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 201 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
Chamath: Without Trump, US could have investigated COVID-19 origins effectively
“And if anybody but Donald Trump was the president of the United States in that moment, we probably could have had a chance of getting to the bottom of it when it counted.”
Friedberg: Capping Bezos at $1B would have destroyed Amazon's future societal benefit
“If Jeff Bezos stopped building Amazon, when he made a billion dollars because he was forced to by the government. At that point, all the future benefit of Amazon would have been lost.”
Green: A BLM Capitol storming would have been a historic bloodbath
“The first thing that went through my mind was, I wonder if that was a Black Lives Matter protest or Black Lives Matter protest that stormed in the capital, how much of a bloodbath it would have been. It would have been one of the biggest bloodbaths in, in Amer…”
Friedberg: Career public servants heroically preserved democracy during Trump's presidency
“But if not for that deep state, we may have found ourselves in a lot of very ugly situations over the last four years that there really were layers and layers of career public servants that did incredible and incredibly heroic things to preserve democracy, to …”
Chamath: Trump would have been jailed if Big Tech hadn't banned him
“The odds that Donald Trump would have gone to jail and been prosecuted, was basically, in my opinion, a fucking stone cold lock. And then now after this happened, There's a bunch of those people who are going to basically like him and ha, and now they're not g…”
Chamath: Social platforms should have temporarily paused Trump's account instead of banning
“This is exactly why the best solution would have been a temporary pause on these accounts to let the dust settle.”
Sacks: 'Defund the police' slogan cost Democrats control of Congress in 2020
“They introduced the slogan of defund the police, and it scared voters across the country into voting for Republicans in Congress, and it probably cost Joe Biden, not the presidency, but Congress”
Sacks: Trump might still be president if he endorsed masks earlier
“If he had just gotten on board with mass, it would have been a very easy thing to do. Politically, personally that could have made the margin of difference. He might still be president if he had gotten on board with mass about three months earlier.”
Sacks: Moderna vaccine would have released before election without trial delay
“If it weren't for those three weeks, Moderna's vaccine would have happened before Pfizer, and it would have come out about a week before the election.”
Sacks: Consistent moderation rules would have blocked Trump tax return coverage
“Because if they were to apply these standards evenly, they would have blocked the Trump tax returns for the exact same reason.”
Calacanis: Retail investors would have bought SpaceX early without accredited investor rules
“People knew SpaceX. They were watching these rockets launch for a long time, and they would have placed that bet 10 years ago when the company was worth a hundred billion or ten billion or You know, five hundred billion, but they weren't allowed to because we …”
Koch Industries could not have built its management framework as public company
“And I think our view, we never could have accomplished what we've had. First of all, we never would have built a principle-based framework, and then we never would have been able to pull off this capability bounded versus industry bounded.”
Sacks: A Harris administration would have blocked data centers and enforced censorship
“Would have no data centers and they'd be using AI to censor us and they'd be promoting DEI values through AI that was in the Biden executive order.”
Sachs: Minnesota ICE chaos would cease if local authorities cooperated
“This would not be happening if they simply turned over the illegal aliens in their custody to ICE and Border Patrol, which is all that they're asking for.”
Lockmiller: Competitors would quickly absorb compute capacity if OpenAI failed
“Imagine, imagine they did go out of business. The reason they'd go out of business is because some other model company, whether it be, you know, Anthropic or Gemini or Grok, like really blew them out of the water. But if that were to happen, the group that mas…”
Tony Hinchcliffe might not have performed at Trump rally outside MSG
“Had it even been anywhere else, I don't even know if I would have done it, but the magic of MSG mixed with the opportunity to perhaps, you know, get a few people, maybe younger people or whoever that was, that were on the fence to vote what I thought was the r…”
Hinchcliffe: Kill Tony would still be in LA without California's pandemic mismanagement
“We would still be in LA if the, if California didn't completely mishandle the pandemic and let police take such a terrible hit during the George Floyd riots.”
Bessent says China's rare earth export policy threatened Western trade
“Same thing on October eighth when Beijing announced that they were going to put a worldwide export license on any product that had .1% of Chinese rare earths in it, which would have ground the Western trading system to a halt.”
Buttigieg: An open primary would have sharpened Kamala Harris for the general
“I mean, if she had become the nominee by prevailing over another half dozen people who wanted a shot, Presumably that kind of sharpening that, that happens would have served her well in the general.”
Eliminating flat or down rounds would double VC fund IRRs, says Friedberg
“45% of their capital went into flat or down rounds, and they had a negative net return on that allocation of capital across 13 funds, and if they had put that, if they had never invested in flat or down rounds, Then they would have doubled their IRR overall as…”
Calacanis: A 10% Tesla equity stake would have funded 100 Solyndras
“If the government had gotten just 10% of that in equity, that would have paid for a hundred cylinders and mistakes.”
