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 2,812 resolved? a statement only gets an assessment when the public record can support or contradict it. opinions and what-ifs never can, and 53 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.”
Zuckerberg: Meta's 2016 political mistake will take another 10 years to resolve
“I think that the political miscalculation was a 20 year mistake. And so it started in 2016... And I think it's going to take another 10 years or so for us to kind of fully work through that cycle before our brand and all of that is back to kind of the place th…”
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…”
Munger claims China's economy has better 20-year prospects than most
“Well, my position in China has been Well, that the Chinese economy has better future prospects over the next 20 years than almost any other big economy.”
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…”
Calacanis: California will be damaged for a decade or two
“I think Austin's kind of the future. I think California's gonna be damaged for a decade or two. So I think for the rest of our adult lives, this town.”
Calacanis: Andreessen Horowitz's long-term returns won't match Benchmark or Sequoia
“I think in the arc, it will not be comparable to benchmark at Sequoia.”
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.”
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…”
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 …”
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 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.…”
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.”
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.”
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.”
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…”