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 92 resolved? a statement only gets an assessment when the public record can support or contradict it. opinions and what-ifs never can, and 3 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
Wolfe: Tesla got away with accounting fraud on warranty reserves
“And so, for me with Tesla, I think that they got away with accounting fraud. On warranty reserves and a whole bunch of other things. I think there was a lot of prestidigitation and magic of look over here while we're doing this. And today it doesn't matter bec…”
Wolfe: Samsung will decline like Intel due to sclerotic bureaucracy
“If I had to come up with somewhat pejorative analogy, I think Samsung is going to be more like Intel. I think that they're just a little bit sclerotic and bureaucratic and slow moving, and it's going to sort of ebb and decline.”
Wolfe: SK Hynix will bypass export controls easier than Micron
“I think Micron is a US company which is going to be more constrained by restrictions that are put on export control, and I think SK being a Korean company is going to be able to skirt those in the same way that NVIDIA has with, you know, distribution to China …”
Wolfe: LLMs will trend toward zero and become commoditized
“Being able to do that is the real gold, and the large language models are effectively, like, over time, I think, going to trend toward zero in a commodity excavator of that data.”
Wolfe: AI will generate full feature films without actors or crew
“One of our companies, Runway ML, you can, and there's others that you can conjure. Today it's 10 seconds, but tomorrow it'll be two minutes, and full feature films with no key grips, no lighting, no costume design, no set design, no actors, and voices entirely…”
Wolfe: Childless CEOs over 50 tend to be overly controlling operators
“I have a really politically incorrect one, which is older CEOs that by choice, not biologically, because there's a big difference, never had children. I find that for whatever reason, they tend to be very controlling. Now, my sample size here is like five of f…”
Wolfe: AI Agents Interacting on Frontends Portend the Death of APIs
“There's another adjacent theme, which I think is also really interesting, which is AI portends the death of APIs. So APIs allow meta with their meta glasses or Ryan to be able to communicate with Uber and, you know, Spotify through the backend, through softwar…”
Wolfe: 30% to 50% of AI inference will occur on-device
“I think that you're going to end up doing a lot of inference on device. Meaning, instead of going, ah, to the cloud and typing a query, like, 30 to 50% of your inference may be on an Apple or an Android device.”
Wolfe: AI Will Cut Software Engineering Hiring by 10% to 30%
“I would suspect that maybe you lose 10 to 30% of the people that you normally would have hired, but the people that are there are still like these 10 X coders, and now they have a machine that's helping them be like 20 to a hundred X.”
Wolfe: DeepSeek release accelerated OpenAI model launch timelines
“The second that DeepSea comes out, it suddenly accelerated the internal strategic decisions from OpenAI of when are we gonna release models.”
Wolfe: AI model developers without proprietary data will struggle
“I think the people that are continuing to develop ever better models, unless they have proprietary data, are going to be sort of screwed.”
Wolfe: Automated 24/7 Machine-Led Scientific Discovery is Inevitable
“So I'm absolutely convinced. Like, high certitude. I don't know exactly which company will do it. We've invested in some. They haven't worked. We'll invest in more. Hopefully they will. But this directional arrow of progress of the idea, by analogy, of machine…”
Wolfe: Physical reactions will bottleneck AI-driven scientific breakthroughs
“So, I definitely think that there will be this recursive improvement, but you're still going back to being rate limited by time and biological or chemical reactions. You still need to instantiate this into a physical experiment. And so you can model and simula…”
Wolfe: Everyone will run multiple virtual companies within 20 years
“Like that, in 10 or 20 years, people look back and be like, how did we not see that coming? And look at all the jobs that are being created, because every single person is now creating And has, like, six virtual companies.”
Wolfe: Allocations to Private Credit Are Now Overdone
“Where private credit in particular, I think, was wise to do a few years ago, and now is overdone.”
