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 199 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
Helsing: AI took full control of Gripen fighter jet in dogfight test
“Last year we flew a real fighter jet and we flew the Saab Gripen over the Baltic Sea. And when I say we, our AI did and took full control of the plane in air combat against and another Gripen, which was human controlled. And so we flew three air combat scenari…”
Kalanick: Uber never passed anti-competitor regulations or donated to political campaigns
“We had never at Uber, we never
Got a regulation passed that would hurt a competitor.
We never would do that.
That's just not how we rolled.
We never donated to a campaign.
Ever.
To try to get something passed.”
Palmer Luckey was pushed out and fired from Facebook for supporting Trump
“This was when he was kind of persona non grata in tech and mainstream for supporting Trump and not supporting Hillary while he was at Facebook. So it was pretty soon after he was pushed out, fired for political beliefs at Facebook, which is kind of mind blowin…”
Ovitz: AI music platforms Suno and Udio construct songs using copyrighted IP
“We've seen it, what's going on with Suno and Udio, where they're taking IP that other people own, even 10 seconds of it, and Constructing custom-made songs.”
A Take-Two Competitor Once Faced 500 Sexual Harassment Claims
“So one of our competitors at one point had 500 sexual harassment claims at their company.”
Spiegel: Studies prove Snapchat boosts well-being unlike Instagram and TikTok
“What's fascinating is when Snapchat is studied separately from social media, there's study after study, independent studies that show that Snapchat makes a positive impact on people's friendships, on their wellbeing, that is fundamentally Different from social…”
Armstrong voted against building USDC before it generated ~$800M in revenue
“There's actually been examples where I voted no on something and it turned out to be a massive success. And an example of that is like USDC, which is the stable coin. I actually, Embarrassed to admit, I voted no on that idea. Luckily, somebody else funded it o…”
Armstrong: Around 300 Coinbase employees staged a walkout over BLM stance
“This erupted in Slack and basically 300 employees did a walkout. In protest.”
Reil: Banks grouped defense in the same bucket as porn and gambling
“Back then the defense of a country or of a democratic society was grouped for banks in the same bucket as pornography and gambling and smoking.”
Altman: AI is currently solving novel math problems and making discoveries
“We're finally at the moment where AI is solving novel math problems. It is discovering other stuff. It is, you know, you can argue about how good or not, I would say not very good, but it is writing poetry.”
Kalanick: Chinese sovereign funds poured billions into global rivals to drain Uber
“And what happened is the sovereign wealth their sovereign wealth funds in China started pouring billions of dollars into my competitors, Uber's competitors in different regions, so that they would subsidize in those regions and drain my resources.”
Kalanick: Automating a gold mine increases annual output by 20%
“Because we can go to a gold mine right now, go to a gold mine CEO and ask whether he wants 20% more gold per year. Why? Because when you automate it, that's the output.”
Kalanick: Post-departure NYC regulations turned Uber into an expensive taxi system
“And if people are taking Ubers today in New York and wondering why it's so expensive, And why it's getting more unreliable. It's because after I left Uber, they started passing a bunch of laws that are turning Uber into the taxi system. They've, they have a li…”
DHH: Twenty out of sixty employees resigned after 2021 workplace politics ban
“We're a small company, 60 people so at the time, 20 took the offer. 20 left. Like, that's almost a third of the company that decided to leave in that moment”
Glyman: Ramp Was First to Unify Corporate Cards and Expense Systems
“It's part of why we're the first in the industry to go look at expenses and say, like, why are there two systems involved in buying every single thing you do?”
Stoute: Independent music has outgrown major labels in frontline new release market share
“So I guess the good news out of all of this, since we started United Masses, is that the independent music space, and there's a lot of us, have outgrown on the front line The major labels. So if you talk about new releases, market share, the independents have …”
ZMC Executed a Hostile Takeover of Take-Two Without Personal Capital
“The way we did this deal has never happened before, and I'm pretty certain it will never happen again, because we essentially did a hostile takeover with no money.”
AppLovin restructured a $1B Chinese buyout into debt to pass CFIUS
“We ended up doing it so that instead of their billion dollars being an equity investment for 70% where they would get control, which is what triggers this scrutiny, we ended up pivoting it to a billion dollar convertible note that if on conversion we pay them …”
Foroughi: AppLovin's $6B buyback generated $50B to $60B in value
“And so for the following 18 months, we ended up deploying somewhere around six billion dollars of buybacks of our own capital, and we leveraged some to buy back shares in the company. And over time, that ended up creating somewhere in the neighborhood of 50, s…”
Spiegel: Snap funded 12 years of smart glasses R&D without VC patience
“What's very unique about Snapchat is we've been able to do that now for, you know, we've invested in glasses for 12 years. We've been able to very consistently invest in a way that no VC would ever in a million years support.”
Armstrong: Coinbase paid zero fines and won SEC lawsuit
“Oh, and I should mention we won that case. It was, so we didn't pay a single dollars, a single dollar in fines. We didn't have to change a single thing about the company. The judge Actually, the SEC withdrew it under this new administration, and several judges…”
Armstrong: Five percent of Coinbase staff took exit package after blog post
“We put out the post, and I said, anybody who's not aligned with this new direction, we'll give you a good severance package. You can fill out this form and accept it by Friday or something. And five percent of the company took the exit package.”
Armstrong: NewLimit successfully reprogrammed human cells to restore function
“We've demonstrated successfully programming human cells for the first time to restore function.”
Fried: Moving 37signals Off the Cloud Will Save Roughly $10 Million
“David wrote this great article about like getting off the cloud. It's going to save us something like ten million bucks and whatever it is.”
