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
Mike Agassi gave ten-year-old Andre speed before a national tennis tournament
“Sure enough, at the Nationals, my father gives me a pill. Hold out your hand, he says. This will help you. Take it. He puts a pill in my palm. Tiny, white, and round.”
High IQ is the CEO trait most correlated with organizational success
“The CEO trait most closely correlated with organizational success is a high IQ.”
Steve Jobs Fired Two Apple Board Members For Never Disagreeing
“In fact, Ed Catmull told this great story where Steve was talking about that he had fired two people from Apple's board, and the reason Steve gave Ed surprised Ed, and Steve said, is because they didn't ever disagree with me.”
DeepMind Employees Had Google-Wide Access While Google Staff Was Barred From DeepMind
“People that worked at DeepMind could get into any Google office globally, but people that worked at Google were barred from DeepMind's premises.”
Google DeepMind Closed Technical Gap with OpenAI Within Two Years
“Less than two years after the messy shotgun marriage that created Google DeepMind, Demis' team had closed the technical gap.”
Dietrich Mateschitz threatened an unauthorized Russian biographer with having kneecaps broken
“There was another potential biographer, this Russian author that tried to start writing a biography, an unauthorized biography on Matashitz, and Matashitz threatened to have his kneecaps broken. He didn't like that the author was going to, like, his hometown. …”
Jensen Huang has 60 direct reports and skips one-on-ones
“Jensen has 60 direct reports and he doesn't do one-on-one meetings.”
Jensen Huang predicted Nvidia's average selling prices would uniquely rise
“He said that Nvidia would be a unique semiconductor company where products average selling prices rise. We are going to be the only guy where ASPs go up over time when everyone else's ASPs will go down, he said.”
Prosecutors alleged John DeLorean and Colin Chapman split millions in UK funds
“They alleged that DeLorean had pocketed 8.5 million of the government fee while Chapman had taken eight million for himself.”
An Australian report found China leads in 30 of 45 emerging technologies
“He says this report was published in Australia. There was a survey of roughly 45 of the most important emerging technologies from quantum computing to solar power cells, to various areas in biotechnology, and the Chinese led in 30 of these areas.”
Citadel hired Enron's entire quant team post-bankruptcy and made $30 billion
“Now, the great part of this story is I hired the entire leadership team of the quantitative research effort at Enron, all the people who actually knew how the place worked, and we've made thirty billion dollars in commodities since then.”
Berkshire operates with no HR, legal, IR, or PR departments
“We have no human relations department, no legal department, no investor relations, no public relations. We don't have any of that. We've got a bunch of all-stars out there running businesses. We just asked them to mail the money to Omaha.”
Berkshire refuses to sell businesses unless they drain cash endlessly
“And like one thing that they bring up over and over again is in their wholly owned businesses, unless it's going to completely drain a bunch of money, they're not going to sell them. Even if, you know, they can say, Oh, we're, we used to make 15%. Now we make …”
Jerry Jones Secured a Gas Contract Paying Nine Times Prior Producer Rates
“The agreement that he signs with the company that his friends is CEO of, it allows Jones to sell gas to Arkansas, Louisiana gas company, which is also known as ArcLaw at a price that was far higher than what the utility was paying others in the field. So he ma…”
Jensen Huang Manages 60 Direct Reports but Refuses One-on-One Meetings
“Jensen's famous or infamous, the fact that he has 60 direct reports and he refuses to do one-on-one.”
Jensen Huang Criticizes Employees Publicly So the Entire Company Learns
“Jensen does not believe, you know, there's this maximum like praise publicly, criticize privately. No, he does not. He criticizes publicly so that the entire organization can learn from a single person's mistake.”
Kobe Bryant vowed his post-basketball career must surpass his NBA achievements
“Kobe mentions this in that interview with Alex Rodriguez, where he says, you know, when he tells people that if the next 20 years of his life isn't better and he doesn't achieve more than the last 20 years, he would consider that a failure.”
Duveen engineered the National Gallery to inflate prices and clear wall space.
“By getting Andrew Mellon to donate his collection to it, the National Gallery was the perfect front for Duveen. In one gesture, his clients avoided taxes, cleared wall space for new purchases, and reduced the numbers of paintings on the market, maintaining the…”
Mateschitz threatened to break the kneecaps of an unauthorized biographer
“There was another potential biographer, this Russian author that tried to start writing a biography, an unauthorized biography on Madraschitz and Madraschitz threatened to have his kneecaps broken.”
Psychiatrist David Shaffer claims his ex-wife Anna Wintour is incapable of empathy
“Her ex-husband, whose name's David Schaefer, he's the psychiatrist. He's been on record. He says that a lot of people debate, like, does Anna have the ability to empathize with other people? And he says very clearly that Anna is not capable of empathy.”
Jobs regularly noted Apple products end up in landfills while Pixar films endure
“He used to say regularly that as brilliant as Apple products were, eventually they all ended up in landfills. Pixar movies, on the other hand, would live on forever.”
Cameron Predicted Avatar Would Make Fox Executives 'All the Fucking Money'
“I said, I think this movie is going to make all the fucking money, and when it does, it's going to be too late for you to love the film.”
Earl Woods used military POW psychological techniques on 12-year-old Tiger
“Earl put him through what he called Woods' finishing school. He would use psychological warfare and prisoner of war techniques that he had once taught to soldiers. Earl broke down his son in an attempt to toughen him up.”