Sacks: Kamala Harris might have escalated the conflict with Iran as president
“Imagine if Kamala Harris were president, just do the counterfactual. Would she have had the situational awareness to realize that when the Iranians struck at our base in Qatar, that it was performative, that it was telegraphed, and that it was meant to basical…”
Isaacman would have eliminated NASA's management layers, deputies, and review boards
“I would have deleted all that. Like not that people don't need to go, but they need to, you know, the amount of deputies, assistants, associate assistant to the deputy. The amount of committees, the meetings with 200 people on them. The review boards, like all…”
An earlier Trump budget release would have blocked Isaacman's committee confirmation
“And if that skinny budget had come out you know, again, a day or two earlier, I would never have made it out of committee”
Isaacman: Without SpaceX, the US would already be behind China in space launch
“Thank goodness for SpaceX, or we definitely be already behind in that regard.”
Friedberg: Returning US spending to 2019 levels yields budget surplus and 2% bond yields
“And we would be, by the way, if we did that, we would have a budget surplus and the bonds would be trading down to two percent yields again.”
Gavin Baker: Nvidia's neocloud investments did not boost its revenues
“If NVIDIA had not put any money into CoreWeave, not put any money into kind of other of these neoclouds, I don't think it would have impacted their revenues at all.”
Lonsdale: Putin would not have invaded Ukraine with Trump in office
“I don't think he would have invaded with Trump as president.”
Calacanis: Zuckerberg would have doubled down on censorship if Harris won
“But I can tell you if Kamala Harris had been voted in, he would double down on censorship instead of taking this position.”
Sacks: Trump would have won by 20M votes if media were fair
“If the legacy media was fair, it would have been twenty million votes.”
Gingrich: Resources in CA, IL, NY would guarantee Trump popular vote
“If we were to actually put real resources into those three states, Trump would be virtually guaranteed to win the popular vote.”
Cuban: I would vote Republican against Biden if the candidate were non-MAGA
“If it wasn't Donald Trump running, it was a non-MAGA candidate, particularly if it was Joe Biden still, I'd vote Republican.”
Chamath: Secondary market sales preserved 75 percent of fund returns
“I would have been in real trouble without the, without reasonably liquid. Myself included. I mean, my numbers would be a quarter of what they are.”
Friedberg: Rejecting Musk's pay would have reduced Tesla stock price further
“And the reality is that by him getting the pay package, the certainty of him sticking around at the company caused the stock to go up by 10%. So they actually had the calculus wrong that if they had gotten their way, the stock would have declined by more than …”
Friedberg: US GDP growth would be negative without government stimulus
“It would be negative GDP growth if not for the government's program stimulating the economy.”
Keeping the economy open would have prevented massive national debt
“If we had responded to this pandemic differently, those issues would not have occurred. If we had just kept the economy open because we understood what was going on, We would not have reacted the way that we did, and we would not have nearly as much debt as we…”
Calacanis: US should have deferred Ukraine's NATO membership by 20 years
“Clearly the right move here would have been to kick the can down the road and just tell Putin, we'll take it off. We'll take needle off the table for 10 years or 20 years, and then we could have outlasted Putin.”
Chamath: Inflection AI deal would not happen without Hoffman and Gates
“They were able to get a deal for investors that would have never happened otherwise.”
Chamath: Apple would have been better off launching a Level 3 car
“They would have been better off going into the car market, launching a level three vehicle and just letting the market play out.”
Calacanis: News industry could have forced Google payouts through a federation
“This is why the news industry should have always had a federation, because they could have just said to Google, hey, we're going to de-index ourselves from the Google search engine, and so you won't have the New York Times, Washington Post, LA Times, you're ju…”
Chamath: Meta acquiring WhatsApp for $17B could never happen today
“Today, that could never happen.”
Sacks: Trump would have won reelection in a landslide without COVID
“If it weren't for the black swan of COVID, he would have been reelected in a landslide.”
Allison: The US would not have invaded Iraq if Gore became president
“If Gore, if the count had gone right in Florida, and Gore had been president, would we have gone into Iraq? No.”
Calacanis: Capitol rioters would have shot up Capitol and killed hundreds
“These are dangerous domestic terrorists. They would have shot the place up and killed hundreds of people.”
Brad Gerstner notes investors could wait until 2003 and capture search upside
“You got the internet right, you got search right, but you didn't have to invest a dollar in search until 2003, and you would have captured 98, 99%.”
Chamath: US could have sold negative-yield 100-year bonds during ZERP
“I think that when we had Zerp, you probably could have charged a negative interest rate because you would have effectively been charging countries, third world developing countries, even first world countries that just wanted a protective mechanism against the…”