Every entry pairs a person's own words, dated and sourced, with the record that followed: a filing, a vote, a disclosure, a court position. Five kinds of pairing live in one ledger. Filter by kind, or search a name. For one person's positions over time, see By person.
We've made it possible to run any combination of tests, including sets of follow-on tests, very quickly, all from a single micro-sample. … Tests run on samples as small as a few drops of blood, taken from a tiny finger-stick.
Elizabeth Holmes convicted on four counts of investor fraud; sentenced to over 11 years in prison.
Boeing entered a guilty plea to conspiracy to defraud the FAA in connection with 737 MAX MCAS disclosures; agreed to a $487M fine and oversight monitorship. Corporate position: the company accepts responsibility for its employees' conduct as a corporate act.…
In the only individual criminal prosecution arising from the same MCAS fraud, Boeing's position (through company-witness testimony and document production) was that the relevant senior managers had no knowledge of the safety-critical changes and that the…
Why it matters Boeing the corporation pleaded guilty to defrauding the FAA — admitting, in its corporate capacity, that the criminal acts occurred. In the parallel individual prosecution of the only Boeing employee charged, the…
Full record →An outgoing president retains absolute immunity from criminal prosecution for any official act, including the retention of classified national-defense information after leaving office. Executive privilege survives the end of the term; the Presidential…
As a former president, Trump asserted executive privilege to block the National Archives from releasing his administration's records to the January 6 select committee — arguing the sitting president (Biden) could not waive his predecessor's privilege. (Trump…
Why it matters In Trump v. Thompson, Trump's position was that executive privilege over presidential records is an enduring protection that a successor cannot waive. In the SCOTUS immunity case, the same privilege framework was…
Full record →Respect for your privacy is coded into our DNA … Above all else, I want to make sure you understand how deeply I value the principle of private communication. … We have not, we do not and we will not ever sell your personal information to anyone.
EU regulators fine WhatsApp €225 million for failing to disclose how it shares user data with other Facebook companies.
Fire every single mid-level bureaucrat, every civil servant in the administrative state. Replace them with our people. And when the courts stop you … stand before the country like Andrew Jackson did and say, 'The chief justice has made his ruling. Now let…
Context Advice he said he would give Trump for a second term: mass-replace the civil service and openly defy the Supreme Court if it objects. The Jackson line he cites is the (likely apocryphal) response to Worcester v. Georgia — the ruling Jackson's government ignored on the way to the Trail of Tears. Vance has been asked about the quote repeatedly since becoming…
We're confident in the safety of the 737 MAX. Safety is a core value for everyone at Boeing and the safety of our airplanes, our customers' passengers and their crews is always our top priority.
Boeing agrees to pay over US$2.5 billion to settle US criminal charges related to the 737 MAX crashes; admits employees deceived FAA about MCAS.
Algorithmic feed ranking, content moderation, and amplification choices are protected editorial speech of the platform; Texas HB20 unconstitutionally compels speech by limiting Meta's ability to curate its product. (NetChoice, LLC v. Paxton (consolidated;…
Algorithmic amplification of third-party content is not the platform's own speech; Facebook is a neutral interactive computer service entitled to full § 230 immunity for the editorial outcomes of its ranking algorithms. (Force v. Facebook, Inc. (and progeny…
Why it matters The same ranking-and-amplification system is described as 'protected editorial speech' when Meta wants to defeat must-carry laws, and as 'neutral conduit conduct of an interactive computer service' when Meta wants §…
Full record →AI will probably, most likely, sort of lead to the end of the world. But in the meantime, there will be great companies created with serious machine learning.
Context Delivered with a laugh line, months before he co-founded OpenAI — the company now racing to build the technology in question. The joke's structure is the alarming part: existential risk and shareholder upside in the same breath, priced as compatible. A decade later he runs the leading lab and the quote circulates without the second sentence; both halves…
Competition is for losers. … Capitalism and competition are opposites.
Context Not a gotcha — the thesis of his own business book: "monopoly is the condition of every successful business," and founders should build companies that escape competition entirely. Silicon Valley adopted it as a bible. Read against the platform's antitrust and regulatory-capture files, it is the strategy document for much of what those files record.
Most importantly, I no longer believe that freedom and democracy are compatible.
Context Written in Thiel's own essay, not paraphrased by a critic. The same piece argues that "the vast increase in welfare beneficiaries and the extension of the franchise to women — two constituencies that are notoriously tough for libertarians — have rendered the notion of 'capitalist democracy' into an oxymoron," and calls on libertarians to find "an escape…
People just submitted it. I don't know why. They “trust me.” Dumb f*cks.
Context Sent at 19, shortly after launching TheFacebook, about the users handing him "over 4,000 emails, pictures, addresses." Zuckerberg confirmed authorship to The New Yorker and said he "absolutely" regrets the messages. The entry stays on the ledger because the regret concerns the wording, while the two decades of privacy consent decrees, FTC fines, and…
