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 51 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
Sacks: FBI warned social networks to suppress authentic Hunter Biden laptop story
“A very important piece of this was the pre-bunking that the FBI went to Facebook and Twitter and social networks and said, be on the lookout for a story about Hunter Biden. It is Russian disinformation. And they primed these social networks to suppress that st…”
Sacks: Russian 2016 Facebook ad impressions were an infinitesimal fraction of total
“When you actually look at the number of impressions that were created by the sum total of all of the so, the so-called disinformation of all these ads, It is a fractionally small, infinitesimal drop in the ocean compared to the total number impressions on Face…”
Calacanis: Amazon, Google, and Meta lobbied Vatican on AI encyclical
“The folks at Amazon, Google, and Meta lobbied the Vatican on April, 29th to soften the language in his missive.”
Bannister: 2025 leaks will reveal government coerced Zuckerberg into censoring Meta
“And after January, we're going to find out some interesting stuff and we'll get to the bottom of, you know, how did the government pressure him to censor things? And I think he's getting in front of that because it is going to come out. And I think that is a h…”
Friedberg: Meta's open-source AI will kill $500M model startup funding
“By open sourcing these models, they limit competition because VCs are no longer going to plow half a billion dollars into a foundational model development company.”
Chamath: Meta made explicit internal decisions to violate copyright for AI
“That article didn't just point the finger at Google. It pointed the finger at Meta where there were explicit decisions to say, yeah, no, let's just violate the copyright.”
Palihapitiya: Nvidia's margins will compress as major tech companies build custom chips
“In the end, Nvidia's gains today will be then spread across Nvidia. Facebook will have their own chip. Amazon will have their own chip. Google already does. Apple will have their own chip. All the memory companies will be in this space, right? So then the prof…”
Calacanis: Twitter and Facebook did not know if laptop story was hacked
“Twitter and Facebook did not know.”
Chamath: Meta spent more on Reality Labs than Apple spent building iPhone
“Look, Tesla's reinventing an entire category, trillions of dollars of energy generation and transportation, but they did it on in one year of meta reality lab spend. Apple reinvented an entire compute platform on one quarter of Meta's Reality Lab spend.”
Chamath: The title 'data scientist' originated from his team at Facebook
“As classically used in Silicon Valley, it came from Facebook and it came from my team in a critical moment.”
Calacanis: Leaked memo shows Facebook projected 45% US teen drop
“Well, they're losing young people at an extraordinary rate on Facebook. US teenagers were projected to decrease by 45% over the next two years.”
Friedberg: Apple ad revenue is surging while iOS privacy hobbles Facebook
“For example, this Apple, you know, ad revenue business, I think is climbing by billions of dollars while Facebook's core business is being affected by the cookie tracking policy change on Apple iOS.”
Chamath: UnitedHealth stock outperformed Facebook and Google over the past decade
“If you look at the stock prices of these companies, you would have made more money being long United Healthcare than you would have been owning Facebook, Google, any of these other tech companies in the last decade.”
Chamath says a large Facebook group coordinated the Capitol siege
“You couldn't have seen this Facebook group called, you know, hashtag storm the capital, which had tens of thousands, maybe hundreds of thousands of members in there plotting and scheming, selling merchandise called storm the capital. You know, these guys were …”
Chamath: Meta spent $15B to buy 49% of Scale AI
“They just spent fifteen billion to buy 49% of scale AI.”
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.”
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.”
Calacanis: Facebook and Apple are actively open-sourcing AI models
“By the way, that's what Facebook and Apple are doing right now.”
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…”
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.”
Chamath: Big tech giants raised under $250M total before IPOs
“Less than a quarter billion dollars.”
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 …”
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.”
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.”
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…”
Cuban: Tech leaders like Google and Meta are borrowing billions
“What's happening now is the market leaders, Google, et cetera, Meta, they're borrowing hundreds of millions, billions of dollars.”
Calacanis: Headcounts at Meta, Uber, and Amazon have dropped from peak levels
“You know, Meta peaked at 86,000 employees now at 75. Uber at 33, now at 31. And Amazon, where you would think you'd have a lot of growth here they're at, they peaked at 1.6 and now they're down at 1.55.”
