The Ledger
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Sam Lessin: Elon Musk and Sam Altman deliberately lie to motivate followers
“I think that Elon and Sam Altman lie, right? I think they say things they know to not be true, to Get people to do things. Right. And like, go on like with them. I just believe that from what I've seen, like, I think they're both way too smart to believe what …”
Wolfe: Europe Is Screwed by Demographics and Failure to Assimilate
“I think that Europe is fucked, and there are bright lights of amazing entrepreneurs that are doing the very thing that Europe has historically not done, which is risk taking. The floor for Europe is higher than the US, so people do not fall through that, but t…”
Sam Lessin: AI labs seeking regulatory capture is cynical and anti-American
“I think it's very cynical for these companies to even try to switch the field of play from business to politics, right? Like, I think that's a very cynical, anti-American thing to do, to be like, okay, we're not going to play and compete in capitalism in a fai…”
Sam Lessin: AI eliminates Silicon Valley's advantage over New York finance workers
“I'd actually argue the average person in Silicon Valley is not as smart as like the average person in New York finance, right? They're not the best marketers. They're not the best at anything. The advantage in Silicon Valley was actually knowing how to write t…”
Lessin: The pro-Palestinian movement is winning the memetic information war
“Well, I think the most successful information warfare mimetic war right now is actually being won by, like, the pro-Palestinian crowd.”
Sam Lessin: Backing founders with small children is generally a bad idea
“Parents of small children that is generally a bad idea. Not always, but generally a bad idea to back parents of small children.”
Sam Lessin calls VCs the least sophisticated financiers on the planet
“I actually think that venture capitalists are probably the least sophisticated financiers, like on the planet. They just have hope, right? Like it's the only hopeful version of finance, right? Because it is like, you know, you're basically investing in people …”
Sam Lessin: AI Is a Terrible Business with Almost No Monetizable Patterns
“I think the answer is almost none of them, and I think AI is a terrible business.”
Sam Lessin: SoftBank is probably the worst investor in history
“Probably the worst investors in history. We've lost so much money in valuable companies because of SoftBank.”
Sam Lessin: Men dominate top leadership because they are higher-beta risk-takers
“Because men have nothing to lose and are worthless, and therefore are very high beta, right? Like, it's just like, you just get more, like, the dumbest people in the world are men, and some of the smartest are. The highest risk takers are men. Guess what? It t…”
Morin: Elon Musk bought $40 billion in 'house ads' to buy America
“He bought forty billion in house ads for himself so he could buy America.”
Khosla: Open source AI models will not be viable due to training costs
“It is costing an order of magnitude more to train, and that's why I don't think open source models will be viable because the training costs.”
Sam Lessin: Google has never had a high-performance culture
“Yes, Google has not had a high performance culture Like ever.”
Sam Lessin: Google invented tech's low-work engineer culture
“So like this idea that it's work from home, Google invented the low work engineer culture.”
Morin: FTC Chair Lina Khan has completely stopped US tech innovation
“Yeah, she's been successful in completely stopping the innovation cycle in the United States so that nobody can get acquired.”
Lessin: Most media business talent are 'B-players' and not talented
“You have the media business talent, which with a few exceptions, I have to say that because there are some people I like, they're bees, right? They're not very talented.”
Dave Morin: Trump Media SPAC is the most insane pump-and-dump ever
“This is like the world's most insane pump and dump of all time, like.”
Sam Lessin: The AI revolution is fake outside of narrow applications
“I don't think the AI, I think the AI revolution is fake. We all know this.”
Sam Lessin: LLMs have only two use cases: summarization and data laundering
“There really are two use cases. One is Dave's point, which is summarization, and the other is Brisk's case, which is data theft, right, and data laundering. Like, I agree those are the only use cases”
Lessin: Big tech is better off cutting average nine-to-five engineers
“Most of like the line engineers and people who just kind of like, you know, show up in nine to five and crunch out small projects. They're just not that valuable and you're better off cutting them rather than doing whatever you possibly can to retain them.”
Dave Morin: Anthropic Is the Anti-Free Speech AI Company
“Sam, we've always known that Anthropic is the anti-free speech company.”
Dave Morin argues anyone under 21 should be banned from social media
“Probably under 21, you shouldn't be allowed to be on social media. It's that bad for mental health.”
Dave Morin argues that Roblox should be completely banned
“And Roblox, like, I actually think Roblox should just be banned.”
