The Ledger
Every statement that passed quotation and attribution checks. Mix any filter with any other: certainty 1/5, debate potential 5/5, or both at once.
why aren't all 47 resolved? a statement only gets an assessment when the public record can support or contradict it. opinions and what-ifs never can, and 5 checkable ones are still open, waiting for their date. predictions held up or didn't; assertions are supported or contradicted. on every card: ▮▮▮▮▮ certainty · ▮▮▮▮▮ debate potential. speakers are clickable
Gilbert: Networks will overpay for NFL rights until economics break
“I continue to think that networks are just on this treadmill where they're just going to keep paying more and more and more for NFL rights until is actually non-economic for them to do so, but then they'll be in so deep that it's pretty hard to recover from th…”
Waymo Can Become a Google-Sized Business if Costs Drop
“You could see a path to a Google-sized opportunity for Waymo as a standalone company just through this analysis, as long as they figure out a way to get costs down to the point where they can run this as a large and profitable business.”
AI Chat Ad Rates Will Be Dramatically Higher Than Search Ads
“So, there should be an ad model that emerges, and ad rates should actually be dramatically higher because you have perfect precision.”
Google's AI Market Share Will Stabilize Between 25% and 50%
“They own 90% of the search market. I don't know what they own of the AI market, but it ain't 90%. Is it 25%? I don't know, but at steady state it probably will be something like 25, maybe up to 50%, but This is going to be a market with several big players in …”
AI Will Capture the Highest-Value Search Query Use Cases
“AI might take away the majority of the use cases of search, and even if it doesn't, I bet it takes away a lot of the highest value ones.”
YouTube's Annual Revenue Will Likely Surpass All of Disney in 2025
“So YouTube is already bigger than Disney's media business, and this year will likely become bigger than Disney's entire business.”
Gilbert: Only a complete paradigm shift can unseat TSMC
“I think the only thing that will unseat TSMC is a complete paradigm shift.”
TSMC will soon create more value than the entire prior silicon industry
“So it is true that the value that TSMC will create in the world over the next year, two years, three years, is probably more than the entire silicon industry leading up to this point combined.”
Chocolate sales will not decline despite widespread adoption of GLP-1 weight-loss drugs
“Even if everyone starts taking Ozempic, I don't actually think chocolate sales are gonna fall.”
Nvidia's gross margins will not erode significantly below 65% as shortages subside
“That's gonna go away, but I don't think this very high, you know, 65% plus margin is gonna erode too much.”
The AI market faces an investor crisis of confidence within 18 months
“I think there's a pretty reasonable chance that there's some falter in the next 12 to 18 months where there's a crisis of confidence among investors where at some point something will come out Where we all observe, oh, maybe GPTs aren't as useful as we thought…”
Gilbert: Future breakthrough defense innovation won't come from Lockheed's Skunk Works
“It's very likely that the Skunk Works mentality ends up solving more problems for our country, but probably not from the Skunk Works division of Lockheed Martin.”
Qualcomm's Best Days Are Behind It If It Remains Only Handsets
“I think if they continue to try to run the same playbook in just the handset market that they have been, the best days are behind them because people have caught onto their games a little bit and are gonna, gonna squeeze them from a bunch of different directio…”
Gilbert: Amazon will inevitably surpass Walmart in total global revenue
“If you look at the gap that Amazon closed in total revenue since the time they were founded to Walmart, they're going to catch them.
No doubt about it.”
Gilbert: Internet barbell dynamics will squeeze the middle in every industry
“I don't think this is unique to media. I think media was the first to experience this sort of squishing in the middle, but it's gonna happen to everything.”
Shamrock Capital Will Never Recoup Its $300M Taylor Swift Masters Investment
“I think Shamrock and the Disney family are gonna be left holding the bag on this investment that they'll never recoup”
Neoclouds Will Offer Google TPUs in the Coming Months
“I think within a year it might happen. There are rumors already that some NeoClouds in the coming months are gonna have TPUs.”
Gilbert: Americans will not care about IPL without domestic US cricket first
“And, frankly, Americans are just not gonna start caring about IPL cricket. They need to start caring about US-based cricket.”
GLP-1s could surpass Humira and remain defensible for a decade
“So I think, assuming that Novo stays sort of neck and neck with Eli Lilly as they both keep coming out with better and better versions, that this could be the next Humira, or potentially much bigger than Humira. And I think the defensibility is an open questio…”
Gilbert: Lab-grown diamonds will plunge in cost while mined diamonds hold value
“We are only going to get better Moore's Law style at creating lab-grown diamonds, and so they will asymptotically approach zero. Maybe not zero, but some number. Every year, presumably, they should get cheaper and cheaper and cheaper, whereas for something whe…”
Card payment networks will persist absent new technology or government intervention
“Without a new paradigm emerging, this is the system.
I'd say a new paradigm or the government intervention, this kind of is the system that we've made our bed and we're stuck with.”
