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 516 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
Reses: Claims of systematic industry 'debanking' are an absolute crock
“Okay, I don't believe there was debanking. I think it's a crock of shit. I think it's an absolute crock of shit.”
Adcock claims Figure's internal AI team was running circles around OpenAI
“It got to a point where we were just like, our team internally that was designing these models were running circles around OpenAI. We were just way better at this. And we were better about testing on the robots, training the models, like all, all of it.”
Rabois: Opendoor should cut headcount from 1,400 to 200–300 max
“There's 1400 employees. There should be like more like 200 or 300 max”
Biden administration delayed Starliner rescue to deny Elon Musk a political win
“The Biden administration clearly turned that down because they didn't want to give SpaceX a political, an Elon, a political win against Boeing in the midst of the, you know, campaign was campaigning for Trump.”
Armstrong: The New York Times is a political propaganda arm
“In my view, the New York Times is more of like a political propaganda arm than it is doing any real journal, journalism at this point.”
Michael: Pete Hegseth is already the greatest Defense Secretary in our lifetimes
“Pete Hegsus, I think, is going to be, and is already, probably the greatest Secretary of War in our lifetimes.”
Karp: No expert class has been right about anything in 20 years
“I can't think of any expert class that's been right about anything substantive in the last 20 years.”
Vasavada: GPs expensing private jets to investment funds is a scam
“And then what a lot of GPs do or a lot of managers do is they actually expense these planes or the operating costs from their fund. Which is, I feel like a complete scam, but you can basically deduct The cost of operating an aircraft from the actual fund, whic…”
Sadeghi: Patients, not doctors, should use genetic data to select embryos
“We believe that every piece of information from cancer to IQ to schizophrenia belongs very thoughtfully in the hands of the patient, and the patient is the one, not the doctor, that the patient is the one that should pick their embryo.”
Asparouhov calls progressive San Francisco liberals among the most racist people
“Progressive SF liberals are actually some of the most racist people that I've ever met, you know, on the planet.”
Beck: Large VC firms are often the worst at space diligence
“Cause you see so many, you see a company that's just objectively terrible. And they just continue to get funding. There's just new investor after new investor and after new investor, but sometimes, sometimes like the really big firms that you think are really …”
Beck: Many SPAC-Era Companies Went Public Because They Were 'Crap'
“I think a lot of public, a lot of companies went public during that SPAC time because they were just crap companies and they couldn't raise capital privately. So their only option was to be a public company.”
Arora Rejects AI Job Loss Fears Due to Talent Shortages
“We're gonna need more AI-ready people, so I don't buy the jobs argument. We have so many things to do, there's not enough people to do it.”
Engineers Must Experiment With AI on Personal Time to Be Hired
“How am I gonna know that if you know how to use OpenClaw? Well, how am I gonna know you understand what an agent is? If you're not playing with it already, you're not sitting, going back home from work saying, I can't wait to get my hands on the new developmen…”
Foroughi: Non-AI-native legacy companies must replace nearly everyone to successfully adapt
“Technically you almost have to replace near everyone and rebuild the culture up to be able to deal with the world as it is today, but that's not really possible for most companies. And so there's no clear answer for how those companies can get there.”
Monroe-Anderson: Many defense tech startup products may be completely useless
“Maybe my hottest take is that a lot of the defense tech, maybe the majority of defense tech products that are being put out right now by startups are not very effective and maybe even like completely useless.”
Monroe-Anderson: Neros was only PBAS winner to meaningfully deliver
“We ended up getting selected. They selected two other companies as well but we were the only ones to really deliver in a meaningful way”
GPS-reliant drone swarm demos fail completely under real battlefield conditions
“Intro, you know, 10, a hundred drones swarming together and going and hitting a target. It's all happening on ranges with GPS, which is not a real thing in the battlefield. And a lot of companies are demoing stuff that just does not actually hold up in realist…”
Wu: AI will be capable of performing all pure human knowledge work
“I've always felt that there's, in terms of just pure knowledge work, there's, there is nothing that humans do that AIs can't do, you know, partly because Humans are, humans, you know, our brains are just computers, you know, like the AIs are too, right?”
Friedberg: California is functionally bankrupt with a $30B–$40B budget deficit
“Well, if the ballot initiatives and the tax policy and the battle that's going on in the state for spending and taxation is any indication, I, you know, think it's probably true. The current budget from the governor is Something on the order of 30 to forty bil…”
Friedberg: Tax unrealized gains, raise capital gains to 40%, cut income taxes
“When billionaires borrow against their unrealized capital gains, they should pay capital gains tax. Capital gains tax should be 40%, not 15% or 18% or 20%. They should pay the same as labor. In fact, labor should pay less. Income tax should be much lower. Capi…”
Friedberg: Government Pension Plans Will Ultimately Bankrupt US States
“These pension plans are poison. The fundamental problem with these pension plans is that they will ultimately end up bankrupting the states, or they will become Ponzi schemes where people get screwed because they're expecting retirement benefits and they don't…”
Patel: Strict token budgeting is a 'loser mentality' that stalls productivity
“I love token maxing. I think anyone who doesn't token max is going to get left behind. I think all this token budgeting stuff is, is loser mentality. If you're token budgeting hardcore, then your people are not going to learn the new workflows and then they're…”
Liang: Groq and Cerebras can only run small models fast
“Or you look at services like Rock Cerebus that run fast, you can only run the small models, right?”