Trump claims Big Tech is investing $320 billion in AI infrastructure
“Meta, Amazon, Google, Microsoft are all investing three hundred and twenty billion dollars or more in data centers and AI infrastructure this year.”
Chamath: Broadcom is a $1.12T business that receives little attention
“Is that it is the only trillion dollar company that nobody talks about. Everybody knows Nvidia. Everybody knows Amazon Meta, but Broadcom is a 1.12 trillion dollar business.”
Bannister: Zuckerberg listed his profile as libertarian when Facebook launched
“And then along came Facebook and he added this third option called libertarian. And I would like to go to the way back machine at some point and find his profile because his profile said he was a libertarian.”
Calacanis: Google, Uber, Airbnb, Meta doubled revenue per employee in 2-3 years
“If you look at Google, Uber, Airbnb, and Facebook Meta, They have the same number or less employees than they did three years ago, but they're all growing in that 20 to 30% a year, which means in but two to three years, each of those companies has doubled reve…”
Gerstner: Meta will spend $20B in a single year on AR/VR
“Meta's gonna spend twenty billion in one year alone on AR VR.”
Chamath Palihapitiya cites market data showing Google holds 26.5% of digital ads
“Google controls 26.5% of a market. 43.4% of that market is with a diverse group of others. Meta has 18.4%, and Amazon has 11.7.”
Friedberg: Twitter was acquired at $172 per MAU versus Meta's $81
“I just sent you guys this link from this analyst and he said that Twitter was bought at 172 dollars per monthly active user compared to 81 dollars per monthly active user at Meta where they sit today.”
Gerstner: A 20% Meta layoff merely resets headcount expenses to 2021 levels
“A 20% RIF At Meta would literally only take them back to where their personnel expense was in 2021.”
Palihapitiya: Meta will inevitably adopt the operational cost discipline of its peers
“The only big four horsemen that hasn't really gotten the script yet is meta, but they will, it's just, we're just debating when.”
Friedberg: Saudi Aramco made $48B net profit in a single quarter
“Saudi Aramco reported their earnings. The largest earnings ever for a company Forty-eight billion dollars of net profit in a quarter. That is more profit than Microsoft, Apple, Facebook, and Tesla combined in a single quarter.”
Chamath: Facebook took a 40% valuation haircut during the 2008 crisis
“I remember we raised money from Microsoft at a 15.3 billion dollar valuation. The great financial crisis took hold and Mark to his credit reset the valuation. We were already profitable, so we didn't necessarily need to raise that money, but we, I think we rai…”
Chamath: Google and Facebook CPMs rose 28% to 30% in Q1 2021
“For the first time in the last quarter, both of these two companies, and they were the only two of big tech that announced an increase in pricing, right? They saw a diminishing of CPM inventory. And so they had to figure out ways to grow inventory as users sta…”
Chamath: Social platforms' system integrity tools have eliminated 6 billion fake accounts
“I mean, obviously they have system integrity tools to figure this out. That's, there's no way you could have eliminated six billion accounts if that wasn't true.”
Chamath: Meta attempted to acquire Manus for $2.5 billion
“Well, if you just look at what Facebook tried to do, they tried to buy Manus for two and a half billion dollars.”
Sacks: Meta stock is up 500% over the last two years
“If you look at Facebook's performance or Bando's performance over the last two years, it's up 500%”
Calacanis: Meta's revenue grew from $270M to $117B during Sandberg's tenure
“When she joined Facebook in 2008, it was at two hundred and seventy million dollars in revenue. When she left, it was at a hundred and seventeen billion.”
Calacanis: Llama 3 reached top two on Hugging Face leaderboard rapidly
“It just came out a few days ago and it's already in the top two models on Hugging Faces leaderboard.”
Calacanis: Meta hit $14B Q4 profit after 22% headcount reduction
“Reduction in headcount, 22% year over year from 86,000 to 67,000 the last quarter for Meta. And their quarterly profits have increased to an all-time high of fourteen billion dollars. That's profits folks in Q four for Meta. All-time high for the stock price, …”