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 45 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
McLean: Elon Musk has repeatedly lied to secure funding for his vision
“That's certainly true of Elon Musk. Wherever you believe he sits in that spectrum, when you look at his history, he's for sure lied at many points in time in order to keep funding his dream.”
McLean: Private equity fracking returns relied on a greater fool theory
“For a long time private equity could get a return on the greater fool theory. They would fund these fracking entrepreneurs who would go out and drill wells, and then they would sell that to a publicly traded company, and the private equity guys would make a to…”
McLean: Fracking executives extract wealth while leaving society cleanup liabilities
“It's another case of capitalism gone wrong, and that a lot of people at the top of these companies have made their billions, and walked away from it, and then the rest of society is left to clean up the mess, because the companies are bankrupt, and don't have …”
McLean: Employees cannot objectively perceive wrongdoing when their pay depends on it
“If you're inside a company and your pay depends on that company, that's that great Upton Sinclair quote, right? You can never tell a man anything if his wallet depends on him not hearing it. That's something like that. If you're inside a company and everybody …”
McLean: Most of Enron's transactions were legal fraud adhering to accounting rules
“Most of what Enron did was actually perfectly legal. So I coined this term once, which I love, which is a legal fraud. And that's what Enron was, because most of the transactions they engaged in, even the ones that appeared to be the most problematic, actually…”
McLean: Valeant pitched zero R&D and justified price hikes against liver transplants
“Their whole promise to investors was, we don't need to do R&D. So it wasn't an argument of, we're gonna take the profits we're making from this and invent new drugs that are gonna save people's lives or figure out a better drug to take, to treat this disease. …”
McLean: Modern capitalism lets top executives reap rewards while shifting risk downward
“I do think either accidentally or deliberately our system has evolved to one in which the people who should be taking the really big risks and then reaping the really big rewards, it's turned into a system where those people can reap the really big rewards, bu…”
McLean: Google and Facebook's models will be impaired if journalism dies
“Google and Facebook, right? They're siphoning up most of the advertising dollars that used to go to journalism, and yet Google and Facebook, it will deeply impair their business models if journalism ceases to function, right?”
McLean: Stock performance does not rationally prove Elon Musk is a genius
“In the Tesla debate, one of the main things Tesla bulls say is, look at the stock. So, because the stock has done so well, that proves that Elon Musk is a genius and that our belief is, is right. I mean, obviously, it proves nothing of the sort, right? It's a …”
McLean: Silicon Valley mistakenly excuses executive character flaws as Steve Jobs-like genius
“Part of what's gone wrong in modern Silicon Valley is that everybody believes he's the rule, right? So all sorts of character flaws have become forgivable, because hey, look at Steve Jobs, and look what he did. And flaws have almost become a good thing, becaus…”
McLean: Valeant's Pearson Weaponized 'Micro Truths' About Drug Profit Growth
“So Mike Pearson, right, had that argument, I'm gonna get it slightly wrong, but he said that most of Valiant's profit growth was not coming from increasing prices on drugs, it was coming from volume. And that turned out to be true if you looked at only their t…”
McLean: Fracking is financially unviable due to steep year-one well decline
“A fracked well declines really sharply after the first year, which means in order to keep production levels up, you have to keep reinvesting. So you're on this capital treadmill, and that's why the industry has not been financially viable, because you have to …”
McLean: Fortune's Enron takedown originated from short seller Jim Chanos' tip
“But this piece, nonetheless, which started when a guy named Jim Chanos, who many people know, he's one of the longest-running short sellers out there, came to me and said, how does Enron make money? Tell me if you can figure it out.”
McLean: Credit markets doubted Enron while equity investors remained total believers
“There were a lot of smart people who were short the stock for a while, and even though the information, their skepticism traveled in a very small circle, the broader circle of people didn't really understand how, how the company made money, and there was this …”
McLean: Enron's hyped broadband division was conceptually Netflix before its time
“Enron's really hyped business was this business called Enron Broadband, which it's an interesting aside. It really was Netflix before its time.”
McLean: Corporate management and long investors are as biased as short sellers
“Company management is biased. The analyst who has a buy rating on the stock is biased if for no other reason than confirmation bias, right? And portfolio managers who own the stock are biased, and so yes, a short seller is biased too, but everyone is.”
McLean: Companies that make enemies on the way up face vicious reversals
“But I think about this a lot, that if a company makes a lot of enemies as it's on its way up, you have to be a lot more skeptical about that company than about an average company, because when the tide turns, it's going to turn viciously.”
McLean: Shareholder Primacy Has Narrowed Executive Ethics to Profit Alone
“As the focus has been on shareholder value and profits above all, it's just narrowed the prism through which executives see the world, and it's become very tempting to say, well, if it makes money, then it's good.”
McLean: Fake corporate altruism is almost worse than single-minded profiteering
“That belief that a company has a broader purpose can become a cover, an excuse for a lot of bad behavior too, right? Because fake altruism is almost worse than single-minded profiteering, right?”
McLean: White-collar crime stems from ego and rationalization, not deliberate malice
“I've really come to believe that very few white-collar crimes or stories of business gone wrong are done by people who deliberately set out to deceive other people. Usually it's this odd mixture of Rationalization. Arrogance. Some greed, yes, but usually greed…”
McLean: Lloyd Blankfein Told FT He Did Not Consider Himself Well-Off
“The Financial Times did a really good interview with Lloyd Blankfein, the former CEO of Goldman Sachs. It was a couple of months ago, maybe a month ago, and Blankfein said in that interview that he didn't consider himself particularly well off.”
