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 43 resolved? a statement only gets an assessment when the public record can support or contradict it. opinions and what-ifs never can, and 1 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
Jain: Over half of hyperscaler backlog stems from OpenAI and Anthropic
“Now we're getting more clarity that more than half of the backlog, hence probably the revenue too,
Is coming from basically anthropic slash open AI.
If you look at Google and Microsoft is more than half open AI.
Amazon is more than half.
So they invest with op…”
Sternlicht: Amazon subsidizes $4B-$5B retail losses with AWS to destroy small retailers
“It's fundamentally destroying mom and dad retail across the country, and it's one of my pet peeves because they were allowed to sell product retail-wise for less than the cost of, they're losing four or five billion a year in retail, which they subsidize with …”
Sternlicht: Amazon Prime will hit $500 once competing retail is gone
“They charge us 75 dollars, and now I think it's a hundred. They'll go to 500 when there's nothing left but Amazon in this country.”
Tian: Alibaba's asset-light business model is an "original sin."
“That's exactly the way that Alibaba did the business, and I actually, I think it's potentially an original sin. It's the way that eBay thought, and it didn't really work out that well for them versus, let's say, an Amazon.”
Jain: Altria outperformed Meta, Microsoft, and Amazon over the past five years
“Cigarette volume has been declining at seven, eight percent in US. And guess what, last five years? Altria has outperformed Mera. I think now Microsoft and Amazon last five years.”
Amazon Will Ultimately Generate Over $100 Billion Annually in Ad Revenue
“Amazon's not going to be doing billions in advertising revenue. They're going to be doing tens of billions and ultimately over a hundred billion a year in ad revenue.”
Michelakis: Amazon Has Not Proven a Good Consumer Business Model
“Has Amazon proven that it has a good business model yet on the consumer side? Three percent margins. It's a good business proposition for customers. That's very different to it's a good business model for shelves.”
Xu: JD moved ahead of Amazon by building proprietary distribution centers
“He's doing e-commerce, but he's one step ahead than Amazon, because when JD started the business, when we give him the money, he did two things. Number one, he expand the category. Number two, he build the distribution center. Amazon didn't have distribution c…”
Baker: Fidelity led three Roku rounds when VCs feared Big Tech
“There's this company, Roku, no VCs would fund it, because every venture capitalist was worried about competition from Amazon, Google, and Apple. I was like, well, I'm really familiar with those companies. Competing with Roku, it is not on their top 50 list of …”
Drobny: Public ESG ETFs are filled with non-ESG companies like Amazon
“It's really hard to do in public markets, because when you look at these ESG ETFs, they're full of Amazon and Google and things that aren't really ESG.”
Lamont: Google and Amazon wouldn't exist without 1990s internet mania
“If we hadn't had a mania, we wouldn't have funded things like Google and Amazon, some of the great companies of today.”
Hamed: Amazon rollups can secure 85% to 95% debt advance rates
“In Amazon, as mentioned, it's the opposite. You can finance them at 90, 95, 85% advance rates. One, because you don't care about the alignment anymore. You're their whole facility. You're the only financier. So if they screw up that facility, they're toast. Th…”
Singh claims he first publicly proposed rolling up Amazon third-party sellers
“And so I think I was probably literally the first person to have the idea of rolling up Amazon sellers, which has obviously become this enormous business. I literally think I was the first person to talk about that publicly.”
Parrish: Six-page memos are far more effective than PowerPoints for decision-making
“When you think about what would be more effective for making decisions in a meeting or getting input into people's heads, it would clearly be the Amazon approach of doing these six-page memos.”
Trigg: Buying Dell and Yahoo over Apple and Google damaged WCM
“We were buying Dell instead of Apple, eBay instead of Amazon, Yahoo instead of Google. I mean, those three trades alone would have had, had they been done differently, would have had dramatically different results for that domestic product.”
Ries: Amazon's long-term orientation as a public company is a singular anomaly
“And people are like, well, Jeff Bezos thinks long-term. I'm like, ok, but then you study the history of Amazon. That's a very unusual, singular situation that's unlikely to ever be repeated in history.”
Mauboussin: Zero $100B+ Companies Have Grown Revenue 15% Annually Over Ten Years
“Let's look at every company that had initial revenues of one hundred billion or more, so obviously adjusted for inflation, and look at how they did in their subsequent growth rates for the next 10 years. And by the way, because this is such rarefied space, you…”
Sacerdote: Amazon Trades at 25x Forward GAAP EPS, Cheaper Than Walmart and Costco
“You've got Amazon now, which is 25 times next year's street EPS, which, that's GAAP EPS, cheaper than Walmart, cheaper than Costco.”
Reynolds: In May 1997, Santa Fe's $1B IPO overshadowed Amazon's debut
“We had just taken public Santa Fe drilling, which was a billion dollar IPO that Goldman Sachs was the lead manager of. Two weeks prior, Amazon had gone public. No one paid attention to Amazon in May of 97. Everybody paid attention to Santa Fe.”
Amazon Historically Generated Massive Cash Flows But Reinvested Every Dollar
“I love when people say like, oh, back in the day, Amazon trades at 150 times earnings, and they don't generate any cash. And like, what are you talking about? They're generating an insane amount of cash. They're just reinvesting it all back in the business.”