Apple never ran a single A/B test on the original iPhone software
“At Apple, we never would have dreamed of doing that, and we never staged any AB test for any of the software on the iPhone.”
Kobe Bryant: Studied referee handbook to exploit court blind spots
“I made a point of reading the referee's handbook. One of the rules I gleaned from that was that each referee has a designated slot where he's supposed to be on the floor. If the ball, for instance, is in place W, referees X, Y, and Z each have an area of the c…”
Teledyne never made another material acquisition or issued shares after 1969
“From this point on, the company never made another material purchase and never issued another share of stock.”
Teledyne had under 50 HQ staff for 40,000 employees
“At headquarters, there were fewer than 50 people in a company with over 40,000 total employees and no human resource or investor relations departments.”
Munger Called Henry Singleton the Smartest Person He Ever Knew
“Munger said Henry Singleton was the smartest single human being I've ever known in my entire life.”
Merchant Banking Dynasties Built Fortunes Through Gold Smuggling and Blockade Running
“How the Rothschilds, the Barings, in many cases, they're like smuggling gold, or illegally transferring materials through like blockades during wars. There's all kinds, they were cutthroats. That's how all the great houses were built”
Apple's core design team had 16 people compared to Samsung's 1,000
“There's 16 odd designers focusing on refining and improving Apple's products and manufacturing processes. By comparison, Samsung has a thousand designers working in 34 research centers around the world. Apple had 16 in one spot.”
Jobs and Perot Struck Secret Side Deal to Sell NeXT Hardware
“Steven Ross has struck a second secret deal. It would never appear in any press release or regulatory filing. They didn't even write the terms down to sell the next computer. Ross was willing to mobilize his high level government networks and his sales force f…”
NeXT Team Used Channel Stuffing to Inflate Sales Figures to Jobs
“The team reported sales figures by determining the number of units given to distributors, not sales to final customers. Distributors didn't have to pay right away. They got the machines on credit. Next then immediately counted these as sales, even though no mo…”
BeOS Founder Brought No Laptop or Presentation to Crucial Apple Pitch
“The founder of B walks in and he pursued a different approach. He hadn't brought anyone else from his team. He wasn't carrying a laptop. In fact, he had prepared no presentation whatsoever because the two teams had been kept separate.”
A Single DeepMind Team Used More Compute Than Google's Entire Gmail Network
“In some weeks, a single research team at DeepMind Might gobble up more computational resources than Google's worldwide Gmail network, which had nine hundred million users.”
SpaceX designed Dragon's docking mechanism using off-the-shelf bike shocks
“The Dragon's capsule docking mechanism was reinvented from off-the-shelf bike shocks And catalog parts instead of adopting NASA's existing design.”
NASA found SpaceX developed Falcon 9 for a fraction of legacy costs
“A NASA study found SpaceX developed Falcon nine for roughly four hundred and forty million. They estimated the same work with traditional contractors would have cost three to 10 times that amount.”
SpaceX runs separate risk profiles for Dragon, Falcon 9, and Starship
“The crucial distinction is between development and operations. SpaceX runs both, but with completely different risk profiles. So for the Dragon, it carries crew. It can never fail. So there's large margins of safety, there's exhaustive testing, there's conserv…”
Gwynne Shotwell convinced NASA and the Pentagon to accept standardized rocket launches
“She made it so the world's most conservative buyers, NASA and the Pentagon would accept a radical new model of standardization.”
Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang prefers to torture people into greatness
“There's a line from the founder of Nvidia, Jensen Wong. He said that he doesn't like to give up on people. He'd rather torture them into greatness.”
Dietrich Mateschitz bought an Austrian tabloid purely to keep himself out
“He's the richest man in Austria, right? And there's a society magazine. So like, you know, I don't, I guess we'd call it like kind of like a tabloid or like a gossip magazine in the States, but he actually buys it. He buys this magazine just so he will not app…”
Senra: Mateschitz rejected profit maximization as the primary corporate goal
“If someone says to him that the primary goal of a company is to maximize profit, he simply declares that to be incorrect. He thinks longer term and more broadly than his competitors.”
Rockefeller's wealth grew more during his retirement than his active career
“What's crazy is Rockefeller's wealth wealth grows more in retirement than it did when he was active. And it did this because he never sold his stock.”
Standard Oil secretly funded patent litigation to financially bleed a rival
“Standard Oil had secretly approached Tweedle and told them that they will cover all the legal costs when Tweedle gets sued for patent infringement, which indeed happens. They then purposely drag the case through the court slowly to bleed the smaller company. E…”
Rockefeller routinely bribed politicians and paid off critical journalists
“So Rockefeller would buy politicians and he would make sure that they stayed bought. When the media wrote critical articles about standard oil, Rockefeller would buy off the reporters in the media too.”
Oracle Slashed Its Global Product Pricing Staff From 200 to Under 10
“We had about 200 people around the world involved in analyzing and reanalyzing, setting and resetting prices. It costs us a fortune in duplication of effort. We were competing against ourselves. It was embarrassing. Now we have less than 10 people working on p…”
Ellison Avoids One-on-One Meetings to Ensure Shared Situational Awareness
“Ellison does not like doing one-on-ones with his direct reports. He prefers communicating as a group so everyone knows what's going on.”