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 13 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
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 …”
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.”
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.”
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.”
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.”
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.”
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…”