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 613 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
Morin: Coinbase Offshore Customer Center Socially Engineered to Expose Customer Data
“Coinbase was hacked, not digitally. They were hacked through social engineering. One of their customer service centers abroad outside the United States was socially engineered, meaning people figured out how to convince the people that work in that Customer se…”
Dave Morin: OpenAI publicly indicated interest in buying Google's Chrome browser
“Like I found it really interesting that open AI was first to raise their hand this morning about
You know, hey, we'll buy Chrome.”
Dave Morin: China will retain control of TikTok's algorithm despite divestment
“There's one little detail in there, which is that here we are at the very end of this very long, very arduous news story, and China will still retain control of the algorithm, right? Like, so they did win the war of attrition at the end of the day. Like, it so…”
Jessica Lessin: OpenAI is projected to lose $44 billion through 2028
“They're only projected to lose forty four billion between. 2023 and 20 28, according to the information.”
Ben Smith: Pentagon advised Trump administration officials to use Signal
“And in fact, they had been told by the Pentagon they should be using Signal.”
Jessica Lessin predicts Google's $32 billion Wiz acquisition will not close
“I am going to go on record saying this deal will not close.”
Dave Morin predicts Google's Wiz acquisition will easily secure regulatory approval
“I just, I think that it'll go through no question. In fact, I bet it accelerates through.”
Jessica Lessin: Rippling is suing rival Deel over alleged corporate espionage
“Rippling, one payroll company, is suing Deal, another highly valued, highly hyped, high expectation fintech payroll company. For a lot of things, including having a spy within their organization.”
Dave Morin: SEC dropped Wells notices against Coinbase and major DEXs
“There's been no laws passed, but the SEC has actually changed their position and actually taken actions to, you know, remove Wells notices from Coinbase from several other major DEX exchanges”
Morin cites Peretti: ByteDance founder planned addictive service using ML PhDs and Musical.ly
“He talked about how he was talking to the founder of ByteDance in 2017, and the founder of ByteDance said, China's going to graduate more machine learning PhDs in one year than America will
You know, graduate maybe ever.
And so all I need is a lot of video c…”
Lessin: JD Vance has been deputized to organize TikTok's new investor group.
“I think the state of play is that, in particular, JD Vance. Vance has been deputized to do this. Is trying to figure out what group of investors broadly, including strategics, can own what parts of TikTok and satisfy you know, the law.”
Sam Lessin: DJI announced removal of US restricted airspace flight limits
“At the same time, DJI, like today, announced the drone company that they're no longer limiting drones, like, from flying in restricted airspace in the United States, which I'm sure is actually unrelated, but it's a hilarious story.”
Sam Lessin: Appointees exploit forced divestment for tax-free asset diversification
“There's this hack where some Goldman Sachs guys got cabinet positions and they're like, well, the reason they did that, or like at some level of seniority of the government is because you are forced to sell, but you don't have to pay taxes on the sale. And so …”
Lessin: Reporting shows Sam Altman knew he had board problems before ouster
“I mean, I just have so much reporting pointing to the fact that Sam knew he had problems with the board, and then a lot of people were like, well, why didn't he do anything about it?”
Jessica Lessin: TikTok will partner with Larry Ellison or Elon Musk
“Tick tock will operate in some form in the U S in a partnership. Either with Larry Ellison or Elon Musk. It's my prediction.”
Sam Lessin: Ultra-wealthy use government cabinet positions to defer capital gains taxes
“There's this hack where some Goldman Sachs guys got cabinet positions and they're like, well, the reason they did that or like at some level of seniority of the government is because you are forced to sell, but you don't have to pay taxes on the sale. And so i…”
Morin: Democrats built swing-state local print newspapers to target suburban women
“I went to this big cabal, you know, this was two years ago. I think I've talked about it in the pod before. It was like this secret meeting. Lots of people from the democratic side. And they were talking about how one of the big pieces of infrastructure that t…”
Dave Morin: NotebookLM could replace Google's Gemini UX within six months
“I mean, I think you might see in three, six months that the sort of Gemini core user experience is thrown out in favor of the notebook LM experience because it's just better for everyday consumers.”
Jessica Lessin: Wells Fargo halted third-party merchant payment processing for Stripe
“What our reporter Michael Rodden reported for the first time is that Wells Fargo has stopped working with Stripes in this capacity to help process payments.”
Sam Lessin: Telegram is not actually end-to-end encrypted
“Telegram tells this whole story about encryption and pro free speech, but it's actually not end to end encrypted.”
Lessin: Bolt Founder Ryan Breslow Pitching Self-Dealing Return Proposal to Investors
“Ryan Breslow, the founder of Bolt, who had left the company, is staging a comeback with a very audacious proposal that he's pitching investors on for him to return.
Includes a lot of self-dealing, as reported in the information.
Also reported that investors se…”
Sam Lessin: Nvidia Scrapped an LLM Over Scraping Netflix Content
“You know what also got reported this week was how NVIDIA scrapped their large language model they had been working on that had been stealing all this information, like, in content from Netflix and everyone else, and they realized, oh, shit, we really can't lau…”
Jessica Lessin: Google is highly unlikely to acquire Wiz for $23B
“Like, is Google for twenty-three billion dollars gonna buy Wiz security company? I think it's highly unlikely, but.”
