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 2,685 resolved? a statement only gets an assessment when the public record can support or contradict it. opinions and what-ifs never can, and 35 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
Chang: Tim Cook told me in 2011 that Intel cannot run a foundry
“And anyway, he told me there's nothing to worry about because Intel just does not know how to be a Foundry.”
Bankman-Fried: FTX's revenue is clean, clear, and completely transparent
“When you talk about, like, recurring revenue, like, there's sort of, like, doesn't exist a clearer example of that than, like, you know, I don't know, we have volume each day, and we charge a transaction fee on it, right? It's incredibly clean, right? People a…”
Ballmer: Bill Gates and I did not speak for a year after I became CEO
“I think it was basically from sometime in about March or April of 2000 to 2001. I mean, literally we weren't speaking. I didn't know what it meant to be his boss and he didn't know what it meant to work for me.”
Morris Chang: Mark Liu declined TSMC BD role due to small headcount
“So, I, ah, first offered the marketing, ah, business development job to the guy who was in the Bigger job, advanced technology, Mark. And I explained to him that I did not think he had had any significant marketing experience in the past, and this would, this …”
Chang: None of Taiwan's PC makers liked dealing with Intel
“Before this Apple thing, Apple and we, before Apple became our customer, I knew a lot of Intel's customers in Taiwan. You know, all the PC makers are Intel's customers. I mean, they, none of them liked Intel. None of them.”
Schultz: An Il Giornale investor tried to hijack the 1987 Starbucks acquisition
“Jerry gave me about, I think he gave me 90 days to raise 3.8 million dollars. Around the second month, he just came to me and said, where are you with all this? And I think I had about half of it raised. I might have fibbed a bit and said I had a little bit mo…”
Costco delayed its China entry for decades after refusing a $30,000 bribe
“The first store they tried to open in China, the first store somebody wanted a 30,000 dollar bribe. You know, Chinese culture. And they just wouldn't pay it. And that made such a bad impression on Jim Senegal. He wouldn't even talk to him going into China for …”
DeMuro: Automakers Secretly Add Horsepower To Review Vehicles Via 'Press Finish'
“There is an option code that most automakers have but hide from their window stickers called press finish, and there is dispute about what that is. Some automakers, there is absolutely no question that press finish adds power. Absolutely no doubt, like they've…”
Lasky: Traditional sports owners who bought franchised esports teams hold dead assets
“I spent five years talking those owners, like the existing sports owners who had terrible FOMO from like dumping money into these things, and some of them took my advice, and some of them didn't, and ended up in, you know, with some really dead assets. But tha…”
Ovitz: Michael Eisner undercut me at every opportunity at Disney
“When I got to Disney, it was very clear there was a head-to-head conflict, and Michael undercut me every chance he could, and after a couple years, I just didn't want to deal with it anymore”
Extensive research uncovered zero evidence that Walt Disney was anti-Semitic
“I turned over every stone I possibly could on this company, and we spent, I don't know, the better part of the year so far researching this, and I found zero evidence of that.”
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.”
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 …”
Studies reveal Coca-Cola is the world's number one ocean plastic polluter
“I was looking up studies recently, and the Coca-Cola company is the number one polluter globally of Crap in the ocean. Pepsi's very close behind all the big drink companies.”
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 TPUs Are Only Scaled AI Chip Deployment Besides Nvidia
“They're a chip company with their Tensor Processing Units, or TPUs, which is the only real scale deployment of AI chips in the world besides Nvidia GPUs.”
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.”
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 …”
AI Data Center Costs Are Over 50% Chips, Under 6% Power
“I've seen estimates that over half the cost of running an AI data center is the chips and the associated depreciation. The human cost, that R&D is actually a pretty high amount because hiring these AI researchers and all the software engineering Is meaningful.…”
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…”
Dimon: Bank One held more credit risk than Citibank under aggressive accounting
“I quickly realized that BankOne had more U.S. Corporate credit risk
Than Citibank did.
And they, the way they accounted for it was unbelievably aggressive.
And, you know, so they had less capital, less reserves, less this.
They were calling these things profit…”
Dimon: Banks earning 30% ROE pre-2007 mostly went bankrupt in 2008
“If you look at the history of banks from up until 2007, a lot of banks were earning 30% equity.
