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 22 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
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…”
Jain: Software has low entry barriers; almost none survive 30 years
“If you look at it, how many companies have survived in software business over 30 plus years? Microsoft is an exception, and maybe Oracle, it's a lower barrier to business.”
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.”
Hale: Strong franchises tolerate capital misallocation for a decade; commodity businesses bankrupt
“If you're a steel company or an airliner and you're in some commodity industry and you misallocate capital for 10 years, you go bankrupt. Someone takes you over. If you're Microsoft, if you're Adobe, if you have a very strong franchise and you don't necessaril…”
Morfit: Microsoft burned $4B to $6B annually chasing Apple and Google
“We could deduce that there was massive amounts of costs and losses being poured into these hardware initiatives. To the tune of four or five, six billion dollars a year that might be better spent driving Office three 65 in Azure instead of trying to chase the …”
Corre: Microsoft's acquisition of Activision will get completed
“And it's still not done, but we feel pretty good that it's going to get done.”
Harris: Cybersecurity investments will lose more money than they make
“There's a lot of money going into cyber. I think cyber is going to be very difficult. I think a lot more money will be lost than made because you always have to ask yourself the question, what's stopping Microsoft from coming in and walking over XYZ company.”
Mid-level engineers at Microsoft are making $1 million in total compensation
“I was just on a call where somebody was talking about mid-level, not even senior engineers at Microsoft are making a million dollars.”
Thomas Reardon single-handedly coded Internet Explorer and was Bill Gates's right-hand
“While he's at Microsoft, he single-handedly codes Internet Explorer, which we've all used, and he's also Bill's right-hand guy during the entire DOJ Monopoly trial.”
Morfit: Shifting software capital allocation beats fixing industrial manufacturing costs
“It's easy to get a company to shift its allocations away from making Windows phones to focusing on Office three 65. Then the one we took on at Rolls Royce, which was how do we engineer your engines to have a lower cost of goods than what they currently have an…”
Microsoft's five-year stock growth was driven predominantly by earnings
“But then if you take something like Microsoft, for example, it's seen some multiple expansion, but the predominant driver of the exceptional stock price in Microsoft for the last five years has been earnings.”
Dixon: Microsoft did not miss mobile phones and had good devices in the 2000s
“People say windows, Microsoft missed mobile phones. They didn't miss mobile phones at all. They had mobile phones in the late nineties. They had very good ones in the early 2000.”
McKeon: For-profit corporations struggle to establish widely adopted industry standards
“It's very hard for sort of a for-profit corporation to create a standard that's gonna be widely adopted, because, of course, everyone knows that a lot of value is going to accrue to that corporation, and so you get all these sort of strategic forces that preve…”
Excel is effectively programming and arguably the greatest software ever made
“Most people, when they're using Excel, they're programming and they don't know it. It's possibly the greatest piece of software ever made.”
Morfit: Microsoft still uses ValueAct's executive compensation design
“I looked back at the Microsoft proxy this year, and I was really pleased to see that the basic architecture of what we designed over a decade ago is still in place.”
Morfit: Microsoft traded at eight times earnings in 2013
“So the PC legacy of the company was not what was going to take it forward, and the stock was trading at about eight times earnings.”
Active ETF Structures Defer Capital Gains Taxes for Fund Investors
“The brilliance of the ETF structure led by Vanguard is create a structure that we can own Microsoft. We don't, but we can own Microsoft and Toga. It can double. We could sell Microsoft and the owners of Toga won't pay the capital gains tax until they sell thei…”
Vieth: Overhaul tracks high-value cargo for Apple, Dell, and Pfizer
“Their customers are, I think, high-value goods. So Apple, Dell, Microsoft, Pfizer, Bristol-Myers, some cold storage, where they're Tracking and monitoring the environment of this high value cargo from beginning point to end point.”
Klarman: Baupost told brokers to bring illiquid stakes, not mainstream stocks
“We'd say, look, you don't need to come by, but if you guys ever see on your desk a bond that you've never heard of, or a stock you've never heard of, or a shareholder in a business that wants to move it quickly, we're your call. So don't call us with IBM Insig…”
Grantham: GMO held Microsoft in value fund until exiting by June 2000
“Our claim to fame in our first quant funds is that we owned Microsoft in our value stream in the top decile of value from the day it appeared as a stock that met our size limit until late 99, when it finally got overpriced enough that it drifted into decile tw…”