Jessica Lessin predicts Skydance will complete the Paramount Global acquisition
“Skydance seems to be the one that's going to get the deal done”
Jessica Lessin: OpenAI is discussing converting to a B Corp
“I think it's very likely we've reported they're talking about converting to a B Corp, which is a company which would essentially completely liberate him from the nonprofit kind of overhang and the issues that had that board boot him.”
Jessica Lessin: The Information reported Apple paused next Vision Pro
“The information is reported there, they're not even working on the next version of it.”
Khosla: AI inference costs will drop up to 10x by June 2025
“I think what will happen is the expensive PhD will become dirt cheap. My bet is a year from now, it'll cost one-fifth to one-tenth of what it does today.”
Jessica Lessin: Slack defaulted users into training its AI on their data
“Slack Auto defaulted all of its users into using all of their data, their messages, everything to train their AI. The way to opt out was to email, email an address with a certain subject line”
Lessin: BYD surpassing Tesla eliminates its structural valuation premium
“They're not the biggest shipping EV company in the world anymore. It's that Chinese company. Everyone has EVs. That kind of like structural advantage that makes them dramatically more valuable or differentiated from car companies is gone.”
Dave Morin: Reddit and Truth Social have comparable market caps despite revenue disparity
“Reddit's sitting at a 9.1 billion dollar market cap today. You know, I need to go look at what the, what their revenue looks like, but I mean, their revenue is somewhere in the ballpark of half a billion dollars, right? Yeah. And meanwhile, truth social is als…”
Jessica Lessin says China will block a TikTok sale under algorithm export rules
“They won't let them. It will be in violation of their rules against exporting algorithms.”
Sam Lessin: US politicians will not risk banning TikTok before 2024 election
“There's just no chance that in that environment they're gonna, like, risk any youth vote, even if they're terrible, woke people, for the sake of banning TikTok right now. And I think that sucks, because I think it is a huge national security risk, But I think …”
Lessin: Sequoia and Roelof Botha publicly apologized over failed Klarna coup
“Sequoia and Roloff, who runs Sequoia, then sort of returned with their tail between their legs a little bit and publicly apologized for this and said they now support the CEO and are ready to move forward.”
Neistat: Every MrBeast Video Gets More Views Than the Super Bowl
“Every video he posts does more views than the Super Bowl we'll do this year. With Taylor Swift, he will do more views with every video he posts.”
Dave Morin: Netflix is losing nearly 100 million users per year
“They've gone from below two percent in January of 19 to two percent per what? Per month to now they're approaching four percent. So it's to me that looks like they're losing anywhere from, I don't know, fifty million users per year in 2019 to close to a hundre…”
Jessica Lessin: AI power demands will drive new nuclear plant construction soon
“And I think we're gonna see that, like, literally come to, like, building nuclear power plants, right, in, in the near term.”
Jessica Lessin: China holds a board seat in a secretive ByteDance subsidiary
“I thought of this because the reason the world knows that actually the Chinese government owns ByteDance is because Of some of the great reporting of my colleagues in Asia that actually broke the news of not just this idea that Chinese companies are controlled…”
Morin: Google Gemini Achieved 90% on MMLU, Beating Human Experts
“The essence of Gemini is, is this idea of multi-modality AI and the idea that it's now finally 90% Of sort of capability, and it outperforms humans. So the human percentage was, 86.4% as far as the human expert scale. Gemini is now 90%, and they call it”
Lessin: Sequoia and Reid Hoffman are major TikTok investors
“Sequoia's an enormous investor. It's like, Reid Hoffman, who's a huge Democratic donor and would have a lot of sway in Washington as a huge investor. Like, they're all investors.”
Lessin: Apple will not remove TikTok due to China exposure
“Apple's not gonna kick them out. Apple's China exposure is enormous, right? Like, you know, even if they should, they won't, right?”
Sam Lessin: Ad Copywriting Jobs Will Disappear in Three Months
“They're not going to have a job doing that in like three months.”
Lessin: Microsoft Is Developing Cheaper In-House AI to Avoid OpenAI Costs
“So Microsoft, who's ten billion dollars into open AI, gave it exclusive access to their IP, has decided in part because it's too expensive to run, they're going to build a cheaper functional enough version to have to power some of these applications.”
Brit Morin: AI transcription has wiped out court reporting jobs
“Court reporting is a job that is just gone. Like, the whole, like, her whole life, she spent typing what everyone's saying at a speed so fast that she could follow along, and now it's just wiped out.”
Dave Morin: Ozempic costs $1,200 in US versus $100 in Mexico
“Yeah, it's 1200 dollars a month. It's a hundred dollars a month in Mexico, so the American health system is causing a 90% markup.”
Sam Lessin: LK-99 superconductor will successfully replicate before 2025
“I'll say yes on one-time replication, and I'll go further to say, like, this is my AI killer scenario, where, like, it's so disruptive if it happens, right, that, like, it's worth putting a lot of effort in trying to figure it out.”