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 190 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
Chamath: Meta is about to launch a standalone app competing with ChatGPT
“And Facebook is about to launch a competitor to ChatGPT and Grok, yeah. A standalone app.”
Calacanis: Big tech companies will buy thousands of $5M Gold Cards
“I gotta tell you, I think out of the gate, Apple, Meta, Microsoft buy, you know, one to 10,000 of these.”
Laffont: US TikTok time spent matches Facebook and Instagram combined
“So we get about a hundred million DAUs in the US, but the time spent on the platform is the equivalent of Facebook plus Instagram.”
Mark Pincus: MBA jobs at Meta and Google have dried up
“Everyone wants a job at Meta or Google, and that's the get rich quick place, and it's, I don't even think that's necessarily true anymore, and they can't get those jobs because those companies are now trying to get rid of middle management. So those jobs have …”
Calacanis: Zuckerberg spent $150M on Meta's Oversight Board to dodge hard decisions
“Zuck created the oversight board. He's so spineless, he decided, I'll create and give a hundred fifty million dollars to this board to make these hard decisions for me, instead of me making the decision.”
Baker: Meta's Libra project would have eliminated immigrant remittance fees
“And I think you can argue it would have been really, really good for not just America, but the entire world. You know, there are a lot of immigrants in America and in America who send remissions back to their home countries at extremely high predatory rates. Y…”
Chamath: Big Tech incumbents consistently win when threatened by upstarts
“And I think in, in the last 20 or 25 years, what you've seen is those companies, when their backs are against the wall, they use money, they're sharp elbowed, but the consistent thing is they've won.”
Friedberg: Strong push coming to curb power of Meta, X, and Google
“I think that because of how inflamed people are at the influence that these companies have meta and Twitter and Google, there is going to be a strong push to do a lot more than what the narrow focus of the ruling in this particular case to do something much mo…”
Calacanis: TikTok's black-box AI algorithm is more pernicious than earlier gamified social media
“So you had the gamification of Twitter and Facebook, which was likes. Retweets, follower count, Instagram, and then now it's transitioned into something even more pernicious, which is some black box on, in TikTok knows this is going to maximize the dopamine hi…”
Friedberg: Meta and Amazon lack high-value call options like Google's Waymo
“Meta and Amazon do not have an isomorphic lab and Waymo sitting inside their business that suddenly pops to a couple hundred billion of market cap. And Google does have a few of those.”
Chamath: Early YouTube code was found on Steve Chen's Facebook laptop
“Like Steve Chen, before he started YouTube was an engineer at Facebook and There was like, at one point, I remember being in some meeting where I was like, oh, I think we found an early version of the YouTube code on an old laptop that was a Facebook laptop th…”
Calacanis: Facebook and Apple are actively open-sourcing AI models
“By the way, that's what Facebook and Apple are doing right now.”
Gerstner: Altimeter bought Meta during 2022 public market collapse
“In 2022, we had this massive correction in the public markets. We believed that they overshot. In part, we believed that because we didn't think we were going to have hyperinflation forever, et cetera. And so you and I invested in, you know, Meta and a lot of …”
Gerstner: Meta will launch major AI models and agents within six weeks
“Over the next four to six weeks. They're going to have massive launches out of the AI side of the business. I expect a lot more support for their open AI model or for their open LLM. I also think they're going to launch a bunch of agents on WhatsApp and Instag…”
Chamath says Mark Zuckerberg burned a quarter-trillion dollars at Meta
“The guy burned a quarter trillion dollars and then found a way to stop it.”
Chamath Palihapitiya predicts internet value will shift to creators and moderators
“I think in this current version of the internet, The value is going to go and again, further, further, further erode away from the centralized apps and more towards the individual people, or in this case, these hubbid spokes, these mods, and not to the central…”
David Friedberg says user-generated networks gain no structural value from third-party apps
“That works well in some contexts, like an Apple app store context, but in the context where there is a network unto itself, like Facebook, Twitter, and Reddit, meaning that there is already a user network that is generating value in the form of the content tha…”
Calacanis: Facebook and LinkedIn will block ChatGPT from accessing their data
“Somebody like Facebook, when they release their language model, which they're about to, is not going to allow ChatGPT to have any access to the Facebook corpus of data. And then LinkedIn will do the same. They'll block any access to ChatGPT to their data.”
Palihapitiya: Startups should question the trend of delaying IPOs as long as possible
“So even though I think we at Facebook were the ones to really put this in the water table about not going public, I think a lot of startups should have gone back to first principles to really question whether waiting as long as possible actually makes sense.”
Chamath: Big tech giants raised under $250M total before IPOs
“Less than a quarter billion dollars.”
Chamath: Meta's recent protein-folding AI model is not that good
“I mean, Facebook released this kind of like rando version of alpha fold recently. It's not that good.”
Sacks: Twitter's plane-tracking ban will prove futile
“I think this policy with regard to planes specifically is going to be futile. It's going to be at best harm reduction because as long as there's many ways to publish this information on Reddit, it's on Facebook.”
Chamath: Meta's 11,000 job cuts do not matter to the broader economy
“I don't I don't think Facebook matters that much to be honest. Well, but it matters that big tech is and they're taking matters to us, but it doesn't matter to the economy to be completely honest.”
Sacks: Meta's collapse will probably not change Silicon Valley governance
“Probably nothing. It's not going to change anything.”
