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 13 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
Founders bluffed about an investor's interest to secure a meeting with him
“We said in, in that interview in La Presse that he was interested in buying us, and he then read it, and then had his office contact us a few days later and said he wants to meet you guys.”
Founders faked a Village Voice lawsuit to justify rebranding as Vice
“We told the world that we were being sued by the Village Voice, and that's why we had to change the name to Vice.”
Vice accidentally exposed fugitive John McAfee's location via unscrubbed photo metadata
“There's the one, the McAfee story, I don't know if you remember that one the guy who did the He was the guy who did the antivirus software, he was, like, on the run from the police a couple years ago? Exactly, where we kind of embedded with him, and released a…”
Shane Smith settled Vice's apparel debts for ten cents on the dollar
“We owed all this money to these Italian, like, fashion companies who were manufacturing our clothes, and Shane went and took meetings with all of them, and figured out how to reduce the debt. So he's like, well, I know you want 200,000. I've got 20. Take it or…”
Early Vice advertisers were given total freedom over their purchased pages
“Our view towards advertising, if you buy that page of advertising, you own that page, you can do whatever you want with it.”
Founders secured a $1 million valuation on a single piece of paper
“We pulled it from the air and came up with this number, somehow justified that it was a million bucks, and he read it. It was all on one piece of paper. It said the price of vice. He read it, and he said, that's a lot of money, and then he signed it, and they …”
Vice pitched its first MTV video project as 'Jackass meets 60 Minutes'
“We took a meeting with MTV, and they said, if we gave you money to make a DVD, what would you do? And we said it would be, like, Jackass meets 60 Minutes. And that worked.”
Vice founders briefly held $44 million in paper wealth before the crash
“Yeah, and like we did a stock trade, you know, our shares for his company, which was called NormalNet, and they're like, you're worth forty-four million dollars now.”
Vice launched using small loans and computers from the founders' parents
“I borrowed five grand from my parents. Gavin borrowed five grand from his parents, and Shane got 5000 dollars worth of computers from his dad. His dad worked in, you know, IT or something, and so it was with that, you know, 10,000 dollars Canadian that we star…”
Vice's co-founders supported themselves on government welfare while starting the magazine
“Well, we were on welfare.”
Vice Media ultimately reached 2,000 employees and a $4 billion valuation
“I didn't know that this is how it was going to manifest itself, and that we would employ, you know, 2000 people, and be valued at over four billion dollars, but yeah, it's pretty amazing.”