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 88 resolved? a statement only gets an assessment when the public record can support or contradict it. opinions and what-ifs never can, and 88 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
Sam Lessin: A novel virus will definitely be invented using AI
“The main fear is that a novel virus is, you know, invented, and then crispered, and we have serious problems. Which will definitely happen.”
Lessin predicts OpenAI equity value is headed to zero
“Guys, I've been saying OpenAI zero the entire time. And I'm gonna keep saying it.”
Jessica Lessin: Anthropic will go public by September
“Anthropic will go public. I would be shocked if they're not public in September.”
Brit Morin: Half of Bay Area engineers face unemployment within three years
“Well, you and I said half of the software engineers that are employed right now It in the Bay area will not be employed three years from now.”
Lessin: Bay Area software engineer headcount will drop to 300,000
“Well, so I will go down, in three years, I'll go down to 300,000, and then I think it probably drops.”
Lessin: Washington won't break up Big Tech because they're trading partners
“They're not going to break up the big tech companies because like, that's like the whole point is like they're trading partners of the big tech companies. They want to see them Win, in a lot of ways, on a global basis”
Sam Lessin: Stripe has no interest in going public
“I would go super under on Stripe going out. Those guys are too smart. They have a totally different plan. They have no interest in the public market. And there's no point to them in going public. There's plenty of liquidity in their currency.”
Sam Lessin wagers $1M that no human sets foot on Mars by 2040
“I, a million dollars that a human has been on Mars by 2040. Like set foot, like planted the flag, like boot on sand. Like literally went out of a spaceship, like hung out, did a little dance and I'll bet you a million dollars.”
Sam Lessin: Google Antitrust Monopoly Decision Will Be Struck Down
“I personally think if this is, if the case ended up coming down, they, that the courts defined it as the search ad market was not a monopoly, but the search consumer was, and that I, my money says this gets struck down, which is why the stock isn't.”
Lessin predicts federal antitrust search ruling against Google will be struck down
“So I personally think if this is, if the case ended up coming down, they, that the courts defined it as the search ad market was not a monopoly, but the search consumer was, and that I, my money says this gets struck down, which is why the stock isn't.”
Sam Lessin: Character AI will be displaced by platform incumbents
“Character AI, sayonara. Like, it's not like, you know, it's, these are cool ideas, but the reality is you have the data, you have the distribution. AI is an easy tack on for platforms. This is not disruptive. It's just extending what they can already do.”
Lessin: Anthropic's IPO is around the corner
“You may also want to know the Anthropic IPOs around the corner, so this may seem like a relevant fact.”
OpenAI and Anthropic Are Both Targeting an October IPO
“I think all of that is smoke and mirrors. And I think they're probably on a very conventional IPO timeframe, putting them at October ish alongside anthropic.”
Dave Morin predicts open-source AI will always lag frontier proprietary models
“And so you have this thing where open source is also always going to be lagging the frontier. And so it's not going to be like a total replacement.”
Morin: China will produce cheaper energy than the US across all metrics
“They're going to have access to lower cost energy. Like there there's like under no metric, whether it's number of solar panels, number of nuclear power plants, like they are going to have the cheaper energy based on how things are going right now.”
Sam Lessin predicts exactly one $500 billion-plus IPO will occur in 2026
“There will be one, but only one, five hundred billion dollar plus IPO.”
Landesberg: Five Seneca drones carry enough payload for top-5% risk fires
“Exactly five drones. They always stay together and they fly either in series or like in a team, depending on what the, Use cases. They'll fly out, get to the fire, hopefully within five minutes or so of detection. And so that should be more than enough payload…”
Dave Morin: SpaceX Starship will be viable for investment within 24 months
“Yesterday was a pretty strong signal that, you know, you can start investing in this new platform, and you're probably gonna see it in the next 24 months.”
Jessica Lessin: OpenAI has a 90% chance of going public by 2027
“I will say I'm 40% 2026, but like 90% 2027. So I think there is a re reasonable chance next year, and like, I just think they're not gonna go a Stripe, a SpaceX, and all that kind of stuff. Like, they're just not. The body language is totally different.”
Yakovenko: Stablecoins will reach $1T in near-future crypto growth mode
“I think at some point the, We're, we'll see that accelerated event. It's hard for me to predict whether it's the next two years or some other two years short in the near future, but you'll see this massive kind of growth mode for crypto where we see a trillion…”
Jessica Lessin: OpenAI and Anthropic will absolutely go public
“These will be public companies. Absolutely. And maybe sooner rather than later.”
