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 1,939 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
Walthour: NJ Director said State Investment Council opposed minority-owned firms
“And McDonough says to me, Jake, the SIC is not a fan of investing in minority owned firms.”
Grantham: The market bubble will likely break in weeks or months
“So I think this is an indicator, not a certainty, but a strong possibility that we are quite close to the bubble breaking in terms of psychology. Perhaps a matter of weeks or months, not years.”
Peters: Private equity is done and managers will emerge looking terrible
“This is the kind of thing that may make me look foolish. I think private equity is done. I think that it will always be an investment style like it has for over the course of my career. It was just LBO investing when I started, I guess now it's private equity,…”
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: CoreWeave and GPU cloud providers are bleeding heavily from underpricing
“When you're underpricing everything, if you look at CoreWeave and EBS, they're bleeding heavily.
That means they're not covering the cost.
The real test of shortage is when you're priced appropriately.
It's a capitalistic system, so when you subsidize somethin…”
Grantham: South Korea Will Cease Being a Viable State Within 50 Years
“That South Korea cannot be a viable political entity in as little as 4050 years. Cannot.”
Grantham: Capitalism Must Change or Humanity Ceases as Successful Species
“Capitalism will either change, or we will cease to exist as a successful species.”
Kleinman: Semi-liquid PE will fail to deliver a good client experience
“It's not going to give the client, i.e. The wealth client, a good experience in the long run.”
Wolfe: AI infrastructure buildout will destroy hundreds of billions in capital
“On the capital market side, you see hundreds of billions of dollars destroyed of people that play the same game that you did back in 2000 with fiber optic cables.”
Gave: US supply disruptions from tariffs will be as bad as COVID-19
“We saw this kind of discrepancy during COVID, and it took the economies a year to get back on their footing. This time, it's going to be just as bad. I don't see how the economy doesn't grind to a standstill. These strict discrepancies are going to be very uni…”
Gave: US-China negotiations will result in China leaving the Americas and US leaving Asia
“This, I think, will end up being the negotiations with China. China, you get out of the Americas, and we'll get out of Asia. That is a trade that Xi Jinping will be very happy to make.”
Gave: Chinese competition will eliminate profitability across the AI sector
“We also know that when China enters the room, profits walk out, so there's not going to be any profit in AI forever.”
Papic: Europe Will See a Tsunami of LNG Supply Disproving Deindustrialization
“Europe is going to be absolutely drowned in its tsunami wave of LNG supply that will crash on its shores over the next two years. This whole deindustrialization debate is wrong.”
Miller: Overcapitalized renewables will likely destroy multiples of shale capital losses
“I see renewables as just a massively overcapitalized space. It will likely torch capital on multiples of what happened to shale.”
Miller: 100% battery backup for Germany's grid would cost $270T
“And the back of the envelope math says, well, in order for Germany to be a hundred percent renewables plus a hundred percent battery, the battery piece of that equation was 270 trillion dollars.”
Miller: Coal-to-gas shift delivers 2.5x the environmental benefit of gas-to-renewables
“And when you look at the delta between, if I move from a coal plant to a natural gas plant, and a natural gas plant to a renewables plant, That first step has 2.5 times the environmental impact.”
Assaf: S&P 500 passive funds will likely lag good active managers over 5-10 years
“It probably won't do as well, relatively speaking, over the next five to 10 years as it did over the last five to 10 years relative to good active managers. We believe that. We'll see.”
Tepper: Replicate expensive quality funds for 15bps using XLP, XLK, and XLV
“You can basically buy XLP, XLK, and XLV at 15 bibs and replicate with about 95% correlation a lot of these quality funds.”
Sandler: Prosecutors threatened to destroy Princeton Newport unless it aided Milken prosecution
“The prosecutors at the time had told the principals and the lawyers for Princeton Newport that they're going to run over them. They're going to destroy them unless they help them against Michael Milken and another Case that was under investigation at the time,…”
Sernovitz: GP stakes funds bet on excess management fees over outperformance
“If you talk to some of the guys in the GP stakes funds, It's a bet on the excess management fees rather than outperformance.”
Seides: Buyouts underperform public equities after risk and illiquidity adjustments
“He said, in aggregate, buyout investments failed to match public market alternatives. After adjusting for the higher level of risk and the greater degree of illiquidity in buyout transactions, publicly traded equity securities gain a clear advantage.”
Seides: Aggregate venture capital returns fail to compensate for risk
“Over reasonably long periods of time, aggregate venture returns more or less match marketable equity returns, indicating the providers of capital fail to receive compensation for the substantial risk inherent in startup investing.”
