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 34 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
Evans: FTC Chair Lina Khan falsely claimed Amazon sold below cost
“Basically she claimed Amazon was losing money, which was This wasn't true. Or she claimed Amazon was selling below cost, which wasn't true.”
Evans: Product search moved almost entirely from Google to Amazon
“What's happened in the last decade or so is product search has moved almost entirely from Google to Amazon.”
Evans: Most Big Tech sub-threshold acquisitions were under $10M and 10 employees
“And the vast majority of them were less than 10 people, and less than ten million dollars.”
Evans: Amazon's $38B Ad Revenue Surpasses Global Newspapers and Prime
“And thirty eight billion dollars is bigger than the global newspaper industry, which of course is now much reduced. It's also bigger than Amazon Prime.”
Evans: One Medical holds no meaningful market power in US healthcare
“There's no possible basis on which you can say One Medical has any kind of meaningful market power in the US healthcare industry.”
Evans: Big Four tech capex will jump from $400B to $650B
“The big four companies, platform companies, spent four hundred billion dollars on capex last year. This year, they've said they'll spend 650, more or less. Microsoft hasn't been given full year guidance. But Meta and Google and Amazon have more or less doubled…”
Evans: Big Tech funds AI capex out of cash flow, unlike OpenAI
“Microsoft, Google, Amazon, and Meta are funding it out of cash flow, Meta less so than the others, whereas OpenAI has to do these innovative funding structures because it has no cash flow, and Oracle is basically going to borrow a hundred percent of revenue to…”
Evans: Amazon accounts for 40% of US e-commerce, 5% of retail
“It's got sort of 40% of U.S. E-commerce, which is about five percent of U.S. Retail and yet has low prices and it uses market power such as it has to push prices down rather than push prices up.”
Evans: Amazon ad revenue makes it a top-four global media owner
“And they did, I think, thirty one billion dollars last year, and they've done like 36, thirty seven billion dollars in the last 12 months which gets them to being like a top three, top four media owner. Globally. It's like Alphabet, Meta, ByteDance and then I …”
Evans: Specialized vertical software on iPads captured restaurants, not Big Tech
“That didn't get eaten by Google, or Amazon, or Apple. It's a generic iPad in a case, and then there's However many software companies, a bunch of software companies that go and solve, this is what restaurants need.”
Evans: Amazon holds 40% of e-commerce but tiny share of US retail
“It's got 40% of e-commerce and like a tiny percentage of US retail, but it has this large market share.”
Evans: Amazon ad revenue hit $31 billion, matching YouTube's scale
“And so Amazon did thirty-one billion dollars of advertising last year, which makes it roughly the same size as YouTube.”
Top US streamers individually outspend all major European broadcasters combined
“Fifteen billion dollars a year, which is what Netflix, for the sake of argument, what Netflix spends, and close to what Amazon spends. It's also what Disney spend, if you exclude sport. That's more than production budgets for the top, all broadcasters in the t…”
Evans: Amazon generated $31B in 2021 ad revenue, topping YouTube
“This quarter, what had previously been sort of implicit in their results, so they have this line in the back of the account, it's called a breakdown of their revenue, and they had this line called other, which they say is predominantly advertising, and this qu…”
Amazon managed net income to zero for 25 years by continuously reinvesting
“What Amazon did was they, if you look at the P&L for the last 25 years, they basically managed net income to zero. It was always zero, even as the revenue went up.”
Amazon's search advertising business generated over $20 billion in 2020
“The other thing that I've noticed recently is Amazon's advertising business, where they sell slots in search results. That is in its category called ads and other in the back of the report, where they disclose revenue but not profit. That did over twenty billi…”
Evans: Amazon's 20 percent private label business is standard retail practice
“Amazon doing private label, like, yo, that's how retails work for the last hundred years. Like every retailer is 20% private label, but on the web somehow it's evil.”
Evans: Amazon generates $55 billion in annual advertising revenue
“Amazon has a three, has a fifty-five billion dollar ad business.”
Evans: Amazon generated $50 billion in ad revenue last year
“And Amazon did fifty billion dollars of advertising last year by selling ads on Amazon to appear in search results.”
Evans: UK 16-to-34s watch more streaming video than all legacy TV combined
“And so you look at the stats from Ofcom, the UK regulator and UK, 16 to 24 watch more subscription video than everything from the PSB and some public service broadcasters, which is the traditional analog broadcasters. More 16 to 34 watch more stuff from basica…”
Evans: Amazon Is Flooded With Spam Products Named After OpenAI Error Messages
“Amazon is overrun. You know, if you saw this link, if you search, search Amazon for I'm sorry, that would break open AI terms of service. And you just got huge numbers of marketplace products where literally the name of the product is, I'm sorry, I can't name …”
Evans: Amazon has 350M to 450M SKUs, many made-to-order
“Amazon has 354 hundred and fifty million scoops. It has sufficiently many scoops that it's actually not a very meaningful number because an awful lot of that is just stuff that doesn't exist until someone orders it.”
Evans: Major tech firms are designing proprietary chips in-house
“Everyone from Amazon to YouTube are designing their own chips instead of just buying them off the shelf.”
Evans: Anker is a $1.8B company with 10% net income
“Looking up the numbers say now about a 1.8000000000 dollar company. With 50 or 60% gross margins and 10% net income, because all the rest of the money is going to a combination of Amazon and advertising.”
Evans: Shein ranks second only to Amazon in US teen brand survey
“Piper Sander does this study of US teenagers, and so what's the favorite brand, and for the last, like, four quarters, Shein, you could see it marching up every quarter, or every, every, every six months, it's a six-monthly survey, and the last two or three su…”
Walmart's quarterly ad business reached $2 billion versus Amazon's $31 billion
“From Walmart's results, latest results, Walmart's ad business was two billion dollars. In the last quarter, obviously Amazon's is thirty one billion dollars, but they're quite a lot further down that down that road.”
Zuckerberg is the only remaining Big Tech founder CEO
“This leaves Zuck as the only head of one of these giant companies who's the founder.”
Evans: Online-only retailers represent 50% to 60% of total e-commerce
“Online-only retailers, which means Amazon and anyone else who only has a website, doesn't have a store, physical store, is about 50, 50 to 60% of total e-commerce.”
Evans: US physical clothing retailers saw their online sales double
“In the US online clothing sales, online sales by clothing retailers. Doubled. That does, that's not telling you anything about what's happening in Amazon. That's just telling you traditional physical stores that also sell online. Yeah. Their online sales doubl…”
Evans: Amazon holds 40% of US e-commerce, but 15% of retail
“Amazon has probably 40% of US e-commerce, but e-commerce is sort of 15 to 20% of US retail.”
Evans: Third Parties Account for 60% of Sales on Amazon
“If you counted that as revenue, then about 60% of what gets sold on Amazon is actually sold by third parties. So Amazon is a platform for other people.”
Evans: Bezos's original 1994 Amazon plan was pure drop shipping
“Originally in the early nine, whenever it was like, 94, when Bezos was thinking, was trying to set up Amazon, the original business plan was it was going to do drop shipping. So there'd be no website, no stock, no inventory no infrastructure.”