Liang: Nvidia GPUs are a commodity offering very limited cost advantage
“People forget, as much as NVIDIA costs, it's commodity. Right? Because what you offer is the same as what your neighbor offers and your differentiation is, I can save you a little bit of money because maybe I got a discount from NVIDIA, right? Or maybe I got a…”
Feldman: Nvidia uses investments to pressure clouds and builders against rival chips
“There are ways for NVIDIA to use their balance sheet to limit competition, right? That if they invest in, in a NeoCloud, right? The NeoCloud is less likely to use a non-NVIDIA chip. If they invest in a model builder there's pressure not to use other people's c…”
Banister: OpenAI and Anthropic's closed, centralized AI approach is the wrong path
“It became incredibly centralized and closed source. And you're seeing that happen with open AI and Anthropic. It's the wrong path because everyone needs to have their own models. Everyone needs to be able to be able to compete and you don't want one company wi…”
Banister: Unsure people should skip college unless studying medicine or hard sciences
“If you're not getting into medicine, or like a hard thing that requires four to six years of school, I'm not sure people should be going to school right now.”
Mathew: AI mega-round funding is rational and AI potential is underestimated
“I actually think the market is totally rational on this. I think if anything, a lot of us have underestimated the potential of AI and the value creation that it offers.”
Pincus: Consumer AI feels uninvestable due to lack of distribution
“I think consumer AI still feels uninvestable. There's no obvious distribution. There's been, like, two companies that make sense, like Sumo and Midjourney. There's, like, this prosumer place, but I think that the whole environment is amazing, but I also think …”
Slotowicz: Argus Gold aviation safety ratings are essentially pay-for-play
“Argus is, like, a third-party safety rating that comes in and does, like, an audit. It's really like a pay for play, right? Like, you basically pay them money, and then they give you a certification, especially at their, like, gold rating.”
Fishner-Wolfson claims SpaceX was the only good space investment in 20 years
“We looked at probably every SpaceX, or every space investment for, I don't know, 1520 years, and the good investment was SpaceX, and I think a lot of people thought, well, we should go invest in all these other things, and the answer is, you should invest in S…”
Singerman says no single Anduril founder could have built the company alone
“The Andurl founding team are all so complimentary to each other and different, but respect each other so much and are good in different ways that Not any one of them, not any one of the four of them could have, like, pulled this off, but I do think that the co…”
Romo: Space debris remediation startups are largely a scam today
“It's a scam, I think, largely. So look the orbital remediation could be a problem one day. It is not currently a problem, and I think there are there are studies you can point to on this around, like, what's the probability of collision, and what challenge cou…”
Tandon: Healthcare is broken because it's run by politicians, not operators
“I would actually say that healthcare's biggest problem today is it is run by politicians. It is not run by ruthless, pragmatic business operators.”
Tandon: Epic creates extreme data friction compared to Salesforce
“For all the shit Salesforce gets as a company, if I want to move data from one, you know, place in Salesforce to another place in Salesforce, I can do it with my eyes closed. Like, there's no, I don't have to ask for permission. If I want to do that in Epic, I…”
Adcock: Trying to code humanoid robot behaviors is a complete dead end
“You basically can code your way out of this, and I think that's a full dead end, or you can run an AI-first strategy in the market, and that's what we do here at Figure.”
Adcock: Figure is probably a few years ahead of all global competitors
“We think we're probably at this point a few years ahead of every big, everybody globally doing this.”
Boston Dynamics' Atlas was an unsafe, uncommercial research project, says Adcock
“And I think for humanoids, like, you know, the best we had four years ago was like a, you know, Boston Dynamics had a hydraulic humanoid called Atlas. It like dripped oils everywhere. It lasted like 20 minutes. It was like very big, very unsafe. You could neve…”
Bry: Skydio is the only non-Chinese company scaling autonomous drone manufacturing
“We find ourselves in a position of really being the only company in the world, certainly the only company outside of China that's capable of delivering these things reliably at scale.”
Younis: Most Bay Area startups are hobby projects, not serious businesses
“I think most companies in the Bay Area are, you know, are more hobby projects than they are, like, earnest, serious businesses, and it's kind of like, we'll take a swing on this, and I don't mean to disrespect my own, you know, my co, I'm in the fraternity of …”
Miller: Universal basic ownership of AI beats universal basic income
“I think democratic ownership is the solution to how we deal with AI. The idea that everyone wants to get, like, universal basic income, I think that's a horrible idea, but universal basic ownership, I feel like that is magic.”
Silicon Valley insiders manufactured narratives to devalue Deel's rapid growth
“I think a weird thing that happened with us is the combination of having really good numbers on the board plus not spending time with non-internal investors allowed for other people in the ecosystem to try to give reason to justify Our growth, right? Like, oh,…”
Raanan: Israel possesses greater tech talent density than Silicon Valley
“You cannot get that density of talent anywhere else in the world. Definitely not in Silicon Valley, which spans over you know, significantly bigger geographical area.”
Alfred Lin: AI will not kill SaaS
“And the simple narrative, as we just talked about, is AI's gonna kill SAS. And I just don't think that that's the case. And the reason why I know that that's not gonna be the case is because I lived it.”
Nejatian: Opendoor lacked real culture because professional managers let it atrophy
“I don't think Open Door had much of a culture. Transparently, I think what happens to companies when they're run by, like, professional managers is, like, culture atrophies.”
Nejatian says PayPal is struggling today because it prioritized short-term metrics
“And the result of that, by the way, very objectively is PayPal. Like over and over again, that company made all the wrong decisions because they cared more about today than 10 years from now. And guess what? It is now 10 years from now, and the company's in de…”