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 1,486 resolved? a statement only gets an assessment when the public record can support or contradict it. opinions and what-ifs never can, and 14 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
The NFL blackballed Colin Kaepernick following his 2016 national anthem protests
“The NFL blackballed Colin Kaepernick after this.”
Rosenthal: The IPL is structurally superior to the NFL
“To me, this is not a controversial statement. The IPL is better set up structurally than the NFL. It is the Most perfect sports league that exists.”
Rosenthal: Taylor Swift Enterprise Value Is $11B Using Disney's 20x Multiple
“Disney trades at 20 X free cash flow. Taylor is five hundred and fifty million in free cash flow. That's a eleven billion dollar enterprise value for Taylor.”
Rosenthal: Steve Ballmer and Ray Ozzie deserve all credit for Azure's vision
“I kind of think all of the credit for the vision for it and the championing it for the initial seven years within Microsoft goes to Steve and to Ray.”
Ilya Sutskever argued next-token prediction inherently requires true world understanding
“The more accurately an LLM predicts that next word, i.e. The name of the criminal. Ipso facto, the greater its understanding, not only of the novel, but of all general human-level knowledge and intelligence, because you need all of your experience in the world…”
The SR-71 Blackbird Was Effectively a Decoy for Space Satellites
“This is heretical to say, because it's so beloved, but I think the Blackbird was a decoy. We were getting everything we needed from space. We just didn't want anybody to know about it.”
Streaming's high-volume content firehose fundamentally breaks Disney's historical IP flywheel
“That whole strategy of a fire hose of content is completely orthogonal to the flywheel strategy of only the best content very infrequently.”
Nintendo's intellectual property rivals Pixar, Marvel, and Lucasfilm combined
“Nintendo is like Pixar, Marvel, and Lucasfilm combined. I mean, they have some of the very best IP in the entire world. They've got three franchises that can stand toe to toe with anything at Disney in Mario, Zelda, and Pokemon.”
Animated IP outperforms live action in flywheel entertainment business models
“The IP that works best for Flywheel Dynamics almost has to be animated, i.e. Not live action, because with live action characters, the characters are too bound up in the actors that play them, and that creates all sorts of problems.”
Ancillary products do not cannibalize core entertainment IP
“The beauty here and the discovery that Disney makes is that when you put the IP into these other ancillary nodes, it doesn't cannibalize the core IP.”
Vanguard's mutual structure starves its technology and customer service of reinvestment capital
“Vanguard, the downside of its structure is that there are no excess profits that can be invested for the long term in things like technology and things like customer service.”
Ferrari Is Arguably the Only Legitimate Luxury Brand Founded Post-1950
“I think you could maybe even argue they are the only legitimate luxury brand established in the second half of the 20th century.”
The NFL is the largest single-property media business in the world
“I'm pretty sure the NFL is the largest single media business in the world. Not an aggregate diversified media business, but like, if you consider the league as a single property, then I think it is the largest individual single property in the world.”
Major broadcast TV networks would not exist today without NFL football
“For those networks for the last decade, run the counterfactual of the networks no longer had football. They don't exist anymore. This has been life support for them for a decade.”
Sequoia refused to raise a mulligan fund after the dot-com crash
“We interviewed Doug Leone who was, you know, one of the, I guess, two stewards ago of Sequoia, and he told us that after the dot-com crash for the Sequoia fund that was the dot-com bubble fund, every other venture firm out there, after the bubble popped, were …”
Warren Buffett's legendary Coca-Cola investment has actually underperformed the S&P 500
“He would have been better off buying the S&P Over that same time period. Including dividends over that same time period. The S and P 500 is up about 11% annually. So the famous Berkshire Hathaway Coca-Cola investment today is actually underperforming the marke…”
Google Is Only Company with Both Frontier Model and AI Silicon
“Somebody put it to me in research that if you don't have a foundational frontier model, Or you don't have an AI chip, you might just be a commodity in the AI market, and Google is the only company that has both.”
The 2011 Google Brain 'Cat Paper' Drove Hundreds of Billions in Revenue
“I think it's not that much of a leap to say that the cat paper led to probably hundreds of billions of dollars of revenue generated by Google and Facebook and ByteDance over the next decade.”
Google's DeepMind Buy Directly Spawned Modern AI Labs
“This company and this purchase of it by Google was the butterfly flapping its wings equivalent moment that directly leads to OpenAI, ChatGPT, Anthropic, and basically everything.”
Noam Shazeer Urged Google Leadership to Replace Search with Transformer Models
“Gnome, though, immediately starts advocating to Google leadership. Hey, I think this is going to be so big, the transformer, that we should actually consider just throwing out the search index And the 10 blue links model and go all in on transforming all of Go…”
OpenAI Rushed ChatGPT Launch After Learning of Anthropic's Chatbot Plans
“So, Anthropic was working on what would become Claude, and rumors were out there, and people at OpenAI Got wind of like, oh, hey, Anthropic and Dario are working on a chat interface. We should probably do one too. And if we're gonna do one, we should probably …”
Google Chrome Kept the Web Alive as a Viable Application Platform
“I don't think it is an exaggeration to say that Chrome kept the web alive. As a viable platform for applications.”
