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 96 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
Microsoft missed early deep learning opportunity with Geoffrey Hinton to Google
“In fact, even Hinton worked, like some of the early work in DNNs happened when he was in residency in MSR and then Google hired him. So we missed, I would say, even in the early 20 tens, some of what could have been doubling down at around the same time that G…”
Nadella: Microsoft Partnered With CoreWeave to Catch Up to ChatGPT Demand
“That, that we did because we all got caught with the hit called ChatGPT and OpenAI APIs, right? Yeah, we were completely, I mean, like, yeah, it was impossible. There's no supply chain planning I could have done in you know, what is it, you know, like none of …”
Nadella details the four pillars governing Microsoft's OpenAI partnership
“I think of them as, hey, as an investor, what are their interests and our interests, and how do we align them? I think of them as an IP partner and because we give them systems IP, they give us, ah, model IP, right? So that's another side of it where we are, a…”
Nadella: Microsoft Is Power-Constrained, Not Chip Supply Constrained
“I am power, yes. I am not chip supply constrained. We were definitely constrained in 24. What we have told the street is that's why we are optimistic about sort of, ah, the first half of 25, which is the rest of our fiscal year.”
Nadella: Microsoft allocates capital to unified cloud infrastructure rather than product silos
“To me, I've never, I don't allocate my capital thinking here is the Azure capital. Here is the M. Three, six, five capital. Here is you know, gaming. I kind of think of, hey, there's a cloud infra. That's the core theory of the firm for me. On top of it, I hav…”
Nadella: Enterprise autonomous AI agents are one to two years away
“But I think we are maybe a year, year to two years away from doing more and more, but as in, so, but I think at least from an enterprise perspective, going and doing, here's my sales agent, here's my marketing agent, here's my supply chain agent, which can do …”
Nadella: Microsoft tried for 10 years to secure an Apple search deal
“Like, I've been trying to get an Apple search deal for, like, 10 years. And so, when Tim finally did a deal with Sam, I was, like, the most thrilled person, which is better, it's better to have ChatGPT get that deal than anybody else, because we, you know, we …”
Nadella: OpenAI Briefly Used GCP Before Returning to Microsoft for Transformers
“The first time yeah, actually, Elon and Sam, they were looking for, obviously, Azure credits, and what have you, and we gave them some credits, and that time, they were more into RL, and Dota II, and what have you, and that was interesting and then we stopped …”
Gurley: Microsoft is now a top four global security company
“A lot of people don't know this, but Microsoft's now one of the top four security companies in the world”
Gurley: Antitrust concerns likely did not derail Google-Wiz deal
“I wouldn't, I have a hard time believing this one was a concern about The antitrust because Google doesn't have a huge security business and there, there's actually concern about consolidation around Palo Alto and Microsoft and Cisco in the industries, or in C…”
Gerstner: Very few companies will be able to build frontier AI models
“I think that the cost structures that are going to be associated with frontier level models, there are going to be very few companies on the planet that are going to be able to build those models. Because I think the latest discussions, whether it's you know, …”
Gerstner: Inflection's Microsoft Deal Was Not a Terrible Stakeholder Outcome
“I don't think it was a terrible outcome for the investors, for Mustafa or for Microsoft”
Gurley: Microsoft's $11 billion annual SBC is only 0.35% dilution
“Microsoft's SBC is 2.8 billion a
quarter.
So that's over eleven billion a year.
And this morning we woke up and read about them taking some employees from a hot AI company in the valley.
And when you're handing out eleven billion a year in RSUs, you know, you'…”
Gurley: Microsoft is a clear net winner from generative AI
“People looked at the Microsoft portfolio of assets, especially where they make money around the office suite, right? And said, and the developer community where they also, you know, control a lot of the IDEs that are used to program. And they said, oh, this is…”
Gurley: Antitrust Scrutiny Puts Google in a 1990s Microsoft-Style Penalty Box
“Google's like not allowed to do that right now, which it's totally crazy. I mean which, it's actually one last thing is. It's similar to Microsoft in the 96, 97 timeframe where they were, you know, in the penalty box and couldn't do those similar things.”
