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 62 resolved? a statement only gets an assessment when the public record can support or contradict it. opinions and what-ifs never can, and 0 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
Munger admits he and Warren Buffett could not rebuild Berkshire today
“The answer to that is no, we wouldn't.”
Huang says he wouldn't have started NVIDIA if he knew the suffering
“The reason why I wouldn't do it, and it goes back to why it's so hard, is building a company and building a video turned out to have been a million times harder than I expected it to be, any of us expected it to be. And at that time, if we realized the pain an…”
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.”
Microsoft Would Have Won Mobile OS Licensing Without Google Buying Android
“If they don't buy Android and they don't get started basically in the month that they did, this market belongs to Microsoft.”
Dimon: An Unrescued Bear Stearns Would Have Triggered Immediate Financial Collapse
“It would have been gone, and the crisis would have just unfolded”
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”
Gilbert: Microsoft's 1997 Office commitment and investment saved Apple from bankruptcy
“Which, by the way, saved Apple. The company would have been completely out of business because it was so existentially important to anyone using an Apple computer to use Office that if Office, you know, Microsoft decides, oh, we're gonna stop developing Office…”
Gilbert: Microsoft would have missed mobile regardless of the DOJ antitrust case
“Even without the whole DOJ thing, Microsoft probably would have visted themselves. Microsoft almost certainly would have missed mobile because there's no chance they would have realized that the business model that Google had Meant that they were gonna win in …”
Schultz: Starbucks should not have launched 24/7 on-demand mobile ordering
“I don't think I would have allowed the mobile app to be on demand, 24 hours a day. I would have slow rolled the availability of it, and then understood how it was being used, and whether or not it was going to disrupt the experience.”
Schultz: Starbucks would not have succeeded under a franchise model
“I never believed that we could build, maintain, and elevate the culture of the company, which I viewed as the thing in a franchise system, where we had individual franchisees who had their own subculture. And so even though there was pressure early on because …”
Munger says Berkshire Hathaway would be 3x larger with slightly more leverage
“If we used a little bit more leverage throughout, we'd have three times as much now. And it wouldn't have been that much more risk either.”
Berkshire Hathaway would have survived if Salomon Brothers went to zero
“If it all blown up and went to zero, we would have written it off and gone on and done pretty well.”
Lockheed Would Have Failed Without Its Missiles and Space Division
“And really, as we'll see, this division, you know, not Skunk Works, this division kept Lockheed alive. Lockheed would have absolutely died without this division.”
Silicon Valley Wouldn't Exist Without Cold War Defense Competition
“All the things we just talked about, Silicon Valley itself, for God's sakes, wouldn't have existed without this.”
Benchmark almost assuredly could have won a slot in Google's Series A
“But could they have beaten one of those two firms to get one of the two primary VC slots in Google? Almost assuredly. I mean, at this point, this was Bench where they had just done eBay. You know, they were at the height of their powers. They were the internet…”
Rep. Gonzalez: One-day settlement likely would have prevented Robinhood's trading halt
“The main thing we could have done is passed a bill to shorten the settlement time from two days to one day. That would reduce the risk in the system overall and probably would have prevented what Robin Hood ultimately had to do, which was halt trading.”
McCormick: I likely would have written a positive sponsored post on Theranos
“One of the tests that I always run for myself, and I probably actually would have failed this test, is if Theranos had come to me on a sponsored post, you know, however many years ago, chances are, frankly, I would have written something positive on Theranos b…”
Dying before building EPCOT metropolis likely protected Walt Disney's legacy
“It just doesn't make sense to me, and it may have protected his legacy that he didn't live another 10 or 20 years to see this through.”
Rival index funds like BlackRock would not exist without Vanguard
“None of those other firms would be in this market or doing it in the same way if it weren't for Vanguard.”
Rosenthal: Kaepernick controversy would not have happened in the NBA
“I don't think this ever would have happened or happened in the same way in the NBA. The NBA embraced both social media and the strategy of letting players have their own platforms, be their own voices and promote the league through that.”
Gilbert: Coca-Cola would be worse off today without New Coke
“I think Coca-Cola would be worse off today if they didn't go through the new Coke moment, which is crazy to say, but I guess we don't have the counterfactual, but if you just look at the data on the resurgence in Coke afterwards, you couldn't have come up with…”
OpenAI Probably Would Not Exist if Google Had Bought Tesla
“I mean, I think if that had happened, DeepMind would not have gone down in the same way, and probably OpenAI would not have gotten founded.”
Google could not have been built at any other time
“Google could not have been built at any other time in history.”
Rosenthal: Crawling the entire web from scratch became impossible by 1998
“If you had tried to undertake this as a brand new project, even just a year or a couple years later, it would have been impossible, because the web would have already gotten so big that to just start de novo and create a index copy like this, like a full copy.”
