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 1,245 resolved? a statement only gets an assessment when the public record can support or contradict it. opinions and what-ifs never can, and 39 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
Todd Graves Built Raising Cane's Without Ever Raising Institutional Equity
“He never raised outside equity after this, And some of the boilermakers, like Wild Bill, one of the few, like, angel investors that would put in money to raising canes, and then he also said that he raised money from his bookie.”
Raising Cane's Grew Revenue From $1.5B in 2020 to $4.5B Four Years Later
“So in 2020, the raising canes was doing 1.5 billion in revenue. Four years later, that four and a half billion.”
Raising Cane's Accounted for Post Malone Profit-Sharing as a Marketing Expense
“What was fascinating is the way that Todd thought about this is like, I'm not setting up another entity, right? This is not a separate company. We're operating on a corporate level, the Post Malone Raising Cane's. This is just part of our marketing budget.”
Raising Cane's AUV ranks second in QSRs behind Chick-fil-A at $6.5M
“The average raising canes does about 6.5 million a year in sales. That puts him in an average store basis in his industry. He's in second behind Chick-fil-A for QSRs.”
Raising Cane's Times Square location generated $22M in year one
“They opened up one in times square and that one did twenty two million its first year.”
CAA captured a 75% market share within its first 10 years
“I think it was within, like, the first 10 years of founding of CAA, and they had, like, a 75% market share of their entire industry”
CAA was the first talent agency to package feature films
“We've grown so big enough that we were able to package movies with multiple clients, which was a common practice in television, but not in film. Nobody was doing this in film. CAA was the first to orchestrate the entire development process.”
CAA netted $60 million from Panasonic's $6.5 billion Universal acquisition
“They handed me a colossal check to distribute as I saw fit, a hundred and thirty five million dollars. After paying the bankers and all the consultants, I was left with sixty million dollars for CAA, which would be about a hundred and ten million today.”
Michael Ovitz Captured 75% Talent Agency Market Share Within CAA’s First Decade
“Within the first 10 years of CAA, 10 years after founding the company, they had like something like 75% market share. Of, you know, his industry.”
Berkshire Missed Google Despite Seeing GEICO's $10 Ad Clicks Work
“We were paying 10 dollars a click for something that had a marginal cost to Google of exactly zero. And we saw that the ads were working for us. We could see at Geico how well Google advertising worked, and we just sat there sucking our thumbs.”
In 95 Years, Li Lu Was Munger's Only Outside Fund Manager
“In 95 years. I have given Munger family money to an outsider to run once, once in 95 years. And that is a Li Lu and he has hit it out of the park.”
Bezos: Amazon's Metrics Improved Rapidly While Its Stock Crashed to $6
“I watched the stock fall from 113 dollars to six, but I was also watching all of our internal business metrics, numbers of customers, profit per unit. Every single thing about the business was getting better and fast, even as the stock was dropping.”
Buffett Bought Disney Stock at 31 Cents and Sold at 48 Cents
“Buffett bought Disney stock after meeting Walt Disney in 1966. He paid 31 cents a share. And sold when the stock went to a 48 cents a share.”
Four Brentwood Gas Wells Fully Funded Jerry Jones's Dallas Cowboys Purchase
“So I went over to Brentwood, about 20 or 30 miles from San Francisco, and I bought 25 lots, like I was going to build 25 houses, except I drilled four gas wells, and those four gas wells in 18 months paid me enough money for me to buy the Dallas Cowboys.”
Jerry Jones Struck Oil on His First 15 Consecutive Drilling Attempts
“The group hit their next well, and the next one, and the next. In all, they hit oil in their first
15 wells that they drilled.”
Jerry Jones Made Over $300 Million Selling Arkoma Production in 1987
“In 1987, Jones and his partner sell it for a hundred and seventy five million dollars, which means if you calculate how much money they took out of the business, plus the sales price or Combo production had walked away with more than three hundred million doll…”
NFL Rules Originally Exempted Luxury Suite Revenues From League-Wide Sharing
“According to the NFL rules revenues from the boxes are not shared with other NFL owners the way ticket revenues are.”
Jerry Jones Fired Head Coach Jimmy Johnson After Winning Two Super Bowls
“He winds up firing his friend and his coach after Jimmy Johnson won the second Superbowl and he winds up hiring another one of his friends. It's getting Barry Switzer who lasts a little bit longer, but he was more comfortable playing like a number two role.”
Hess bypassed US shipping laws while simultaneously collecting domestic refinery subsidies
“So the refinery is able to secure foreign refiner status, which allows it to circumvent federal rules that require the use of higher cost U.S. Flagged vessels. When shipping oil to the East coast, while simultaneously at the same time, also receiving subsidies…”
1970s Wallenberg companies employed 40% of Sweden's industrial workforce
“MW's impact on Swedish industry was so substantial that during the 19 seventies, Wallenberg family businesses employed about 40%, a single family, employed about 40% of Sweden's industrial workforce and represented 40% of the total worth of the stock market in…”
Munger considered John D. Rockefeller the greatest entrepreneur of all time
“If you were to ask Charlie Munger and I did, I got to talk to Charlie Munger about this before he died, like who he thought the greatest entrepreneur of all time was. And he would say Rockefeller.”
Marcus Wallenberg Jr.: 'In a Crisis, We Wallenbergs Are Ice Cold'
“MW did not outwardly reveal any sorrow or possible remorse. He told one family member, remember that in a crisis, we Wallenbergs are ice cold.”