Multi-manager hedge fund platforms consume 80% of their gross alpha in fees
“The EROC is terrible. And another way to think about it is, of the total gross alpha, how much do they keep? It's about 80%. We get 20% of the alpha. The alpha's huge. Absolutely huge. But we could never get comfortable with only getting 20%.”
China Will Become Uninvestable If Xi Retains His Current Advisors
“If he stays in power, which it looks like he's going to, and he's got the same people around him, the same advisors, I think China is going to ultimately become an uninvestable market.”
Distressed Russian Assets Will Return 50x Rapidly Upon Any Regime Change
“Just a small amount of investment in those stocks, and some people can retire on it because you're going to make 50 times your money on any regime change in a very quick period of time, so.”
Argentina Might Be the World's Best Performing Market in 2023
“Next year might be the best performing market in the world on the back of that election.”
Dixon: Google and Facebook will become low-growth legacy giants like IBM
“I think they're very likely going to become like IBM and HP and just chugging along and not really doing much new innovative stuff. They'll still be around and they'll still have their services, but I think that their relevance and growth are limited.”
Dixon: a16z owns less than 5% of most Web3 networks
“Generally what we own, contrary to Jack Dorsey and others saying that we own web three, we generally own sub five percent of most of these networks.”
Olaf Carlson-Wee: Every global financial transaction will eventually occur on DeFi
“I really do view it as where every financial transaction in the world will take place.”
Drogen: Bitcoin will not become a global reserve currency or inflation hedge
“The techno libertarians who felt that this could be a new global reserve currency, that it was an inflation hedge, that you could extricate yourself from holding fiat government currency and things like that. I think a lot of people drank that Kool-Aid, and it…”
Libby: Lower-cost ETF equivalents will disrupt traditional venture capital fee structures
“I think that that's going to come to the venture world too. It's been a momentum trade. And so if you're Sequoia or Forerunner or Bessemer, you have services and tools. I think it's going to be hard to prove that you should be getting two in 20 versus an ETF e…”
Gave: As Energy Prices Rise, Europe Will Go Bust
“As the energy price goes up, Europe will go bust.
The only question is at what price?”
Sethi: Startups like Terra and FTX could reach hundreds of billions
“These companies will probably at some point, if they continue to grow at the pace they're growing, could be worth hundreds of billions of dollars.”
Papic: China has peaked as a geopolitical power for the next decade
“So I think that China has peaked as a geopolitical power for the next decade.”
Papic: The Ukraine war will cleave the Western alliance further, not unite NATO
“There's a view out there that this will help NATO unity. And I really don't think so, Ted. I think that this will actually cleave the Western alliance further.”
Hamed predicts Instagram risks obsolescence due to poor creator monetization
“And we think Instagram is really at risk of going away because the creators on Instagram aren't making enough money to actually make good content.”
Samani: Long-term technical and social gravity trends toward one single chain
“Given both the explicit technical costs and then the softer, squishier social developer experience costs, I think gravity trends towards one chain.”
Visser: Interest rates will remain lower forever, pressuring allocators
“My belief has always been that rates would be stuck at low levels. We're still at that space, and I continue to believe that they'll be not only lower for longer, but lower forever, and that's putting more pressure than ever on allocators”
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.”
Jensen: Very high chance humanity fails at superhuman AI development
“We only get one chance to develop an intelligence greater than us, and if you do it wrong, it's the end of things, and there's a very, very good chance we're going to do it wrong, just judging by how rarely we as a species get things right the first time.”
Grantham: African migration to Europe will be society's primary political risk
“So I think it will be stress on those areas, and immigration, and the pressure on Europe of millions of Africans attempting to migrate will be the main political risk that we face, and a real threat to the well-being of society.”
Ariely: Token female leadership appointments make female employees feel worse
“We found that some companies, when they assign women to high positions, The women within these companies feel worse. Why? Because they take it as an indication that the company doesn't really care about them, that they're only doing things to appeal to PR, lik…”
Garcia: Bitcoin will drop to its underlying tech value without government backing
“If governments are not going to embrace it honestly, it should go down to just the technology value of it.”
Paul: 10% Chance Bitcoin Suffers Disabling Attack By 2026
“I put it at maybe 10% over the next five years that there is a successful attack on Bitcoin that effectively renders the network temporarily unusable, but unusable in a way where we don't know when the next attack will be.”
Dixon: Decentralized blockchain communities will build tomorrow's social networks
“A lot of the thesis we have with crypto blockchain is that a similar thing will happen with internet services in the same way that almost all software today is made by a group, a community of people who get together and build something. We think the same thing…”