ChatGPT reached 100 million users in two months. In the Senate its maker was handed a study saying a model like his can predict what people will believe. Josh Hawley reads the paper into the recording. Feed a model the media diet of one group and it guesses how that group answers surveys. Hawley's next question is what that does to an election. Sam Altman says he is nervous about it. He wants rules that force companies to tell people when they are reading something a machine wrote. His comparison is photoshopped pictures. People learned to doubt those, and this will be the same thing on steroids. The researcher sitting next to him adds the part that lands harder. "One of the things I'm most concerned about with GPT-4 is that we don't know what it's trained on. I guess Sam knows, but the rest of us do not." What a model is trained on decides which way it leans. Two years after that hearing the list is still not public.

Instagram's own research said 32% of teen girls felt worse about their bodies because of the app. Senator Ed Markey reads those numbers back to Adam Mosseri on the video, including the share of teen users who traced thoughts of suicide to it. Mosseri corrects that one figure, 1% and not 6%, and says any loss of life is a tragedy. Nothing here was about breaking a law. The questions were about what parents can switch off, and that is the part a company decides on its own. Asked to back a bill letting 13 to 15 year olds wipe their data, he answers that 13 isn't a magic number. Teens lie about their age anyway. Will he back a ban on targeting ads at children, yes or no. He believes it's valuable for ads to be relevant. Markey tries once more and gets the same shape of answer, then says out loud that the answers are too vague to legislate on. Another senator had already told him his questions were yes or no questions. That hearing was in December 2021, and the bill they kept asking about still isn't law.

Over 85% of online searches in the US go through Google. In this video the chairman of an antitrust panel asks Sundar Pichai why his company steals content from honest businesses. David Cicilline reads one case into the record first. A man called Brian Warner watched traffic to his site drop 80% after Google changed what it showed, and he laid off half his staff. Warner's line is the part that sticks: if someone came to him with an idea for a website today, he'd tell them to run. Strip out the word steal and the question stays. Who decides which businesses get found, and that call sits inside one company. Pichai says he disagrees with the characterization. He had met small businesses just last week. Then come the numbers he brought. 1.4M small businesses supported, $385B of activity, and a Texas company selling kettlebells. Cicilline cuts in. The question was specific, and he says the answer doesn't match what months of investigation turned up. That was July 2020. In August 2024 a federal judge ruled Google had kept its search monopoly illegally, partly by paying to be the default everywhere.

Facebook had almost 400 million users in Europe when Mark Zuckerberg sat down in Brussels in May 2018. The format let him pick which questions to answer. That's how this video runs. Philippe Lamberts, a Belgian MEP, hands him six yes or no questions on paper. Will Facebook publish who pays for political ads, with amounts and targets. Can a user opt out of targeted advertising completely. Is Facebook a publisher or a neutral platform. Nobody there accused him of a crime. Those are the answers a regulator needs before it can write any rule about him. Then he talks for 22 minutes about audits, fake accounts and the work his teams do. Partway through he stops and asks for the second question again, because he missed it. That was the one about letting people escape targeted ads. Lamberts gets the microphone back. "I asked you six yes and no questions. I got not a single answer." Then he says the format was requested for a reason. Three days later a privacy group filed the complaint that became question two. In January 2023 Ireland's regulator fined Meta €390M and ruled it can't make personalized ads the price of using the app.

Walt Disney employed about 600 people in 1947. That year he sat in front of a congressional committee and named the man who led a strike at his studio as a communist. This video is that testimony. He frames the strike as a personal betrayal, because signing with the union meant selling his artists down the river. The organizer, Herbert Sorrell, told him an election would take 2 years and a strike was faster. Disney says he laughed and promised to make a dust bowl out of his plant. He isn't accusing anyone of a crime. He's telling a committee which of his own people he believes belong to a political group, under oath, with reporters present. Then he goes further. He lists the publications that attacked him during the strike and calls them communist fronts. One name he reads out is the League of Women Voters. Asked what should be done, he says they ought to be smoked out and shown for what they are. Within months the industry had a blacklist. It ran over a decade and ended hundreds of careers. The studio he was protecting is worth about $170B today. The union he refused to sign with still represents its animators.

Elon Musk paid $44B for Twitter and cut roughly 80% of the staff. In this video a BBC reporter tells him hateful content has gone up, and Musk asks for one example. The reporter says he personally sees more of it in his own feed. Musk asks what he means by hateful. The answer is content that solicits a reaction, maybe slightly racist or slightly sexist. Musk asks whether slightly sexist should be banned. And now the question that ends it. Name one. The reporter says he honestly can't, because he stopped using that feed weeks ago. Musk tells him he doesn't know what he's talking about, and when the reporter pushes back: "You just lied." Neither man can settle it. One made a claim he couldn't support, the other owns the only data that would prove or disprove it. The reporter falls back on a research institute. Musk answers that people say all sorts of nonsense. The question underneath was whether anybody outside the company can check what a platform does to what you read. It never got asked.