Don Valentine Backed Nvidia While Threatening to Kill Jensen Huang
“And yet the end of the meeting, Sequoia decides to invest. And there's a great quote on Don Valentine in this. He goes, against my better judgment, based on what you just told me, obviously it's a crappy pitch. I'm going to give you my money. But if you lose m…”
Jensen Huang Rejected Board Recommendations to Hire a COO
“He's insistent on a flat structure says he steadfastly refused to change his management philosophy. Even when new board members joined and recommended that he hired chief operating officer to reduce his administrative burden. No, thanks. He replied.”
Huang reprimanded staff who based goals on competitors or past performance
“Jensen would reprimand subordinates who set goals. I referred to what the company had already done before, or what the competitors were doing at that moment. As he saw it, he needed to prevent that kind of eternal rot. That he observed at other companies.”
Nvidia Used Simultaneous Design Teams to Ship Chips Every Six Months
“NVIDIA would split the design team into three groups. The first would design a new chip architecture while the other two worked in parallel to the first to develop faster derivatives Based on the new chip. What is that? Why? Why would you do that? Because this…”
Jensen Huang Directly Manages Nvidia's Product, Sales, and Investor Relations
“Jensen has run NVIDIA for over three decades. And the way he's done that is he manages the company directly. He involves himself to reap deeply in product decisions, sales, negotiations, investor relations, and more.”
Nvidia Repackaged Flawed High-End Chips to Defend Against Low-End Competitors
“Jensen saw that Nvidia could stop throwing away parts that failed quality tests. They failed quality tests. If you're building a Ferrari, but not if you're building, you know, a Ford fusion, right? So true. These parts were not suitable for the company's Ferra…”
Hetty Green bailed out New York City multiple times
“So on more than one occasion, Hedy as a single individual bailed out the city of New York.”
Hetty Green built a $100 million fortune by only investing trust income
“She's going to become the richest woman in America and maybe the richest woman, self-made woman in a, in the world, not by investing the principle of her family's fortune, but by investing the investment income. She turned, she's going to turn a yearly cash fl…”
Brad Jacobs sold his road rental businesses at a $500M loss
“We ended up selling those road rental companies at about a half a billion dollar loss because it was the best way forward under those circumstances.”
XPO's contrarian $2B stock buyback generated a $4B profit
“A couple of years later, those two billion dollars of shares we brought back, we bought back, ended up being worth six Billion dollars, giving them a profit on that one transaction of four billion dollars.”
United Rentals acquired Wynne Systems to access industry-wide macroeconomic data
“Owning win accomplished two things. One, we had an industry-best platform that we can continue to develop internally for our own use, and the acquisition gave us access to aggregated, anonymized data on macro trends across, across the industry.”
United Rentals reached $1B revenue in thirteen months; Hertz took 37 years
“Hertz did this, and they built up a national equipment rental chain to about a billion dollars of annual revenue over the course of 37 years. United Rentals did that in 13 months.”
Most value created by Brad Jacobs' companies flowed to external stakeholders
“The great majority of the tens of billions of dollars of value that my teams and I have created Have flowed outside of my companies.”
Zara Takes Under 15 Days From Trend Detection to Store Hangers
“Zara's main advantage is an astonishing ability to detect fashion trends, assimilate them, make them a reality on the hanger at a bargain price inside of a store that's conveniently located all in less than 15 days.”
Ortega believed full vertical integration could cut middle margins by 70-80%
“He was convinced. That if he managed to complete the cycle, meaning completely integrated, he could reduce the margins by between 70 and 80%, which would clearly affect the price the end consumer had to pay for each garment.”
Senra: Over half of Zara's production comes from proximity manufacturing
“So Zara also produces in those countries, but more than half of Zara's production comes from what they call proximity.”
Inditex Almost Acquired Sephora Before LVMH Bought It
“They almost bought Sephora before LVMH buys it.”
American railroads generated twice the US federal government's revenue by 1885
“So by 1885, railroads brought in twice the revenue than the federal government did.”
Railroad companies owned more than ten percent of all US land
“Railroaders were the largest private landholders in the country. They owned more than 10% of the land in the United States.”
James J. Hill turned a bankrupt railroad highly profitable within one year
“The line showed net profits by the end of the year, well above 500,000 dollars. That is an 1878 dollars.”
Elon Musk personally interviewed SpaceX's first 3,000 employees
“Musk made hiring a priority. He personally met with every single person the company hired through the first 3000 employees.”
Legacy aerospace launch contracts billed the government for delays plus a fee
“When the military awarded a national security launch contract to Lockheed or Boeing, they signed a cost plus agreement where any delays were billed to the government. Plus a fee.”
By 2023, the US held 54% of global commercial space launch revenues
“In 2023, the U S had a 54% share of global commercial launch revenues with space X's Falcon nine responsible for the bulk of these.”
SpaceX offered $6M orbital rocket launches while competitors charged $26M to $28M
“At this time it would cost between 26 and twenty eight million dollars per launch. SpaceX winds up being able to do this for six million dollars.”
Sam Zell: Tribune Company Lost $50M in Cash Flow Last Year
“This company lost fifty million dollars of cashflow last year, and you never would have known if you talked to anyone around here.”
Sam Zell Made a 400x Return on His Chicago Bulls Investment
“He gets invited to buy into the Chicago Bulls a few years. I think it was two years before they drafted Michael Jordan. And so if I remember correctly, he said something like, you know, the annual div, he has to do nothing for that, right? He just has like the…”