SpaceX is priced like a meme stock driven by media headlines
“Like SpaceX is a meme. It's a great meme. It's an awesome meme. Like, SpaceX, like Moderna, has every ability to pop out headlines that people are going to go nuts for. But, you know, it isn't that dissimilar from a GME, not in that they don't do amazing thing…”
Lessin: Traditional American pathways of hard work and schooling have run out
“Historically, if you were an IQ 100 person and worked hard, you'd do fine. If you had a shovel, then it was like, oh, just go to school, and you'll do fine, because there was so much demand for, like, intellectual jobs. Those stories have run out on the capita…”
Belsky: AI-generated fake media is helpful because it inoculates society
“But I also think we're all gonna be gradually inoculated, and I think, honestly, like, fake stuff is really helpful for society right now because it inoculates us and makes us realize we can't trust what we see anymore.”
Morin: AI makes lightweight UI tools like Airtable and Retool obsolete
“The reality of Airtable and tools like it Is that AI has made it, you know, there's like other businesses that were really, really flying, like in the Airtable days, like Retool and these kind of lightweight UI layers that made it easier to interact with datab…”
Sam Lessin: Elon Musk priced SpaceX to bail out xAI and Twitter investors
“He bailed out his XAI people. He bailed out his Twitter people. He bailed everyone out, right? So Elon gets to be the guy who makes everyone money, and if you're a SpaceX shareholder, you're like, whatever, you kind of got robbed on a few things, but number bi…”
Morin: Anthropic Is Guided by Anger and Spite Toward OpenAI
“So much of what anthropic does is guided by anger and spite towards open AI and the people involved in open AI.”
Lessin: Frontier AI Researchers Suffer From Oppenheimer Complexes
“I think what it is, honestly, is, like, all of these people have Oppenheimer complexes and think they're working on the Manhattan Project, right?”
Sam Lessin: OpenAI breach announcements are a cover for struggling revenue
“This is, all you know from this is that OpenAI is struggling on revenue growth. It's like, this is the AI move, is if you're struggling on revenue growth, you have to announce a security breach that sounds scary to support your stock price. Very simple.”
Sam Lessin: Big Frontier AI Labs Are Economically 'Fucked'
“This isn't a technical commentary, but from like a business and economics perspective, I think all the big labs are fucked.”
Lessin: AI labs can only survive by creating regional monopolies
“This is, the business is multiplying large numbers. It's globally liquid. There's no natural barrier to it. It's not even, energy is more barriers than this because it's hard to ship energy, not hard to ship multiplication output. Same, on top of that, there's…”
Lessin: Anthropic is winning the AI race, not OpenAI
“He's not a real company like Google or Open or Meta or someone who actually five percent is meaningful, and he's not even winning the pure AI race. It's an anthropic is.”
Lessin: OpenAI's government equity offer signals it is distressed
“But it is also, like, one of those things where, like, the only way we do this is for distressed situations. It's crazy for us to not do this, so they're distressed. They're distressed.”
Lessin: Altman's government equity offer is damaging regulatory capture
“Sam Altman trying to give five percent of the government to the government for regulatory capture and all this politics is so bad, right? Because all of a sudden it makes the game not a fair and open game that at least you can play with rules. It becomes a gam…”
Lessin: Frontier AI model companies are 'all f***ed'
“Like, I honestly don't care, which means these companies are all fucked.”
Morin: GLM 5.2 is as good or better than frontier models at coding
“I was testing it, doing the exact same coding tasks that I'm doing with frontier models. It's like as good or better.”
Elon Musk is the best financier of our generation
“I think the new line might be, love it or hate it, he's the best financier of our generation.”
Lessin: SpaceX's $1.75T IPO Valuation Makes No Financial Sense
“It is financially, if you look at it like with a Wall Street hat on, nonsense. Right? At a 1.75 trillion dollar valuation.”
AI and data center investments are literally sustaining the US economy
“If Anthropic were to fail, that would have a massive cascading effect on the entire economy and AI and data centers in general are what is literally keeping this economy going.”
Dave Morin: Google's new AI model is worse than top competitors
“The most reason, the model's not even competitive. What's not competitive about it? It's not competitive. Like, it's just less good than every conceivable benchmark. It's less good than five, five and, ah, four, seven. Like, meaningful. Like, you wouldn't use …”
Sam Lessin: Anthropic is currently the top winning AI company
“The number one winning company right now in AI, I think, is Anthropic. And they're actually shockingly focused, right? Like, it's cloud code. Very pure play.”
Morin: Anthropic faces platform problem as downstream companies lack revenue
“And it's just the truth. Like Anthropic is making all of the money and none of the companies being built on top of it are making revenue that exceeds their revenue. And so you've got a really serious platform problem.”
Sam Lessin: Sam Altman deliberately stoked AI fear to maximize funding
“The AI hatred narrative is partially just what it is. It's also, let's be honest, it's because Sam Altman in particular, but everyone leaned into it as marketing. This is so scary. This is so powerful. This is going to be like, it was a very explicit strategy …”