Nvidia will eventually operate its own complete data center buildings
“They used to have to plug into other people's servers, and then they started making servers that plugged into other people's racks and rows and architectures, and then they started making their own entire rows and walls, and at some point here, they're gonna s…”
A cloud provider's traditional market share will dictate their AI era dominance
“I bet the way it plays out is that where you landed in cloud one point O strongly dictates where you will land in this AI cloud era.”
A large portion of machine learning inference will move to edge devices
“I suspect a lot of inference will get done on the edge. If you think about the insane amount of compute that's walking around in our pockets that is not fully leveraged right now, there's gonna be a lot of machine learning done on phones that are gonna, like, …”
Jordan Will Earn $5B to $10B Lifetime From the Jordan Brand
“Michael Jordan will make five, maybe ten billion dollars over his lifetime from the Jordan brand.”
Gilbert: Having capital and writing checks will differentiate VCs within 6-12 months
“A year from now, it's like six to 12 months from now, that's gonna be differentiating.”
Qualcomm Is Developing a Direct Competitor to Apple's M-Series Chips
“They already make Snapdragons for the high-end Android phones, and soon they'll be able to make a competitor to Apple's M series chips for laptops and desktops and maybe even servers.”
Gilbert: Adobe will not ruin or kill Figma post-acquisition
“And all these people that are like, oh, they're gonna ruin it. They're gonna kill Figma. No, they're not. That's why they paid twenty billion dollars for it and have a gigantic bonus for Dylan to stay on board.”
Gilbert: Walmart should win same-day grocery delivery via Supercenters
“In my bull case, there's, they kind of should win same-day grocery delivery since they have these super centers everywhere.”
Gilbert: NVIDIA Will Likely Shift Away From Board Partners to Direct Sales
“So I suspect that shifts more over time. I can't imagine a company that wants as much control as NVIDIA does loves the ad and board partner thing, but they've built a business on it, and so they're not really willing to cannibalize and alienate. But I bet if t…”
Gilbert: Enterprises will model everything in Omniverse before real-world rollout
“Because I think now that we have the compute, the ability to gather the data, and the ability to actually, you know, run these simulations in a way that has a efficient way of running it and a good user interface to understand the data, people are going to sto…”
Ben Gilbert predicted in 2022 that Peloton would be acquired soon
“I think two years from now, I think the most likely thing is that it's acquired by someone”
Gilbert: Disney will set an all-time net income record in 2026
“But I think in 20, 26, it's looking like they'll set a brand new net income record ever based on the way it's trending.”
Gilbert: Formula 1 Will Not Replicate Its $500M Owner-Operated Las Vegas Race Model
“I don't think they will pursue this model elsewhere. If I'm reading the tea leaves right now, these things take a long time to pay back. And I think they've sunk over half a billion dollars into building this out.”
Gilbert: NFL will easily beat $25B annual revenue target by 2027
“The league now does over twenty three billion dollars per year across all teams. That's on track to surpass twenty five billion, which was their goal by 2027, they're going to easily beat this number.”
Gilbert: NFL will soon produce international stars through flag football
“It's only a short number of years before we see a meaningful presence of NFL stars who are not from America, because they sort of grew up playing flag, and then when they hit 1314, 15, started playing tackle football”
Gilbert: NIL money will improve NFL rookie classes as players develop longer in college
“Because now that players can make money in college, there's not as much of an incentive to get thrust into the NFL before they're ready. They can sort of develop longer mentally and physically before coming to the NFL, so we may have sort of better rookie clas…”
Gilbert: Profit disparity will test NFL's league-first mentality
“This league first mentality is going to be really tested in the coming years with these enormously profitable teams at the top, and these teams at the bottom”
Gilbert: US hospital consolidation will not cause healthcare prices to decrease
“This consolidation will not lead to prices coming down, let's just put it that way.”
Probability of a third-party UI replacing Epic's backend is near zero
“The fear is that someone deploys to like a 70% of your customer base. They're all using some Chrome extension. They're all feeding the data into some nice UI. That nice UI is the thing everyone prefers to use. And then that UI vendors like, oh, instead of usin…”
Gilbert: TSMC will ramp its 2nm process in the second half of 2025
“I think they're actually doing the small production runs, getting ready to ramp in the second half of this year on the two nanometer process.”
Gilbert: Cloud computing represents a 30- to 40-year secular growth wave
“It's probably a 3040 year wave that they get to keep riding.”
Gilbert: Visa will not capture high-ticket real estate or auto purchases
“This is a bear case on Visa is, are they ever going to participate in real estate or cars or, no, not at these interchange rates. Why would anyone Ever buckle to pay these sorts of things for things that cost a thousand dollars or more.”
Costco operates at an 11% gross margin and will never expand it
“Even though Costco is only an 11% gross margin business, and only ever will be an 11% gross margin business, it's still a pretty amazing business to own.”
Porsche Will Weather Downturns Better Than BMW but Worse Than Ferrari
“Like, I think they'll fare better than Mercedes and BMW in a downturn, and, like, way worse than Ferrari.”