Wolfe: Retail Inflows into Illiquid Private Equity Could Cause a Massive Blow-Up
“There's something here to watch about the flood of retail money that will go into illiquid alts, private equity in particular, and new vehicles that are formed to be able to provide liquidity because of that. And I think that that's both going to be really int…”
Wolfe: Trained AI Avatars of Loved Ones Will Become a Reality
“If there is an AI that is totally trained on my voice, and my likeness, and everything I've ever said, which I have done, that my kids would actually have a dad AI, and maybe they can consult it for questions, or, and is that a good thing, or a bad thing? I do…”
Wolfe: Anduril will be a $30B–$50B public company with software margins
“I deeply believe that Anderil in the next few years will be a 30 to fifty billion dollar publicly traded business doing single-digit mid-billions of revenue with software-like margins that are not like these cost-plus margins, so that is gonna usher in a big w…”
Wolfe: US SOCOM drone operations require legal authorization for strike ratios
“In the Pacific region with SOCOM, and there's a drone operator who's flying the drone, there's another drone operator who's piloting the weapon system, and there's two lawyers. So, they're helping the commander who is effectively given, like, a godshot of, you…”
Wolfe: Lux banned TikTok internally and helped push for its divestment
“TikTok, of course, a huge one, right? We banned it years ago, right when it had become TikTok from Musical.ly, in part because at the time, I seemed like a conspiratorial nut saying, I don't trust this with the Chinese Communist Party having control over this.…”
Wolfe: Much of VC and PE 'dry powder' is actually reserved 'wet powder'
“I think there's a ton of dry powder in venture capital and private equity, but a lot of it I call wet powder, and Because this money is basically reserved for companies and people don't realize.”
Wolfe: 38% of US AI researchers are from China
“In our own country, in the United States, 38% of researchers in AI are from China.”
Wolfe: Psychology drives 90% of Lux Capital's successes and 99% of problems
“All that's important, but what really matters is understanding human nature and psychology, and so, 90% of our successes and 99% of our problems in our companies are us playing armchair psychologist and trying to diagnose, why is this team not effective?”
Wolfe: Only a dozen elite scientists generate America's deep-tech startup diaspora
“And there's probably a dozen such scientists in the war in the country. Where that you in the US where you can go and find these people and the postdocs and where they sort of, ah, traverse to and find that diaspora and develop relationships with them, stay cl…”
Wolfe: Satellite imagery will commoditize while AI data processing captures the value
“All the imagery that's going to be coming off of these satellites is going to be commoditized, and the real value is going to be the processing of that using artificial intelligence and machine learning to look at different spaces over different times to make …”
Wolfe: Disreputable advisory board members signal a startup CEO's poor judgment
“But then I see an advisory board with one or two people, and for me, these are, like, red flag people. They're, like, total BS scientists or promoters or, like, authors that I think are full of it, and I just, like, shake my head, and to me, it's a It's a sign…”
Wolfe: Technological progress follows inevitable directional vectors independent of specific actors
“If you look at a directional arrow of progress in energy, you went from carbohydrates to hydrocarbons to uranium, and the undeniable arrow of progress there was more and more energy density per unit of raw material. When you discover the directional arrow of p…”
Wolfe: Lux Capital's unanimous consensus investments have typically been very wrong
“And so, when the team has total consensus, we typically make an investment, and we've typically been very wrong.”