McLean: Wealth Accumulation Beyond Basic Needs Serves Ego, Not Utility
“Money over a certain point, if it's your goal, is for sure not in service of material goods or making your life nicer. It's just about comparing your balance to those of other people so you can feel bigger than they are, and so that's what I mean by greed in t…”
McLean: Many visionaries lie to keep investors funding their dreams
“Because a lot of visionaries from Thomas Edison through have lied at various points in time and have said things that weren't true in order to keep their employees and their investors believing in them so they can keep getting the money to fund their dreams.”
McLean: Inevitable corporate frauds are the price society pays for world-changing ambition
“And I think that's the inevitable frauds and blow ups are the price we pay. And I think it's good to have these big, grand, ambitious plans. Life would be really boring if you didn't have that. And I think reflexive cynicism about this sort of thing is just as…”
McLean: Hyped digital media models like BuzzFeed and Vice failed to work
“Most of the new business models that have come along and been hyped for a period of time have proven not to work any better than the old business models, whether it was Vice or BuzzFeed or what Vox or whatever else has come along that people have said, this is…”
Bethany McLean: Good journalism is transparency and honesty, not infallibility
“I don't think it's necessarily getting it right, because I think really provocative stories may prove to be wrong. I think it's transparency and intellectual honesty, so being clear about what the facts are and where things are coming from, so that people can …”
McLean: Viable renewables will push oil into secular decline and trigger bankruptcies
“And it may bounce up and down, but it goes into secular decline. And then that means bankruptcies of fossil fuel companies, and I don't think we're being thoughtful about then what those companies obligations are for cleanup afterwards.”
McLean: Shifting to renewables will dramatically upend global geopolitics
“I have no idea other than that it's going to upend everything. If a nation's wealth and standing in the world is no longer dictated by geology, but rather by the innovation of its people, and which is renewables, how does that change geopolitics? I mean, drama…”
McLean: Enron investors ignored business fundamentals to chase 20% earnings growth
“So many people who were investors in the company Couldn't answer the basic question, how does this company make money? They just wanted the 20% earnings growth that would spit out the bottom line, and the stock price jump that would happen when the company met…”
McLean: Skepticism in Business Stays Within Small Circles
“In the business world, you can't, because skepticism about business tends to travel in a very small circle. Companies won't speak ill of their competitors, at least not, not publicly, or very rarely will they. Employees can't speak publicly without being fired…”
McLean: The business world is emotional and biased toward belief
“There's this idea that the business world is hard and cold and rational, and it's not, it's incredibly emotional. And everybody is biased toward belief because most people stand to make money. If a stock goes up”
McLean: Journalists criticized her for taking tips from Enron short sellers
“Back in the day when I wrote about Enron, even other journalists said to me, well, you took a tip from a short seller. How, how could you do that?”
McLean: As an Enron employee, I probably would have been a believer
“And if I had ended up at Enron, would I have been a whistleblower, or would I have been a believer? And I like to think the former, but I suspect the truth is probably the latter”
McLean: Valeant's wrongdoing was drug price hikes, not hidden accounting
“The ways in which they were different, I don't think the substance of the Valiant story was accounting misrepresentation the way it was with Enron. You could actually see pretty clearly that what Valiant was doing with its numbers. There were a lot more of Enr…”
McLean: Unlike Enron, Valeant attracted smart money like Sequoia and Bill Ackman
“With Enron, when you got to what was commonly considered the smart money, people either weren't invested in Enron, or they were short. And it was largely long-only funds and index funds, and what we think of in terrible terms, but the dumb money that was inves…”
McLean: Inspiring a Grand Vision Makes CEOs Blind to Failure
“It's very hard to be the leader of a company, I would think, if you yourself aren't a believer, and aren't biased toward belief, because you need, as the CEO or the leader, to be able to inspire other people, right, with your grand vision. And so how, if you'r…”
McLean: Enron's top 200 employees extracted $1 billion in options before bankruptcy
“There was this great number, and I'm gonna get it wrong, but it was from the Joint Committee on Taxation, which investigated Enron after the collapse, and they calculated that the top 200 employees of Enron got a billion dollars from exercising stock options i…”
McLean: Public Investment Banks Took Greater Risks Than Private Partnerships
“When investment banks were private partnerships where people had their own fortunes and their own financial well-being on the line, you saw very different behavior than you did in the years leading up to the financial crisis where they were playing with other …”
McLean: Local newsrooms lost nearly 50% of employees over the past decade
“Local newsrooms have lost, what, almost 50% of their employees over the last decade.”
McLean: Investors succumb to charismatic founder worship over evaluating business profitability
“And I think we're particularly guilty of that today because the lure of the founder is, is so strong. And so there's this idea that the right charismatic person can build anything. And so I People latch on to that. We all want to find that person we can believ…”
McLean: Former Enron CEO Jeff Skilling preferred hiring 'people with spikes'
“Jeff Skilling used to say that he liked people with spikes, and what he meant by that was that he didn't like well-rounded, genial, average people. He liked people with a really exceptional characteristic that defined them, and that may come at the expense of …”
McLean: Intimidating executive cults of personality undermine collaborative workplace cultures
“So I think people tend to see this intellectual charisma or the ability to intimidate others around you into belief as a good thing, because we all follow that kind of blindly, but I think that's probably not a good thing, at least if you believe that a collab…”
McLean: Hyper-precise language concealing broader reality is a major red flag
“And when people are very precise with language such that what they're telling you is true, but they're totally not telling you the broader truth, that's a really interesting characteristic too.”
McLean: Subjects Always Learn Every Unflattering Claim Prior to Publication
“We always at Fortune, and I still today have a belief, I'd always, if I'm writing something about you will know everything in the piece that is unflattering before it goes to print, so that we'll, we'll have it out before it's in print.”