Calacanis: Zuckerberg should have made Sandberg CEO of Facebook
“He should have put Sheryl Sandberg, a CEO of the Facebook corporation. He should have became CEO of Meta, and then he should have ran that other business to print even more profits.”
Friedberg: DTC marketing costs on Facebook and Google have doubled or tripled
“Cause in the last year, the cost of DTC direct to consumer marketing on Facebook and Google. Double, tripled. And a lot of the unit economics are falling apart on D to C businesses because of it you know, costs a lot more to acquire the customer than you make …”
Sacks: Concerns over Facebook should be ten times greater for TikTok
“Whatever problems people have with Facebook, they should have them like, 10 x with TikTok.”
Sachs: Facebook and Google do not hold a dominant position in tech labor
“Facebook and Google, no matter how powerful monopolies they may be, they don't have a dominant position in the labor market. This is not true. They're competing for the same engineers that every tech company is competing for.”
Sachs: Facebook's Instagram acquisition extended its monopoly into mobile
“When Facebook bought Instagram at that time, it didn't seem to be a problem, but it definitely allowed them to extend their monopoly from the desktop into mobile, and it probably should be scrutinized harder.”
Chamath: Facebook, Google, Apple, Microsoft, Amazon raised under $250M combined
“Facebook, Google, Apple, Microsoft and Amazon raised collectively less than two hundred and fifty million dollars.”
Friedberg: Zuckerberg is much more product-driven than Larry Page was
“No, I think he's way more active and driven in terms of product direction than Larry ever was. So I don't think they're the same person and I wouldn't like in these two.”
Chamath created Facebook's 4-month parental leave but took three weeks
“I came up with four months for either the father or the mother, irrespective of the context. And that's how we started the original policy. Four years later, though, when I had my first kid, I took like three weeks and I came back because the grind was too har…”
Friedberg: Heavy platform regulation will drive users to unregulated decentralized alternatives
“If they start putting the regulatory hammer down on these quote unquote, platforms telling them what they can and cannot make available to their users, there will be another platform that will emerge. And that platform may end up being in this kind of decentra…”
Chamath: Facebook will have to navigate Microsoft-style regulatory oversight
“And so this is the point, which is, I think, practically speaking, the beginning of what Microsoft went through, Facebook is going to have to navigate.”
Chamath: Getting laws passed with regulators is Facebook's path to salvation
“So they need to get this pin down quickly, get in front of regulators, get some laws passed, whether it's section two 30 or whatever. That's the path to salvation for Facebook.”
Balaji: Facebook is probably more beneficial overall than critics acknowledge
“I actually think on net, it's probably being more beneficial than many people say, but I don't believe that the federal government is a solution to those problems.”
Sacks: Legacy media exaggerates social media risks due to financial disruption
“There's a lot of people who hate social networking in the traditional legacy media because they've been disrupted Buy Facebook, buy these social media companies, and so they're looking. They took their money, and they're looking to publicize any article about …”
Sacks: Social media exacerbates body image issues but did not create them
“I mean, I just, you know, I, yes, I think there's like a kernel of truth here in terms of, yes, it does exacerbate body image issues, but I don't believe that Facebook Or social media created those issues.”
Chamath: Google, Facebook, and Amazon hinder constructive capitalism
“I generally think that companies like Google and Facebook and Amazon unfortunately do not allow The constructive form of capitalism that people want in today's society.”
Chamath: Section 230 claims are harder to bring against Reddit
“I think it's very hard to pin a section two 30 claim on Reddit as easy as it is YouTube, Facebook, and Twitter.”
Chamath predicts Amazon will face Facebook-level antitrust scrutiny within 5-10 years
“Amazon today I don't think is at risk just because its end market is so big, but I think within five or 10 years it definitely will be looked at through the same lens as Facebook and Google and actually just those two.”
Chamath doubts anyone at social platforms fully understands their content algorithms
“And I would be very skeptical that anybody there really understands every single piece of content, how and why it gets weighted the way it does.”
Sacks: Amazon is the scariest monopoly because it endlessly expands into adjacencies
“I think he's the scariest monopolist out of the whole bunch. You know, if you look at kind of Amazon versus say Google or Facebook or Apple, I mean, those other companies are sort of sticking to their original footprint. Whereas Amazon keeps expanding into new…”
Chamath: Facebook's fake account problem is just as bad as Twitter's
“I think that there's a fake account issue on Facebook that's just as bad as Twitter.”
Facebook banning political ads increases Joe Biden's likelihood of winning in 2020
“I think he's actually more likely to win based on news that just hit the wire, which we haven't talked about today, which is it looks like Facebook is going to ban all political ads this year.”
Chamath: Facebook attracts middle America while Twitter serves rich coasts
“I think basically that Facebook is, is becoming middle America and Twitter is becoming sort of the coasts. And, you know, Facebook is basically a product of middle America plus kind of like countries outside the United States and, you know, Twitter's about, yo…”
Chamath: Facebook and Google destroyed traditional journalism
“We're in the business of editorializing, and we've been in that business since basically Facebook and Google, you know, Kind of destroyed the ability for journalism as it stands to remain intact.”
Sacks: Meta faces over $1T in addiction lawsuits after $6M LA verdict
“Look at what's happening to Meta right now. They're getting sued because supposedly their product led to social media addiction and they're being sued for over a trillion dollars right now. And this comes on the heel of them losing a six million dollar jury tr…”