Steve Jobs Lawsuit Threats Kept Pinch-to-Zoom Off Early Android Devices
“So Steve Jobs threatens to sue Google over implementation of multi-touch gestures. And so, as a result, Android for several years doesn't have things like pinch to zoom or the sort of swipe operating system UI navigation gestures, and I'm pretty sure if you re…”
Google Is the Only Tech Giant to Extend Its Business Across Eras
“Nobody stretches a business model across technology eras. Nobody. And Google did it.”
Rosenthal: Google would not have succeeded if GoTo acquired it
“Well, there's almost zero chance that Google becomes Google if that deal had happened, so”
Rosenthal: Google Has the Best Business Model in Corporate History
“It's the same beautiful ballet where every piece of the Google business model works together and reinforces the other pieces, and in concert it creates the best business model of all time.”
The VA's Cerner EHR rollout will take until at least 2031
“The VA system was bid out in 2017. The latest announcement from the VA about this project is that it will be live at all VA sites by, this is a direct quote, as early as 20 31.”
Cerner is probably one of Oracle's worst acquisitions of all time
“You know, maybe it's too early to tell, but I think this is probably one of Oracle's worst acquisitions of all time.”
Rosenthal: Epic may be the most durable software company in history
“I think this is maybe The most durable software company in history.”
Epic Systems has the highest switching costs of any software in history
“I mean, this is the biggest switching cost piece of software ever.”
Rosenthal: Epic's Judy Faulkner is history's most successful female founder
“Judy is almost certainly the most successful by any measure female founder in history. I think that is actually true. I looked up to try and see who else might even come close.”
Epic is likely the world's most valuable vertical software company alongside Bloomberg
“Epic has gotta be the most valuable vertical market software company in the entire world. What else could possibly be up there? And so I started racking my brain. I was like, Bloomberg was the only one I could come up with that could. Plausibly maybe be as val…”
Rosenthal: IPL Originated as Lalit Modi's Revenge Play Against Rupert Murdoch
“And thus begins a 10 to 15 year journey that is not just the ultimate revenge play by Lalit on Rupert, but accidentally along the way starts the biggest sports entrepreneurial story phenomenon that has ever existed.”
Rosenthal: BCCI controls world cricket talent via wealth and veto rights
“The BCCI has cornered resource access to the best talent in the world. Because they have all the money, and they have the Indian fans who care about watching the best Indian players, and they have essentially veto right over the best Indian players playing any…”
Rosenthal: BCCI board member N. Srinivasan bought Chennai Super Kings for $91M
“Anyway, this I think is known at the time, one of the other board members of the BCCI who would soon become the chairman of the BCCI, a gentleman named N. Srinivasan, who also is an industrialist who owns the Indian Cements Company, He buys the Chennai Super K…”
Rosenthal: Winning the Super Bowl is a net-negative fiscal event for an NFL team
“Winning the Super Bowl is actually like a net negative economic event for an NFL team.”
Rosenthal: IPL could rival the NFL in size by age 30
“And in theory, by the time it is, call it 30 years old, could be as big as the NFL.”
Rolex is likely worth over $100 billion in enterprise value before assets
“There's no way that this business is worth 40. I don't know if it's worth 200, but it's worth a hundred plus. Zero doubt in my mind.”
TSMC has the strongest economic moat of any company in the world
“Other than that, I don't know that there is a stronger moat that any company has in the entire world than TSMC.”
Forrest Mars believed building wealth requires knowing how to manufacture a product
“You can hire lawyers. You can hire accountants. You can hire advertising men or financial types. But if you want to get rich, you got to know how to make a product. And you aren't going to hire anybody to make a product for you to make you rich. They'll only m…”
Mars has generated billions in profit from commodity trading operations
“Rumors are, these are rumors, but heard from multiple places, Mars has actually made Many billions of dollars of profit from commodity trading over the years.”
IKEA has no direct globally scaled furniture competitor in 2024
“IKEA does not have a direct competitor today in 2024. There is not a single other globally scaled furniture business in the world.”
Sean Parker Is Entirely Responsible for Mark Zuckerberg's Founder Control
“Mark having full control over the company as we are going to see time and time and time again as we go through the story here makes all the difference in the world, and that is 100% because of Sean Parker.”
Turning Off Meta Ads Actually Reduces User Engagement in Some Markets
“There are markets in the world today where I think Meta has run this test, where if you turn off ads, In the, you know, meta family of apps products, engagement in those products actually goes down, which is just, like, freaking wild.”
Facebook Acquired Onavo to Track Competitor Network Traffic and App Usage
“Well, in 2013, Facebook acquired a small Israeli company called Onavo, and Onavo was exactly what you just said, Ben. A VPN, actually, I think it initially started as, like, a data compression tool, so if you were worried about your data plan, which was Really…”
ByteDance Is an AI Company Using TikTok Merely as a Deployment Vector
“ByteDance is an AI company. ByteDance is not a product company. And the core product that ByteDance makes is its AI, along with all sorts of other stuff. TikTok is like the product vector, one of many, and the biggest. By which they deploy their actual product…”
Meta Enjoys Guaranteed Profitable ROI on AI Hardware via Ad Optimization
“It's one of the fundamental advantages that Facebook has today relative to all other AI companies is that they are guaranteed profitable ROI on all of their AI spend. All of their research, all their infrastructure, all their GPUs, they have highly, highly pro…”