Goldman Sachs sold $600M of a security its own head of division had called, in writing, "one shitty deal." Carl Levin reads that email out to Daniel Sparks, who ran the mortgage desk, and then keeps reading it off the screen through the whole video. He uses the phrase 11 times. The question underneath never changes: how much did you sell to your clients after June 22, 2007. Sparks says he doesn't know the number. He says the price would have reflected the levels at which buyers wanted to invest. Levin then reads the internal sales emails in order. June 26, July 1, July 24, August 22, each one putting Timberwolf at the top of the sales priority list. One of the sales leaders writes about the buyers: "I'm all over these guys." Sparks's defense is that the email was about his own performance. Nobody told the customers what the firm thought of the thing they were buying. Three months after this hearing Goldman paid $550M to settle a fraud case over a different deal. One of the funds that bought Timberwolf collapsed within weeks.

Theranos was valued at $9B. In this video the SEC sits Elizabeth Holmes in front of a camera and asks how many tests her machine could actually run. She doesn't know. Probably tens of them, she says, which she agrees means fewer than 100, and she can't name anyone who would know. A lawyer asks whether those tests were validated. They were validated by what the company understood validation to mean back then, she says, and that understanding changed later. Asked who read the guidance document they validated against, she names whoever ran assay development. Asked who that was, she doesn't know. The machine gets three names in one answer: the mini lab, the 4 series, and the Edison. Walgreens supplied the first one during due diligence. By then Walgreens had it running in 40 Arizona drugstores, where ordinary people walked in and had blood drawn. Theranos later admitted more than 1 in 10 results given to Arizona customers were voided or corrected, and paid $4.65M back to about 76,000 of them. Across these sessions she says some version of "I don't know" more than 600 times. She was the one person paid to know.

Warren Buffett bet $1M that an index fund nobody manages would beat 5 hedge funds that people were paid handsomely to manage. He explains the whole thing himself in this video, standing in front of the Berkshire meeting with the running score on a screen behind him. The terms were simple. The other side picks any 5 funds of funds, each of those picks its own managers underneath, and the clock runs 10 years. By 2015 the scoreboard on the wall read 65.7% for the index against 21.9% for the professionals. The gap isn't about stock picking. The funds charged a management fee, then the funds inside them charged another, and both layers came out before any performance showed up. The number you can act on is your own expense ratio. Look it up for whatever you hold, because 2% a year compounds against you exactly the way returns compound for you. Buffett has said for years that his own estate instructions are 90% in a low-cost index fund. The man on the other side of the bet conceded before the 10 years were up.

GM knew about a faulty ignition switch for about 10 years. The part that fixed it cost well under a dollar, and at least 124 people died. Mary Barra had been chief executive for 2 months when she sat down in front of Congress, and this video is that hearing. Fred Upton walks her through what the documents show. Complaints about the Cobalt switch came in for 2 years, and in 2006 the part was quietly redesigned. She answers that she wasn't in that part of the company then, and that this is why there's an investigation. Upton asks what should have happened. Barra describes the normal path: engineers look at it, they raise it to a cross-functional team, that team takes it to a decision group. The redesigned switch kept the same part number, so from the outside nothing had changed. That detail is why it took another 8 years to connect the crashes. For anyone with a car: open the NHTSA site, type in your VIN, and it lists open recalls for that exact vehicle. The fix is free at any dealer, however old the car is. GM paid $900M to settle the criminal case. No individual was charged.

Apple takes up to 30% of what you pay inside an app, and it has never once raised that number. Tim Cook makes that his defense in this video, in front of an antitrust committee in 2020. His argument: before the App Store, software went through shops that charged high fees, or shipped on discs that nobody could update. Developers set their own prices, he says, never pay for shelf space, and for the vast majority of apps keep 100% of the money. The commission lands only where a developer gets the customer on an Apple device and the service is used on one. In more than 10 years, he says, the rate has only ever gone down. Both halves are true, and the thing they leave out is choice. If you sell a digital subscription on an iPhone, there's no second shop to try. If you're buying rather than selling, the useful habit is to subscribe on the company's own website instead of inside the app. The price is often lower by exactly the share Apple takes. Epic Games sued Apple over this a month after the hearing, and the court later ordered Apple to let apps point you at that website.