Falbe: No AI system will find another Amazon because duplicates don't exist
“No machine is going to find another Amazon out there because it doesn't exist.”
Papa: Silicon Valley refused to fund Kiva Systems' hardware before Boston backed it
“My favorite example is Kiva Systems, the robot company that Amazon bought. No one would back hardware in Silicon Valley when they were being founded. Came to Boston, found folks interested in backing what today we call hard tech.”
Wolfe: Tech veterans from Stripe and Google are returning to Africa
“You have people that were born and raised in Nigeria and Ghana and Kenya who have gone to Silicon Valley and trained at Stripe and Google and Facebook and Amazon and are coming back, and they're coming back Sent to millionaires. They've made hundreds of millio…”
Hamed: Top Amazon sellers get free traffic while Shopify merchants buy ads
“An Amazon seller who's ranked highly in a category doesn't need to spend much money on marketing and ads because the traffic will come to them for free. It's almost like you're in a mall without paying for the rent for foot traffic. In Shopify, that's not true…”
Grinda: Marketplaces solve matching problems rather than capital-intensive supply chains
“The problem is if you want to build Amazon, you need billions of dollars of capital. You need supply chain management skills. If you want to build E-Trade, you need a banking license. When you build a marketplace like eBay, you have a unique set of problems of…”
Cocke: Financial accounting is the exhaust of a business, not the engine
“And you think that accounting is sort of the Rosetta Stone of investing, and in the end, you realize, no, accounting is the exhaust. It's not the gas, and so you can't let it Take over your mindset. You've got to think about what does the business actually do?…”
Ellis: Investors Irrationally Avoid Buying Back Stocks They Previously Lost Money On
“People who lost money in a particular stock never want to invest in that stock again. Even 10 years later, they sold Amazon at the wrong place and you find that they've never bought Amazon again. It's like, look, you can buy things at the wrong place, you can …”
Lewinsohn: Tracking cyclical shifts in company narratives is critical for security selection
“Understanding investing as narrative, not just for the long term about how a company will improve, or how, you know, Amazon will go last mile and transform the way we do things. But actually, within the macroeconomic cycle, how the narrative around a company w…”
Rubenstein: Carlyle sold Amazon at IPO and passed on Facebook and Netscape
“Well, the mistakes that I made and not pursuing Mark Zuckerberg when he was at Harvard, when my now son-in-law was prepared to introduce me to him, or when we kind of sold our stake in Amazon at the IPO. And then also a young man showed up in our office one ti…”
Russo: Amazon possesses a winner-take-all advantage in per-unit distribution costs
“Now, Amazon has kind of first mover advantage and probably a winner take all advantage in terms of the distribution cost per unit. That's something I completely missed. I mean, that, that notion that they are actually delivering more packages now, faster and w…”
Batnick: Hindsight '$10K invested' charts ignore the emotional pain of holding
“I think that looking at the growth of a dollar, you know, a lot gets lost in the charts, the emotions of it and what it took to hold on. I just think that like people that are, oh, if I should have bought Amazon, I knew it. No, you didn't. If you did, you woul…”
Acito: The next credit distress cycle could be an "Amazon distress cycle"
“Maybe, maybe the next distress cycle is called the Amazon distress cycle. Again, where you have severe displacement of certain industries happening during a period of time in which the broader economy is doing fine”
Johnson: Non-diverse shareholder bases make stocks prone to violent moves
“Just because you lack diversity or independence doesn't mean they're wrong. And there's a subtlety there that's not insignificant. We're not saying that Amazon is mispriced. We're just saying the crowd's not very diverse. So if an event happens that challenges…”
Amazon is classified as a consumer discretionary stock, not technology
“You think Amazon's a tech stock? It's not. It's consumer discretionary. It's not in the tech index.”
Toast founders built second commerce app on Apple App Store
“In fact, they were the second mobile app in the Apple App Store for commerce after Amazon.”
Papa: Endeca could have exited to Amazon around 2005
“There were two other moments we could have exited the business. One was around 2005 where Amazon was very attracted to what we were doing.”
Cocke: Anchoring to Amazon as a short was my most expensive mistake
“Missing that and getting anchored to Amazon as a short is the most expensive mistake in my life. And I've still never owned it.”
Tech giant antitrust scrutiny parallels late 19th-century Standard Oil trust-busting
“You had the government agencies in the states suing Facebook, you have these challenges and these emerging powers in Amazon, and you're seeing these comparisons to standard oil back in the late 19th century and how it evolved and the trust busters”
Friedman: Amazon HQ2 in Northern Virginia Is Partially in an Opportunity Zone
“Amazon's second headquarters is partially an opportunity zone in northern Virginia.”
Russo: FedEx stock halved while simultaneously serving and competing with Amazon
“Now, one of the ironic stock declines over the past several weeks has been Federal Express, which has dropped from two 60 to a 150. And, you know, they're trying to serve Amazon at the same time, compete with it. And its share prices collapsed to nine times th…”
Williamson: Amazon board documents explicitly define duty to long-term share owners
“Amazon's board, Amazon is often quoted as a very long-term company, actually explicitly has in their corporate governance documents that their responsibility is to what they call the long-term share owner, and so they don't get themselves into this who's our d…”