Gerstner: Microsoft, Nvidia, and Meta PEG ratios trade in line historically
“The big three, what I call Microsoft, NVIDIA, and Meta, You know, they too are trading at a premium, about a 14% premium, but if you look at their peg ratio, this is growth adjusted on the bottom of that slide, right? They're basically trading in line with whe…”
Nadella: Microsoft is currently bringing up NVIDIA GB300 hardware
“We now have GB 300 bringing, you know, that we're bringing up. So you don't want to have ordered a bunch of GB 200 that are getting plugged in only to find the GB two, 300 are in full production.”
Altman: OpenAI could not have succeeded without Microsoft and Nadella's conviction
“I don't think, I think this is one of the great tech partnerships ever and without, certainly without Microsoft and particularly Satya's early conviction we would not have been able to do this.”
Nadella: Seeing Codex in GitHub Copilot triggered Microsoft's 1-to-10 OpenAI investment
“Then seeing the early codecs inside of Copilot, inside of GitHub Copilot, and seeing just the code completions, and seeing it work, that's when I would say we, I felt like I can go from one to 10. Because that was the big call, quite frankly. One was controver…”
Nadella: Microsoft Is Supply Constrained Rather Than Demand Constrained
“We're not demand constrained, we're supply constrained. So we are shaping the demand such that it matches the supply in the optimal way with a long-term view.”
Nadella: Microsoft's $400B RPO Backlog Averages Two-Year Duration
“Yeah, that, that four hundred billion it has a very short duration as Amy explained. It's the two year duration on average.”
Nadella confirms Microsoft-OpenAI revenue share runs until AGI or term end
“Yeah, we have a rev share, and I think as you characterized it, is either going to AGI or till the end of the term.”
Nadella: Microsoft cannot lose more than $13.5B invested in OpenAI
“If you've invested, let's call it, 13 and a half billion dollars, you can, of course, lose 13 and a half billion dollars. But you can't lose more than 13 and a half billion dollars. At least the last time I checked, that's what you have at risk.”
Gerstner: Microsoft is spending 80% of free cash flow on CapEx
“Microsoft, I think, is spending 80% of their free cash flow, right, on CapEx.”
Gerstner: Big Five Grew 2024 Earnings by 44% vs 2% for S&P 495
“And in 2024, the big five, so in this case, Microsoft, Meta, Nvidia, Amazon, and Google grew earnings at 44%... If you look at the other 495 companies in the S&P, their earnings only grew two percent.”
Nadella: TypeScript team is building an open-source schematized AI memory project
“Yeah, I mean, we have, like, there's an open source project even I think it's, I forget, like, it's the same set of folks who did all the type TypeScript stuff who are working on this. So what we're trying to do is essentially take memory and schematize it and…”
Nadella: Memo by Amodei and Sutskever Convinced Microsoft to Bet on Scaling
“In fact, I think the first memo, weirdly enough, I read, On scaling was written by Dario when he was at OpenAI and Ilya, and that's sort of what, like I said, let's take a bet on this, right? Which is, hey, wow, if this is going to have exponential performance…”
Nadella: Licensing Outlook sync to Apple leaked value but protected Exchange
“We licensed the sync, ah, for Outlook, ah, to Apple, ah, for Apple Mail, ah, it was kind of a, it was an interesting case, and I think that there was a lot of value leaked, perhaps, But at the same time, I think that was one of the reasons why we were able to …”
Nadella: Azure Kubernetes service is among OpenAI's fastest-growing workloads
“One of the fastest growing things of, in fact, open AI itself is the container service, because after all these agents need a scratch pad for doing some of those auto grading even to generate the samples, right? And so that is like where they run a code interp…”
Nadella: Companies should never enter markets out of envy
“Sometimes it's okay to fast follow, and it worked out, but you shouldn't do things out of envy. That was one of the hardest lessons I think we've learned. Do it because you have permission to do this, and you can do it better.”