Dave Morin: OpenAI will definitively not launch glasses or cameras
“I also think that OpenAI, I, I'll just say it on the record, I think that OpenAI will not launch a glasses-based vision, like, definitively they will not have cameras, they will not have glasses, like, That is a very diff, it's a very divergent worldview from …”
Jessica Lessin: OpenAI's for-profit conversion will trigger a multi-year lawsuit
“And then they actually have to convert into a company cause guys, they're not a company. And then there's going to be a multi-year lawsuit over that fact.”
Ben Smith: House Democrats will convene corruption committees targeting Big Tech CEOs
“If the Democrats take the House, we're talking in 20 months, there will be a corruption committee convened, which will have Mark Zuckerberg, Tim Cook, Sundar Pichai, and whoever talking in great detail, but every penny that was directed, and, you know, and I t…”
Lessin: Any TikTok US deal will merely create a services company
“My prediction is that whatever ends up transacting here is going to look like a services company. It's going to have the data. Maybe it'll have a little bit of revenue ops or eng, but I think this is the needle that now everyone's trying to thread.”
Sam Lessin: Google will not be broken up under Donald Trump
“That's not going to happen with Trump as president.”
Jessica Lessin: Google antitrust case will likely end in a major settlement
“Well, I think I, and I've actually started to do some actual reporting on this topic, and my strong hunch is a really, is a nice juicy settlement coming. Nothing imminent, but they're still waiting for courts”
Jessica Lessin: Apple Is Suspending Production of Vision Pro Version One
“Also, according to the information, we've known the Vision Pro hasn't exactly been a rocket ship, but it does appear like they are suspending production on version one.”
Sam Lessin: Meta Will Not Release Its Orion AR Glasses Anytime Soon
“By all accounts, I've heard Orion's amazing, but they're not going to release it any time. Like, there's no, Device coming. It's going to be a long time on the burn, and I think it's a totally different story in terms of what the progression is there.”
Lessin: Publisher lawsuits will not put OpenAI out of business
“Will it put OpenAI out of business? No, I don't think so, because like, They can fight these lawsuits. You know, there's not clear, like, other kind of regulatory stuff breathing down their neck”
Jessica Lessin: Frontier AI models will cost tens of billions to train
“I mean, it's gonna be tens of billions of dollars to train these models going forward, and that's not, you know, a research lab at Stanford kind of stuff.”
Jessica Lessin: Musk killed Twitter's misinformation tool to cut Google Cloud costs
“The information reported this week that Elon had killed a tool that had been involved, that Exit or Twitter had been using to spot fakes and misinformation, and he killed it because it was hosted on Google Cloud, and in his big cost-cutting efforts, he had wan…”
Sam Lessin: Repealing Section 230 will cause platforms to ban news entirely
“The unintended consequences that I think politicians will think in their heads, oh, if we get rid of section two 30, it will force the companies to deal with fake information and fake news and AI news because we can't do it. Right. What it will do in fact and …”
Sam Lessin: The SEC no longer considers Bitcoin or Ethereum securities
“I don't think even the SEC is claiming things like Bitcoin or Ethereum are actually securities anymore, right? You know, that we've kind of moved beyond that.”
Sam Lessin: Luna Route's Fixed-Fee Unlimited Inference Will Go Bankrupt
“That's clearly going to go bankrupt.”
Anthropic founders and trust will retain super-voting power post-IPO
“And this trust is also going to maintain some of that power in an IPO, which will also give the co-founders super voting shares.”
Lessin: Users will stick with Airtable because of browser auto-complete habit
“Because they're thinking, because they type A on their keyboard, and it auto completes to Airtable.com, and so they will keep using it.”
Lessin: Venmo Will Never Make Money Despite Being an Important Product
“It's like how Venmo is an important product, but never will make money and never has.”
Brown: Teamshares plans to grow corporate EBITDA to $100M by 2027
“We put out a forecast, right, to go from nineteen million of corporate EBITDA. So there's, like, segment EBITDA, right, so it's just sort of roughly, you know, sixty million, but then after our parent overhead of 90 people that, you know, propelled the machine…”
Morin: SpaceX IPO features multi-tranche lockup ending at 180 days
“So they're doing seven percent tranches at seven, 9105, 121 135 days post IPO. Full release at 180 days for most holders.”
Sam Lessin predicts The New York Times' lawsuit against OpenAI will fail
“That lawsuit, I just can't imagine that OpenAI, the cat's out of the bag. It's just not going to happen, that that, that lawsuit will be successful.”