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 441 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
Catton-Brown: F1 Journalists Avoid Heavy Criticism to Protect Access
“There is something very Unique and bizarre in formula one that the journalists are very rarely, very skeptical of formula one or will never say anything too heavy about formula one for fear of losing their credentials.”
Microsoft invested $100 billion in Bing over 20 years for 5-10% share
“Bing has invested about a hundred billion dollars over the last 20 years, and they've got 10%, five to 10% share of US search.”
70% of US search happens on Google default placements
“About 70% of search in the US happens on a device where Google's made it the default.”
Competitors cannot afford to match Google's default search distribution payments
“Well, no one can afford to match what Google's paying and even Bing, because in fact their monetization per search is worse for the same reason that their search engine results are worse, and no startup could afford to spend a billion dollars a year building i…”
Evans: Davos attendees stopped discussing AGI between 2023 and 2024
“Last year, everyone at Davos was talking about AGI. This year, no one at Davos was talking about AGI.”
Evans: Deloitte survey shows one-third believe generative AI is always accurate
“They asked about hallucinations, and they said, do you believe that generative AI always produces accurate answers? And the question is still, like, a third of people say yes, even if they've tried it.”
Evans: Every large enterprise is exploring AI, but none are in production
“It seems like we're now sort of at the point that every big company's got this, everyone big company sort of is thinking about what they do with it, and no one's got any production yet.”
Evans: Hong Kong security law technically applies to US firms in America
“The Hong Kong national security law, technically applies to American companies in America. So if you work for a company that happens to be covered by that law and you set foot in Hong Kong, then they can arrest you, even if the company isn't in Hong Kong.”
Evans: Temu and Shein Accounted for $4 Billion of Meta's Revenue
“10% of revenue, five percent of revenue growth. And so that's about four billion dollars, and so apparently half of that was Temu, and well, presumably quite a lot of the rest was Shein.”
Evans: US De Minimis Rule Gives Temu a Massive Tax Advantage
“There is a rule in the US that for orders of a value of less than 800 dollars, there's no import taxes or different, much less, or different import taxes. And so if you were running a store in the U.S. And shipping a shipping container full of garments to Amer…”
Evans: Social platforms previously blocked COVID lab leak and mask efficacy posts
“I mean, the kind of the case study here is when social networks decided to block anybody Suggesting that masks weren't very useful during COVID or block anybody suggesting that maybe COVID had leaked from a Chinese biology research lab. And I think now, I don'…”
Evans: Netflix outspends all broadcasters in top five European markets combined
“Netflix's content budget, which is what's the number? 15,000,000,016 billion dollars a year. Last time I looked, that was more than all broadcasters spent in the top five European markets combined.”
Evans: McKinsey finds 90% of managers tried AI, but few use it
“This is a study from McKinsey, which is, you know, how many people in big company management have at least tried this? And the answer is like, 70, 80, 90%, depending on industries. But people using it for work is sort of three, four, five, maybe 10%.”
Evans: Twitter cut 80% of staff and withheld contractual severance
“And meanwhile, Twitter fired 80% of the staff and an awful lot of them have said it's failing to pay them their contractual severance payments.”
Benedict Evans: Meta Quest has only single-digit millions of regular users
“So Meta sold maybe twenty million. That you have survey data that says that maybe 10 or 20% of people are actually using them regularly, which is not a great number. So there's like single digit numbers of millions of people using this thing.”
Benedict Evans: Meta has spent at least $35 billion on Reality Labs
“Meta has spent, I think, at least thirty five billion dollars on this stuff. Because they spent like over thirty billion dollars on operating losses for the Reality Labs group, offset a bit by revenue from selling hardware and games. And they bought Oculus, an…”
Benedict Evans: Apple's laptop-grade silicon gives Vision Pro an architectural advantage
“Apple is using a high-end laptop SAC in this thing because they have their own, which has massively better performance per watt than anything from Intel. Guess what Meta has to use? They have to use a smartphone chip from Volcom.”
Evans: Meta spends billions inventing tech, unlike Apple's original off-the-shelf iPhone
“Meta is spending tens of billions of dollars every year on all of that Moore's law, because where Apple could basically sit on top of an awful lot of technology that already existed, like they didn't need to create ARM from scratch. They didn't need to invent …”
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: US Has 5 to 10 Times More Retail Space Per Capita
“Well, so there's a chart in my presentation of retail square, square foot per capita in, in which the U S has like five to 10 times more retail square foot per capita than anywhere else. And half of that is is, is malls in which the U S has basically massively…”
Evans: Google pays Apple nearly $20B for default iPhone search
“Google pays, Apple pays, Apple probably close to twenty billion dollars to be the default search engine on the iPhone.”
Evans: Recasting Star Wars with Burt Reynolds via AI is a weekend project
“Reshoot, give me the complete original Star Wars movie with Burt Reynolds instead of Harrison Ford, and that's a weekend project.”
Evans: ChatGPT passes the Turing test by producing C-grade answers
“ChatGPT can pass the Turing test. I mean, you may not think it's a very bright person. I mean, this is the thing. I was plugging in my questions. I remember from when I was at history undergraduate, like, yeah, these are all C grade D grade answers. They are a…”
Goldberg: Only about 100 non-semiconductor companies can design custom chips
“There's only about a hundred companies in the world that really can design their own chips other than chip companies, right? It's mostly the big internet companies and the big industrial companies.”
Goldberg: Moore's Law has slowed from 18 months to five years
“Moore's law is slowing, right? It is not 18 months anymore. It's five years.”