Iovine: Spotify is worth $150B, double the entire record industry combined
“Of course, Spotify is worth a hundred and fifty billion, and the entire record industry is worth half that together.”
Iovine: Music streaming economics broke by copying Apple's 70/30 download split
“If you look at those deals are reflective of the iTunes download market, 70, 30. That was the same business as the download market. So they just copied that, which is not a great bit model for that. Why? Because you have Not enough money in the streaming servi…”
Graves: Raising Cane's Is Valued at Over $20 Billion on 20x EBITDA
“We're trading on, not trading, we don't trade, but we're valued on over 20 times EBITDA, those company restaurants. Go into that. So the profitability that comes into all of it gets on that, that higher multiple. That's why we have the twenty billion plus valu…”
Reil: AI algorithms already enable robust GPS-free drone navigation on frontlines
“Pretty much the whole frontline is GPS jammed, so you can't use your GPS receiver, so you need to find a different way to navigate and know where you are. You either do that with a human trying to recognize where they are, just almost like a pilot of a plane d…”
Altman: ChatGPT has reached one billion users in under four years
“ChatGPT has only been out, like, less than four years. A billion people use it.”
Kalanick: Uber spent tens of millions monthly fighting Didi in China
“So we were spending, let's say tens of millions of dollars a month fighting DD in all these cities.”
Malka: OnePay powers all mobile payments and credit products at Walmart
“If you want to pay with your phone today, the only way to pay at Walmart is with OnePay. If you want to have a debit card, it's the only way you want to loan from Klarna. It goes through OnePay. If you want an installment loan, you want a credit card, it goes …”
DHH: Shopify Uses Autonomous AI Agents to Complete Work and Open PRs
“River, the current system that they have for you. Employing agents to do work and open PRs and everything. Like, everyone is working towards that. Shopify is already there”
Ross: Porting AlphaGo to TPUs jumped its ELO by hundreds of points
“AlphaGo running on GPUs had an ELO score of about 3200. Lease it all was about 35, 35 50. And I might be getting the first digit wrong. It might be 2000 instead of 3000. But like, you know, it was more than 200. And then when put on on TPUs, it actually went t…”
Devin scored 13 percent on SWE-bench against a 3 percent baseline
“At the time the best known was like Three or four percent or something like that, but obviously, yeah, 13% still means you fail, you know, 87% of the time.”
LeBron James rejected a $10M Reebok signing bonus in high school
“His wife wrote a personal check for ten million dollars, and the driver, when we landed, had the check. We went to the meeting, And Paul says, LeBron, I know, you know, a hundred million dollars, you know, Adidas is gonna offer that when you go see them next, …”
Stoute: Ryan Coogler negotiated an unprecedented rights reversion deal with Warner for 'Sinners'
“The rights of that movie reverts back to him. So what he did when he negotiated his deal with Warner to put out Sinners, which he wrote and directed, was that he would only put it with a studio that would allow him to get the rights back in a certain period of…”
Stoute: Jay-Z wrote Snoop Dogg's parts on 'Still D.R.E.'
“Every line Snoop says in the hook is fucking Jay wrote. I was like, this guy's different. He wrote Snoop's parts on that song.”
Catmull: Steve Jobs acted as Pixar's outside corrective force
“We had to get another outside force, and the outside force was Steve Jobs.”
Catmull: Jobs refused to renew Pixar deal while Eisner ran Disney
“Michael Eisner was still the CEO, and he would not have continued with Michael Eisner. So, since we were getting into the contract, he started discussions with other studios which would mean, you know, them doing the distribution.”
Ivanka Trump: 40% of US produce is plowed under for cosmetic reasons
“Planet Harvest, which I co-founded with my good friend, Melissa Ackerman, that's helping find use for the 40% of fruits and vegetables we grow in this country every single year that don't even make it out of the field. They get plowed under because they don't …”
Chobani sources all yogurt fruit from Ivanka Trump's Planet Harvest venture
“So companies from Chobani, now all of the fruit that we find in their beautiful yogurt products and smoothies, It's all sourced by Planet Harvest from small and medium farmers. That would have been a hundred percent waste. It would have been tilled under.”
BMG Sold Its Take-Two Stake for $14M Right Before GTA Released
“So we sell the stock in the open market for, wait for it, fourteen million dollars. So a month later, this public company launches the first property that we had completed into the market.”
Zelnick Won an 88% Shareholder Vote to Take Over Take-Two
“The general counsel comes into the meeting room that we're in, and he says, well, we don't have the final vote, but we have a provisional vote. You have 88%. He said, so will you accept that, or do you want us to keep counting? I said, we'll accept that. And t…”
White: Early UFC Was Banned From Pay-Per-View While Porn Was Allowed
“At that time it wasn't allowed on pay-per-view. You as a grown adult didn't have the right to purchase it on pay-per-view porn. Was on pay-per-view. Okay. But the UFC was not allowed on pay-per-view.”
White: We Sold the UFC for $4B in 2016 Without a TV Deal
“We sell for four point oh two five billion, right? No TV deal. We're coming up to the end of our Fox deal. We have no TV deal. Nothing.”
White: UFC Media Rights Scaled From $35M to a $7.7B Mega-Deal
“Spike, thirty-five million dollar deal. Fox, hundred million dollar deal. ESPN, three billion dollar deal. And now here we are, 7.7 for seven years.”
White: I Produced a Fully AI-Generated Commercial for the White House
“Well, the response was I did a whole commercial in AI, ah, after that for the White House.”
Foroughi: AppLovin bought 14 to 15 game studios to train its ad models
“So actually like the business from KKR investment to IPO ended up looking wildly different than an advertising business because we ended up with like 14, 15 different game studios across all categories of gaming that we ended up owning so that we can not only …”