Gerstner: Microsoft said almost all $10B AI revenue is inference
“Microsoft has said of its ten billion dollars in AI revenue, it's almost all inference.”
Gurley: Four AI coding co-pilot startups have raised over $200M each
“There are four companies in the coding co-pilot space that are not named Microsoft that have raised over two hundred million dollars each, and we're just These companies are all of a year and a half old, right?”
Gurley: Gemini in Workspace and Android could be a huge win for Google
“They've always had sheets and docs, and a lot of the startups in our community live on that stuff, but it hasn't really competed with the Microsoft stack, and with Satya's comeback, everyone's been super, you know, super excited about what this means for Micro…”
Gerstner: Azure AI hits $4B run rate with 7% growth contribution
“Azure AI contributed seven percent of growth this quarter. So it's now translates into about a four billion run rate business You know, that didn't even get broken out until five quarters ago.”
Gerstner: 64% of Fortune 500 companies use Azure OpenAI
“64% of Fortune 500 customers are now Azure OpenAI customers, which I thought was pretty extraordinary.”
Gerstner: Cloud hyperscalers will beat consensus revenue forecasts due to AI
“You know, our belief is that they will. We think they will beat those forecasts because we do see that real acceleration coming out of AI.”
Gerstner: Microsoft Opens a New Data Center Globally Every Three Days
“Microsoft alone is opening a new data center globally every three days.”
Gerstner: Microsoft, Amazon, Nvidia, and Google invested $25B in VC in 2023
“We go from almost no venture capital investing, you know, out of these folks six or seven years ago to all of a sudden this twenty five billion dollars last year in VC investing”
Gerstner: Tech trades at 36% premium to 10-year average while software lags
“The blue line represents tech. This is the Q's. We're trading at about a 36% premium to the ten-year average. I just showed you software. Software is still trading at a discount because people are more skeptical of software, but when you look at the Q's, Nvidi…”
Nadella: Microsoft did not expect initial $1B OpenAI bet to return 100x
“It's not what we thought, and as I said to somebody, it's not like when we first invested our billion dollars that, oh, this is going to be the hundred bagger that I'm going to be talking about to VCs about, but here we are.”
Nadella: Kevin Scott's conviction drove Microsoft's big AI bet
“Quite frankly Kevin's conviction that this is worth going after is one of the big things that drove this.”
Gerstner: Earnings from Google, Meta, and Microsoft all report compute shortages
“Google, Meta, Microsoft, Satya, you had your earnings yesterday, you know, and we heard consistently not enough compute.”
Nadella: Microsoft Azure was OpenAI's first sponsor in 2016
“We were involved even in 2016 when initially OpenAI started, in fact, Azure was even the first sponsor, I think. And then they were doing a lot more reinforcement learning at that time. I remember the Dota two competition, I think, happened on Azure, and then …”
Gurley: Microsoft leads tech capex at roughly $80 billion per year
“I guess Microsoft's the highest right now at eighty billion a year.”
Nadella: Microsoft spends ~$4B on customer support across Xbox and Azure
“We spend around four billion dollars or so. This is everything from Xbox support to Azure support.”
Nadella: Microsoft built 10 to 15 autonomous agents into Dynamics
“We built 10 or 15 of them into dynamics, right? Even looking into sort of my supplier communications and automatically Handling my supplier communications, updating my databases, changing my inventories, my apply. Those are the kinds of things that you can do …”
Gerstner: Big Tech Earnings Are Up 38% Over the Past 12 Months
“So if you look at it for Microsoft, NVIDIA, Amazon, Google, Meta, earnings are up 38% over the last 12 months.”
Gerstner: Google trades at the lowest P/E and growth rate among MANG peers
“This is the 23 through 25 expected growth rates. 14% for Microsoft, 12% for Amazon. 42% for NVIDIA and 11% for Google. So Google's already expected out of those four to be growing at the slowest rate. But then what's interesting, if you come down here, To the …”