Goldberg: Cruise autonomous vehicles contain $10,000 to $20,000 in chips
“Because if you look at sort of the autonomous cars that are out there today, like I live in San Francisco and there's autonomous cruise cars driving around. They have 10, 20,000 dollars of chips in them, right?”
Evans: Hardcore gaming is limited to 300-400 million players globally
“Games market is small. Sort of a counterintuitive thing to say. Lots of money but it is sort of something with, say, three or four hundred million people at most are playing something that a gamer would consider a game, like a real game.”
Evans: 30% to 40% of top Amazon sellers are Chinese companies
“Something like 30 or 40% of the top Amazon marketplace sellers are actually Chinese companies.”
Evans: YouTube creator payouts rival major TV studio programming budgets
“And then of course they pay out 45% of the ad revenue to the creators, which makes, puts their budget somewhere sort of Makes them sort of top three, top four. If you count that as programming budget, comparable to the US media companies, that would put them s…”
Evans: Modern tech company returns occur mostly in private markets pre-IPO
“Tech companies of the eighties and nineties, like 80 or 90% of the returns to investors came in after the IPO. Let's say IPO at a hundred million dollars, and then they end up being a fifty billion dollar company. Whereas for something like Google or Facebook …”
Evans: Chinese manufacturers captured the enterprise IP connected camera market
“And so what's actually happened with IP connected cameras for enterprise is it's all the Chinese manufacturers. Because from their perspective, all the Silicon Valley company was doing was branding and marketing. They weren't actually, there was no network com…”
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.”
Cameron: Many EU regulators have never written code or built software
“One of the reasons when I started my career in the European Commission and I left very quickly is that it all felt, I'm working with some of the smartest people, but it all felt very theoretical. And it was obvious that a lot of these people writing these legi…”
Evans: Tech companies historically fought encryption policy with ideology, not engineering
“Far too often, not so much recently, but particularly, you know, until a few years ago, the argument from technology would not, technology companies would not be, no, this is the only way we can stop China from reading your emails, or the only way that we can …”
Evans: Shein uses browsing traffic to trigger 200-unit manufacturing batches
“You know, there's all sorts of different narratives about this, but you know, at a very, at a minimum, they're ordering in very short, small numbers. They may not even have actually ordered that product before they list it on the site. They're making 200 of th…”
Evans: Shein surpassed Zara and H&M combined in US sales
“No, Ernest, which is this company that does credit card, aggregates credit card bills, sort of said it's now the same size as Zara and H&M, and now, at the end of last year, it's bigger than Zara and H&M combined in US purchasing”
Evans: Shein raised at a $100B valuation, surpassing Zara and H&M combined
“And Sheehan raised this week at a hundred billion dollars, which Company we talked about before and is now bigger than Zara and H&M combined globally.”
Evans: TSMC manufactures roughly 75% of current-generation semiconductor chips
“TSMC Really in the last five years moved from being one of many players in chips to dominating cutting into chip. So, you know, current generation chips are, I forget the number, three quarters TSMC.”
Evans: Russian daily jet losses exceed US losses in entire Gulf War
“Just today, I think the Russians have had half a dozen jets shot down, which is more than America had in the whole Gulf War.”
Evans: Apple kept a VR headset in its lab for five years
“Meanwhile, Apple has had a VR headset in the lab for five years and looks at it every year and say, nah, we don't think this is good enough yet.”
Evans: China regulates algorithmic feeds while US and EU lag far behind
“So like, you know, very, very detailed thing on how algorithmic content moderation should work, and how algorithmic content feeds should work, which the EU and the US have not anywhere close to having. Like, now here's a law on how the news feed should work.”
Evans: 0.5% of iPhone users generate half of App Store spending
“Second observation is we know from the disclosures in the Epic trial that about 80% so Apple did fifteen billion dollars. Apple gives a number. They did fifteen billion dollars in App Store commission. 65, sixty-five billion dollars, I think, of total money sp…”
Evans: 0.5% of App Store Accounts Generated 54% of Billings in 2016
“Not .5% of accounts spent over 450 dollars in the quarter. Not sure if this is quarter or month, I have to go and check. Same point, really. And those users were 54% of total App Store billings.”
Evans: Lack of Local Loop Unbundling Made US Broadband Less Competitive
“The issue here, which is the US in a lot of industries is sort of systemically less competitive than Europe and many other developed countries particularly in broadband where Europe and most of the rest of the world had local deep on bundling, which meant ther…”
Evans: IBM shipped more mainframe capacity in 2020 than ever before
“In fact, IBM shipped more mainframe capacity last year than in their entire history.”
Cowan-Brown: Shein turns around fashion production in two to three days
“Unlike Zara or Asus, and most people have gotten familiar with their e-commerce model and being able to turn things around in two or three weeks. Shein is turning things around in two or three days, which is absolutely insane.”
Li: Sea, Grab, Gojek, and Rappi Credit Chinese Tech Rather Than US Giants
“See, which is like a super app in, in Southeast Asia credits a lot of its innovation and the way they think about app building to Tencent as do Grab, Gojack, and Rappi in Brazil. You know, they credit Chinese tech for, and the way of kind of, you know, buildin…”
Li: Chinese platform fines targeted exclusive vendor lock-in agreements
“So if you're a supplier to Alibaba, you can't go on Pinduoduo or JD. They would sometimes make you sign an inclusive, exclusive agreement with them, which would be very, you know, anti-competitive in most parts of the world. But they've managed to sort of have…”