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 359 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: Vast majority of platform moderation decisions are universally agreed upon
“The vast majority of the decisions are not the lab leak theory from China or Hunter Biden's laptop. They're not things where people disagree. They are, you know, things where literally everybody who thinks content moderation is bad would look at that and go, o…”
Evans: AI Model Inference Alone Generates 40% to 50% Gross Margins
“And meanwhile, we sort of know that you have positive gross margins on inference alone of sort of 40, 50%, but you've got the cost of building the next model, and you don't know where the cost The cost will move, or the cost of the next model will move, and yo…”
Evans: DeepSeek Proves Anyone With Two Billion Can Build Foundation Models
“Like anyone who's got a couple of billion dollars can make a foundation model which is what DeepSeq showed us as well.”
Evans: No competing AI app has more than 5% of ChatGPT's usage
“Go look at App Store ranking, or Google Trends, or usage data of any kind that you can get, and you see that basically it's ChatGPT, and then none of the others are more than five percent of that.”
Google paid $25 billion last year in device revenue share
“Google is paying a revenue share of 25 to 35% of the revenue they get from each search back to the device, and that was twenty-five billion dollars last year.”
The US court cannot compel Apple to add Safari choice screens
“The court can't make Apple put a choice screen in Safari. Like, Apple isn't in court. Like, they haven't been convicted of anything.”
Evans: Google Gemini generated racially diverse depictions of Nazi stormtroopers
“And so it turned out that if you typed in, give me pictures of Nazi stormtroopers, you got A white person in Nazi uniform, and a black person, and a Chinese person, and an Asian woman, and so on.”
Benedict Evans: Meta has spent up to $20,000 per active Quest user
“Yes, I was doing some back of the envelope math earlier, and like, if Meta, you know, like, depending on quite how much they've spent, quite many active users, Meta would spend somewhere between 10 and 20,000 dollars for each active user that they have on this…”
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.”
Goldberg: Cost per transistor is increasing in many cases
“The cost per transistor is actually going up in a lot of cases”
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: MrBeast viewing time rivals a top 10 to 15 Netflix show
“Depending on whether you think he gets like one minute Per view, or six or seven minutes per view, it looks like Mr. Beast in total would sort of count as like a top 10 to top 15 Netflix show on a weekly, rolling weekly basis, and sometimes more than that.”
Evans: Australian court ruled Google is not a publisher in defamation suit
“There was a fascinating court case a couple of weeks ago in which some, someone, a newspaper would describe somebody as a gangster, and the newspaper story is in Google, and the person accused of being a gangster sued Google for defamation, and the court said,…”
Russia cannot manufacture new tanks due to foreign semiconductor shortages
“So the Russians are fucked, because they can't even make new tanks, because they can't get the components.”
Evans: Musk has zero experience in consumer software or social networks
“Whether, you know, Elon with zero experience of building consumer software, or, and zero experience of a social network is the right person to do that is a slightly different question.”
Evans: Laws of physics prevent mesh networks from replacing cellular
“You can't replace, laws of physics prevent mesh networks from replacing cellular.”
Evans: Apple's SKAdNetwork limits conversion attribution data compared to IDFA
“They're going to turn it off and replace it with something called SK Ad Network, which will really just tell you there was an install, but not tell you what or how much it resulted in, which is like massively less useful.”
Evans: Facebook's targeted advertising does not sell user data to advertisers
“Facebook sells your data. Okay, what does Facebook do? You're an advertiser, you go on Facebook, you say, I want to show an ad for a playgroup to mothers in Cardiff, and I've got 500 pounds to spend. Okay, we'll show that ad to 500 people that we, to a thousan…”
Evans: EU communication privacy law inadvertently banned child abuse scanning
“So late, late in December, the EU had passed a law on privacy of communications platforms, which basically said you're not allowed to look at what people are saying to each other. And suddenly realized, just as this was about to go into effect in mid-December,…”
Evans: Facebook generates trivial revenue from news content
“All my friends at Facebook would basically say, we wish we didn't have news at all. We don't make any money from it. We actually don't make any money from news, although the amount of money is trivial. It's a huge amount of pain and aggravation”
Facebook cleared out Oculus founders for wanting to build gaming consoles
“This is why they cleared out all the team, because they bought a company staffed by people who wanted to make a games, a high-end games console, and they know they don't want that.”
Evans: Telco stocks were flat for 20 years while apps captured value
“Giant industry, trillion dollars of revenue, two hundred billion dollars a year of CapEx stocks have gone nowhere in 20 years, and all the value is built by other people.”
Evans: Survey data shows Claude holds between 0% and 1% consumer usage
“If you look at the, you know, survey data on usage, it's,
It's ChatGPT, and then it's sort of two-thirds of that to a half of that is Gemini and Meta AI.
Even though Meta AI is a fiasco, Llama IV was a fiasco, the new models haven't launched yet, but consume…”
Evans: Oracle raised $50 billion in bonds this year for cloud
“Borrowed a lot, an enormous amount of money, fifty billion dollars of bonds this year to capital raising this year.”
Evans: Meta AI consumer usage rivals Gemini; Claude has zero adoption
“For consumers, Meta AI has got not actually very dissimilar usage to Gemini, and Claude is nowhere.”
Evans: Waymo is delivering close to 1 million rides per day
“Waymo is doing close to a million rides a day”
Evans: Top four cloud platforms will spend over $200B on data centers this year
“And we will build the five, four platform companies, four big cloud companies will spend something over two hundred billion dollars this year, which is up 80 or ninety billion dollars from last year on building data center.”
Catton-Brown: All 10 Formula 1 teams recently became profitable
“In the last two or three years only, have all of the teams, for the first time in the history of Formula One, have the 10 teams across the grid been profitable. For 70 plus years, these teams were operating at a loss.”
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.”
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: 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: 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…”