Mark Zuckerberg said back in 2018 that engagement based ranking is dangerous, because people are drawn to interact with extreme content. Frances Haugen worked on that ranking inside Facebook, and in this video she explains what it does to the price of an ad. The same system that decides what goes in your feed also prices advertising. An ad that pulls more comments and reshares costs less than one that doesn't. A divisive ad can end up 5 to 10 times cheaper per impression than a calm one, because outrage is easier to provoke than empathy. In her words, the platform subsidizes hate and division, and that's why she wants a flat rate on political ads. Then the number that sticks. When she left, the team hunting coordinated influence operations had 17 people, while the company was claiming 200. You can switch the ranking off on your own account. Facebook and Instagram both still have a chronological feed, it just isn't the default and it resets. Zuckerberg's 2018 line ended with the reassuring part: don't worry, AI will save us.

Google handles more than 90% of all searches on the internet. Sundar Pichai sat in front of Congress in 2018. A congressman held up his iPhone and asked whether Google knew he had just moved one seat to the left. That's in this video. Pichai answers "not by default", then starts explaining that there may be a service you opted into. The congressman cuts him off. It's yes or no, he says, you make $100M a year, you can answer this. Important detail: Pichai says he can't answer without more details, and he's technically right. Location History is one setting. Web and App Activity is a separate one, and it stores where you were too. 4 months before this hearing the AP showed Google kept saving location data from people who had switched Location History off. Both switches sit in your Google account under Data and Privacy, and most people have only ever turned off the first one. He never managed to say no to a yes or no question about the phone in the room with him.

Meta made $134B of revenue in 2023. Mark Zuckerberg is asked in this video to put some of it into a fund for the families sitting behind him. The hearing is from January 2024, and Josh Hawley is reading Instagram's own internal research back to Mark Zuckerberg. "We make body image issues worse for one in three teen girls." That sentence is from Meta's own study, not from a critic. Important detail: Hawley never argues about whether it happened. He asks who was fired over it. Zuckerberg answers that the company studies these things to improve the service. Asked a third time, he says he isn't going to answer that. Then Hawley points at the parents in the room holding photographs of their children and asks whether a single victim has been compensated. The answer is no. The reason given is that it isn't his job. Meta still hasn't paid a dollar to anyone in that room, and it doesn't have to. A law written in 1996, before any of this existed, says the platform isn't responsible for what gets posted on it.

Jensen Huang paid $200 for 20% of Nvidia. That company is worth about $4.6T today. He tells it himself in this video. He was 30, had never taken a business class, and bought a Mac just so he could make a presentation for venture capitalists. Important detail: the $200 wasn't a funding round. The lawyer incorporating the company asked how much cash he had on him, took it, and priced the shares off that. The other 2 founders each put in $200 and got 20% each as well. The first 6 months were 3 guys sitting in a townhouse in Fremont with nothing to do. The big event of the day was picking where to eat, until somebody asked for donuts in the fridge. He never finished the business plan. He read 3 or 4 chapters of a book on starting a high tech company, decided that finishing it would have killed them, and went to work instead. His line about investors is the useful part. They don't fund business plans, because plans are easy to write, and your reputation gets there before your deck does. Save this before you spend another week on your slides.

Microsoft had put $13B into OpenAI when the board fired Sam Altman on a Friday afternoon. He was back in the building 5 days later. In this video he's asked to walk through that weekend, and the first thing he says is that it was the most painful professional experience of his life. Then he adds the part nobody expects. He says it was also like going to your own eulogy, watching people say great things about you while you have no idea what happens next. Important detail: he doesn't claim he held it together. He describes the month and a half after as a fugue state, drifting through the days, wanting to crawl into a cave. He was running the company that whole time. Almost all of the staff signed a letter saying they'd leave with him. The board that fired him was gone within a week. Save this if you think the people at the top always know what's going on. The line he keeps coming back to is that the road to AGI should be a giant power struggle, and that he expects more of them.

American families lost $11.2T of net worth in 2008, and Warren Buffett says the people running the big banks walked away rich anyway. He's talking in this video 10 years after the crash, and he opens by admitting he learned nothing new from it. His picture of the bubble is a party. Everybody knew the clock was running, and nobody wanted to be the one who left early. "It was like Cinderella going to the party," he says. Everything turns to ice and pumpkins at midnight, but nobody leaves until one minute before, and then the rush for the door can't be handled. Important detail: he doesn't put it all on Wall Street. The lenders, the banks and the public were in it together, because it was fun while it lasted. Then comes the part people skip. He says the heads of the big institutions got in trouble and were disgraced to some degree, and they still went away rich. So the incentive system, in his words, hasn't improved a lot from what it was 10 years ago. Save this and watch his face when he says he probably shouldn't name names.