Public markets would value Epic Systems near $100 billion
“My guess is if this is public, which it never will be, investors would value it somewhere in the hundred billion dollar neighborhood, giving Judy's shares a value of about fifty billion dollars and making her the wealthiest self-made woman in the world and one…”
Gilbert: Rolex would probably rank among the world's top 50 companies
“And so if this thing were to publicly trade, listing with its assets, It's probably top 50 companies in the world.”
Chang: Eliminating TSMC's dividend for Apple would have crashed the stock
“About one-third of our investors, shareholders, are very seriously interested in the dividends. So if we do what the Jeff Williams said, oh, a stock is going to drop like hell, you know.”
Rosenthal: Without ARM, Intel probably would make all iPhone chips
“Like, if ARM hadn't become such a viable CPU architecture platform, and Apple hadn't standardized, you know, their Apple Silicon on ARM, Probably Intel would be making all of the chips that go into your iPhone, all the leading edge chips that go into your iPho…”
Mars could not have bought Wrigley without Berkshire Hathaway providing confidence
“I suspect there's no way the deal gets done if Berkshire doesn't get involved.”
Gilbert: TikTok could have disrupted Meta without FAIR's AI research foundation
“If not for FAIR, TikTok could have disrupted Facebook.”
Gilbert: Zuckerberg's post-2016 leadership mirrors Gates staying through DOJ antitrust fallout
“Zuck, after all the 2016 election fallout, and the shift in public perception, and having to do all this testifying, Is like watching an alternate future for Microsoft where Bill Gates had decided to stay at the helm instead of leaving after the DOJ case.”
Huang: I would start NVIDIA again knowing how it turned out
“Of course, I, it was taken out of context because I was asked about that several times after that, and of course I would start the company if I knew it would turn out this way.”
Huang: Nobody would start NVIDIA knowing 32 years of hardship beforehand
“The mountain of it in the course of 31 years, if I were to take all of that all the challenges and all the hardship and all the pain and suffering of the last 32 years, and I would have compressed it into the brain of a twenty-nine-year-old, there is no way th…”
E-commerce would not have emerged or succeeded without credit cards
“On the other hand, I don't think e-commerce really would have happened, you know, alone. There's plenty of other value creation out there too. Lots and lots and lots, but let's just take e-commerce. I feel like this is Passover. Like, you know, that would have…”
Without Lockheed in Silicon Valley, Apple Would Not Exist
“No Lockheed, no Woz in Silicon Valley, no Apple.”
Ek: Spotify would have died if it launched in the US first
“I can tell you definitively Spotify would not have been alive today had it not been that we Couldn't launch in the US as our first market, huh?”
Gilbert: Enron Online could have achieved Citadel-like information advantage
“I think that Enron Online was a real way that they could have gotten real market power. I'm trying to think what that is. It's probably cornered resource. They would have had better access to information about the market than anyone else. It's almost like the …”
Without Amazon outbidding eBay for Accept.com, PayPal might not exist
“If that had gone otherwise, I don't know about PayPal. Like, there's probably no PayPal. There might not be a PayPal mafia.”
Rosenthal: Without Sony and Morita, Apple would not have created iPhone
“And I think you know, no Morita, no Sony, no iPhone.”
Apple Could Have Achieved Dominant PC Power Had the Apple III Succeeded
“I think if they hadn't completely flubbed the Mac three, I think they might've ended up in a very attractive power position because they did own the stack and they did own the operating system and they didn't yet own the processor, but they could eventually.”
Taylor Swift and Kanye West Are Both Better Off From 2009 VMAs
“Both of them are way better off today than if this never happened.”
Michael Ovitz proposed that Disney acquire Yahoo and CBS Records
“When I went to Disney, I put together seven initiatives. That I wrote about in the book that would have made Disney a fortune, starting with buying Yahoo, buying CBS records for two billion dollars, which is worth 10 times, 20 times that right now.”
Johns: Intel should have adopted ARM's IP licensing model for mobile chips
“They came down, they came out with a cheaper version of it, but in reality, that's not what they should have done. They should have, you know, actually embraced a totally different business model like arm dead. We're just, they were just selling IP and enablin…”
The global oil industry would look identical today without Standard Oil
“I think the world would end up in no no different of a place. I think it would have been totally net even. And the only difference would be that the, you know, Rockefeller family foundation wouldn't be as large. I think give or take a few years, I think the wh…”
Rosenthal: Coca-Cola wouldn't have scaled without its franchised bottling network
“If they had taken the Amex approach and Candler had decided, ah, you know, we're gonna enter the bottling business ourselves and
We're going to go market by market and invest the capital in the production lines and the bottles.
Absolutely no way would they hav…”
Rosenthal: Trader Joe's would have become BevMo under its original strategy
“I mean, there's an alternative world where Trader Joe's basically becomes Total Wine or BevMo or something like that.”