Most of them went bankrupt.
We never did that much.
Okay.
But in oh eight and oh nine, we were fine and they weren't.”
Dimon: 80% of Federal Mortgage Settlement Targeted Bear and WaMu Conduct
“80% of what they're asking for related to Bear Stearns and Wamuu, not JPMorgan Chase.”
Dimon: Venture capitalists caused SVB and First Republic runs by telling startups to withdraw
“What happened with Silicon Valley Bank and kind of First Republic is some of these large venture capital companies, call them there hundreds of them, maybe a thousand, told their constituent clients that they invested in, who all banked in Silicon Valley and F…”
Page and Brin offered to sell Google to GoTo for $200M
“And Larry and Sergey Before they raised the Sequoia and Kleiner round came to Bill and said, what about two hundred million?”
Ballmer: Microsoft wasn't seen as an enterprise company until late 2000s
“It was the late 2000. You know, certainly it wasn't before 2005. It wasn't the beginning of my tenure. We were still trying to prove that we were an enterprise company.”
Ballmer: Gates strongly disagreed with Microsoft making Surface, phones, and HoloLens
“Disagreed about whether we should do hardware. That was a big one. We did, you know, surface was a big disagreement. Phone, big disagreement. HoloLens. Big disagreement.”
Ballmer: Visiting NBA teams shoot lowest free throw percentage against The Wall
“I saw data that said that the- Lowest free throw shooting percentage of the league for the visiting team is against the wall.”
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.”
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.”
Gilbert: The BCCI banned IPL creator Lalit Modi for life in 2013
“And in 2013, the BCCI bars him from India cricket for life. I mean, this thing that he, like, willed into existence, that he created billions of dollars of value for all these other people, he has been barred from.”
Chang: 2009 TSMC CEO retake was triggered by 600-700 performance layoffs
“Another problem was the immediate one that triggered me to retake the CO ship because the previous CO had laid off, except he didn't use the term laid off, you know. He used the bad performance review, the worst performance review people, and there were about …”
Chang: TSMC's 2009 CEO circumvented board approval by framing layoffs as performance dismissals
“So I said to him, if you want to lay off, bring it to the board. I'll call a special board meeting. And I knew what I would ask the board to do, you know, which was not to grant the permission. That's right. But he decided to circumvent that, the CEO, you know…”
Morris Chang: China heavily subsidized and took control of solar manufacturing
“The solar business could have been pretty good. However, China ruined it. They subsidized the hell out of it. And they now control that business, solar cells.”
Chang: TSMC Offered NVIDIA Over $100M with 48-Hour Deadline
“Yes. More than a hundred million. And I also said, our offer is effective, 48 hours. If you do not, there is not going to be, we are not going to argue, we are not going to bargain. If you don't accept the offer within 48 hours, we will have to go to an arbitr…”
Chang: Previous TSMC CEO Offered NVIDIA Zero Dollars in Dispute
“The previous CEO did not even give him a number, you know. The previous CEO gave him zero.”
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.”
Mars is so private it does not produce financial statements for bankers
“No one knows what their balance sheet looks like, including their bankers. They don't produce financial statements for their bankers.”
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.”
Sandberg Bet on Mobile Because Zuckerberg's Control Prevented His Firing
“And when they sort of arrived at this plan of, we are going to forego a lot of desktop revenue to basically bet it all on figuring out mobile revenue, she said, well, Mark, nobody can fire you, and only you can fire me, so if you're in, I'm in.”
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…”
UK probe found Facebook told Cambridge Analytica to delete data in 2015
“The conclusion was that the quiz was taken by 320,000 people. Since those people had access to friends, the total surface area was the public profile data of eighty-seven million Facebook users. They also found that Facebook had requested that Cambridge Analyt…”
Zuckerberg Claims Meta Media Would Be Twice as Profitable on Owned Hardware
“And Mark made the comment on stage with us that they've run the analysis. They think they could be twice as profitable in their Core media products if they were on their own platform.”
Zuckerberg: Facebook board tried to fire him after rejecting Yahoo's $1B offer
“In 2006, Yahoo wanted to buy the company for a billion dollars, and everyone on our management team wanted to sell it, and the board tried to fire me, and everyone, and basically in the next year, everyone else on the management team left because they, I hadn'…”