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 26 resolved? a statement only gets an assessment when the public record can support or contradict it. opinions and what-ifs never can, and 1 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: Infrastructure providers and banks must not engage in viewpoint discrimination
“At the level of pipes, like an AWS, like a cloud flare, like a PayPal, like the ISPs, like the banks, they are not doing any. Content moderation, or they have no legitimate reason to be doing content moderation. None of those companies should be allowed to eng…”
Sacks: PayPal engages in financial retaliation against users over political views
“You have companies like PayPal, which are just engaging in retaliation, basically financial retaliation, purely on based on what political viewpoints they have.”
Sacks: PayPal worked with ADL and SPLC to de-platform users
“PayPal was taking the lead to financial deep platforming. They were working with the ADL and the SPLC to kick, to just to identify groups to kick off their platform.”
Sacks claims PayPal partners with ADL and SPLC to ban users
“Basically, PayPal is creating the equivalent of a no fly list with respect to their service. Well, for anybody who they put, they deem as deplorable or undesirable, basically they're working with the ADL, the Anti-Defamation League, and the Southern Poverty La…”
Palihapitiya: Stripe, Block, Advent PayPal acquisition would compete with Visa
“What is the only kind of baby that Advent and Stripe and Block could have together? And I think there's one, which is you are creating a competitor to Visa and MasterCard.”
Friedberg: eBay and PayPal deals signal wave of legacy digital buyouts
“I think that eBay and PayPal are probably the beginning of a wave of mega deals of call it flaccid, you know, digital businesses. That can be revived. With the blue chew of capital and the right operator. Again, I think that there's probably a big wave of this…”
Palihapitiya: Final PayPal takeover price will be 10% to 15% higher
“The other thing is this is probably not the final clearing price. I think the price is probably another 10 to 15% higher from here.”
Lutnick: Stopping payments is the easiest way to identify fraudsters
“And if all the guys who did PayPal, like Elon knows this by heart, right? Anybody who's been in the payment system and the process system knows the easiest way to find the fraudster is to stop payments and listen.”
Hoffman: Musk demanded firing CEO Bill Harris right after X.com merger
“Pre the merger closing you know, Elon is, is saying, oh, I got the CEO of Bill Harris. He's the best ever. That's part of the reason why you should give so much percentage of the company to x.com and the merger, you know, dah, dah, dah, dah, dah, dah. And then…”
Sacks: Pre-IPO PayPal employees created more unicorns than all Google alumni
“There are more unicorns founded by ex-PayPal people than ex-Google people, even though at sort of the PayPal mafia, if you define it as the pre-IPO group of people who worked at PayPal, there were only a couple of hundred in the Bay Area, whereas Google had li…”
Sacks: Callin is a better product than Yammer or PayPal
“It's the best product I've been involved in creating. It's better than Yammer. It's better than PayPal.”
Sacks: PayPal is an obsolete legacy product growing at only 7%
“I think it's only growing seven percent a year, which is a lot on the base that, you know, it's grown to, it's a big base, but the product has become somewhat obsolete, and in a way, it's a legacy product.”
Palihapitiya: Proposed PayPal buyout would have been blocked two years ago
“This is the exact reason why if this had happened two years ago, this would have been the antitrust equivalent of a colorectal exam. I mean, you would not even get one step close to doing this deal two years ago.”
Chamath: Payment processors like Stripe and Adyen fundamentally lack pricing power
“The thing to remember about all these businesses, Stripe, Adyen, PayPal, is that they're middlemen businesses, which by definition means that they don't have pricing power. They actually have to reflect the prevalent pricing power of the incumbent sponsors of …”
Sacks: PayPal burned $10M monthly with no revenue in 2000
“PayPal had this situation back in 2000, the year 2000, right after the dot-com crash. We were burning ten million dollars a month, like fast. We had no revenue and no business model, ok?”
Calacanis: Block contributing $17B equity to joint PayPal acquisition bid
“Block, formerly known as Square, is Jack Dorsey's payment company, one of the few entrepreneurs to ever create two decacorns in our industry, and they're contributing seventeen billion in equity in the combined offer.”
Sacks: Stripe processes $2T in annual volume, exceeding PayPal's $1.7T
“And I think they're doing about two trillion a year of annual transaction volume. I think PayPal is doing 1.7”
Sacks: Historical fraud data fails to predict risk when verification changes
“You can create all the models you want, and you can create an expectation of future fraud based on the prior fraud rates. However, if you change your verification standards, that data is no longer relevant. If you create a loophole big enough for a fraudster t…”
Sacks: PayPal instituted a strict no-MBA hiring rule early on
“I remember way back in the PayPal days, over 20 years ago, we had a rule that we weren't, wouldn't hire MBAs. We had a no MBA hiring rule.”
Sachs: PayPal founders succeeded partly due to lack of prior payments expertise
“When we did PayPal, none of us knew anything about payments, that was one of the reasons we were successful. All the payments experts told us it couldn't be done.”
Palihapitiya: Carl Icahn unlocked $250B in value by pushing eBay-PayPal split
“He unlocked a quarter trillion dollars of value.”
Chamath: Shareholder revolt forced PayPal to explicitly deny Pinterest acquisition
“PayPal was rumored to be buying Pinterest. And, you know, there was such an incredible shareholder revolt that they had to put out a press release saying we have absolutely no interest In acquiring Pinterest.”
Friedberg: Musk couldn't have funded Tesla and SpaceX without selling PayPal
“Elon sold PayPal and he was able to use that money to reinvest in Tesla and SpaceX. I think Elon's putting all the money back into two companies that are solving two major issues for humanity. He wouldn't have been able to do that if he hadn't sold in the firs…”
Sacks: Legacy credit card transaction fees choked PayPal micropayments
“The way that the old credit card rails network works is there's like a 25 cent charge per transaction, and so, like at PayPal, it just didn't make sense to facilitate micropayments because the cost of that transaction always exceeded the fee that we could get.”