Wolfe: Bill Gates will aggressively eviscerate flawed ideas in the boardroom
“You know, publicly, he sort of has this Mr. Rogers persona, you know, sweater, and I think in the boardroom, you know, he'll eviscerate somebody. Somebody will say something, he'll be like, why would you possibly do that? You know, that's the stupidest idea, a…”
Wolfe: Africa's Sahel Region Could Become the Next Afghanistan
“The Sahel and Maghreb in Africa, which is not an area that a lot of people talk about or think about, that I believe with low probability, super high magnitude import
Is going to become the next Afghanistan, that that region in the Sahel, all these coups and c…”
Wolfe: Android is better architected than Apple for on-device AI
“And if I had to bet today, it's Android because of the architecture over Apple, but if Apple can do some smart things, maybe they can catch up to this, but some of the design choices and the closed aspects, which have been great for privacy as a feature, may h…”
Wolfe: Machines will replace white-collar knowledge workers while blue-collar craft is protected
“But interestingly, I actually think that the people whose jobs are, like, most protected in this new domain are blue-collar workers. A robot today can't really fully serve a meal, and they cannot effectively, even though every humanoid robot tries to do foldin…”
Wolfe: SpaceX is an indispensable American national treasure
“Now, that said, SpaceX, I have no issue with. I think SpaceX is an extraordinary company. I think it's an incredibly important American company. I think without it, we would be at a massive disadvantage. I think it is truly a national treasure run by Gwen Shot…”
Wolfe: Great entrepreneurs prove short sellers wrong rather than banning them
“You know, you've got similarly, the best entrepreneurs, when short sellers are like, you know, saying something, they don't want to ban short selling. They don't want short sellers to be arrested. They just prove them wrong.”
Wolfe: Rising capital costs will bring a return to active managers
“I do think that we will see a return to
Active managers that are able to discriminate true fundamentals, in part because I think that the cost of capital is just gonna rise and all the funny money of the past 10 years is, is gonna wash out.”
Wolfe: Behavioral discipline is the only persistent investing advantage left
“So informational advantage, hard, analytical advantage, brilliant people combined with brilliant technology, really hard, and then it goes into this last one, which is the behavioral, and that, to me,
Is the persistent thing.”
Wolfe: TikTok is the only digital tool restricted for his children
“The only tool that I restrict them from is TikTok. But otherwise, and that's for a variety of bad influence and Chinese Communist Party but otherwise, I want them learning how to use every tool as they would every appliance in a kitchen”
Josh Wolfe: AI will never replicate shared human experience and memories
“And the great human feeling is commiserating about the thing that we experience together, or the memory and laughing hysterically, which I still do with my childhood friends, of this shared moment, and AI will never get that.”
Wolfe: Personal beliefs stem from close peers, not independent reasoning
“You may think you think the things you think because you analyzed and you reasoned or whatever, but no, the reason you think the thing you think is because of the five or six most important people around you. And they sort of believe something and you believe …”
Wolfe: Lux Capital requires full-time in-office presence Monday through Friday
“Everybody is here Monday through Friday now. You know, at first it was Monday through Thursday, take Friday. Now I'm like, look, if you need to leave, you go family first. It's a principle here. Never miss a concert, a recital, a science fair, but we need to b…”
Josh Wolfe: Adding 10 to 20 Years to Lifespan Is Possible, Not Doubling
“I think that's possible, 10 or 15 or 20 not doubling.”
Wolfe: Investing drive is motivated by public status and getting credit
“I want to be right. I want to make money. I want the credit for it, but it really is about like the status because otherwise you would just do these things in private and totally in quiet.”
Wolfe: X is an invaluable generator of randomness and optionality
“It is this huge randomness generator, this huge optionality generator, and the accessibility, and I just, I absolutely love it. So that's another thing where I'm really rooting for Elon in the continued success of X, because I'll continue to pay a lot of money…”
Wolfe: Musk made the right move blocking Google from X's data
“And I think that's the right move, right? This is our platform, same way as Meta has. So I think that that repository of everybody's tweets and retweets and likes and the comments that they've made”
Wolfe: Putin would not have invaded Ukraine if Ukraine had nukes
“If Ukraine had nuclear weapons, Putin wouldn't have invaded.”
Wolfe: Reshoring and tariffs will cause inflation and raise capital costs
“Reshoring. All of these things, you know, tariffs, they're gonna be inflationary, there would be a rising cost of capital.”
Wolfe: DOGE is virtuous for shining a spotlight on government waste
“I think it's a virtuous thing because it's shining a spotlight on a lot of things that were just done because they were done and you get this bloat or in some cases there was like, Overt obfuscation. And so I think sunlight heals all and putting a spotlight on…”