Masters in BusinessBloomberg Radio host Barry Ritholtz speaks to Matt Levine, a Bloomberg Opinion columnist and the author of Money Stuff, a daily newsletter about Wall Street and finance. A former investment banker at Goldman Sachs, he was a mergers and acquisitions lawyer at Wachtell, Lipton, Rosen & Katz; a clerk for the US Court of Appeals for the Third Circuit; and an editor of Dealbreaker.
This is Master's in Business with very rid holds on Bloomberg Radio.
This week on the podcast, I have an extra special guest. Matt Levine, writes the Money Stuff daily newsletter for Bloomberg. Matt has become this fascinating character in the world of Wall Street research and analysis and commentary. He brings an unusual background as both an m and a attorney and a derivative specialist at two of the best firms in the world for those spaces, and so he has this unique way of taking these very complicated, sophisticated ideas and making them both accessible and amusing to both finance professionals and lay people. Nobody in the world writes about markets, finance, derivatives, hedge funds, you name it, the way Matt does, and and it's why he has such an amazing following. Over three hundred thousand people get his daily missive. I found this conversation to be really intriguing, and I think you will as well. With no further ado, my conversation with Money Stuffs, Matt Levine.
Thanks for having me. I walked all the way across this floor to get here.
Not easy right to not easy to get to the broadcast.
Weirdly, I went upstairs and then came downstairs.
That's right, So let's talk. This is really the only kind of odd question I'm going to ask, and everything else is all very career oriented, so hopefully this isn't too embarrassing. But let's ask this. So you're undergrad at Harvard, where you majored in classics, and you list your activities as quad whiffle ball and tequila Tuesday, which doesn't strike me as you take it very seriously. You were valed victorian Harvard. You never mentioned your Ivy League education.
You're quoting my LinkedIn, which probably my proud of social media, since is my LinkedIn is I would like to think a little bit funny, And yes I was. I was. I was, I believe, the co commissioner of quadwiffle wall very, which is neither like prestigious, neither prestigious nor nor athletic nor organizationally impressive.
But I had to dig that up. I had to dig up that you evalid Victorian.
I wasn't really Validictori, you were not. I didn't give a speech.
I like, okay, so you you were. You just didn't accept the.
No, no, no, there's there's not a thing called valedictoria and I want a prize.
For So where where is this coming from? You? Not the first time you've heard no.
No, no, I did win a prize for having the highest GPI. So there's like a technical sense, but not the most technical sets. That was not the validatory Yeah, editory.
I never hear you talk about the Ivy League. You go to law school at Yale. It's almost as if you're embarrassed by the whole bruhaha around the IVS.
Uh. I don't know, it's like a little embarrassing to say.
That you, Well, the old joke is right.
How do you tell someone however, they'll tell you.
They'll tell you, But you're the exception to that rule.
There are a lot of exceptions, but I do I will say that like in my in my column, I fairly regularly have occasion to disclose that I worked at Goldban because I'm often writing about Goldman and it feels like somehow dishonest not to mention that I worked at Golvin. So I get a lot of my bragging in that way because because it used to be and it's less true now, it used to be that like there is a lot of like you could be like, oh, I worked at Golvin. I was like, oh, you worked at Goldvin. Now like that's a little tarnished, but there's still some good.
All right. So you go to Yale law school, you're on the Law of You given your current career as a writer, did you did you publish a lore of you artcle?
You know? I did? I published it what it's called the Comments, like a very short one about this great tax law case with this guy who like won the lottery and then wanted to get his lottery winnings treated as capital gains. He lost, But I thought that was so funny, and then it had nothing to do with like anything I did for the next like seven years after law school. But it's like, you know, like it could have been a money stuff section, Like it was pretty close to what I.
Do now very much. So, so we'll skip you teaching Latin because my brain can't wrap my head around.
That that was fun. It's pretty bad.
So you say, I know, I'll become an M and a attorney at Walktail Lipton, perhaps the most infamous M and a law shop.
Yeah, I mean, like the normal thing to do with a classics degree is conclude that you should not continue to be a class assistan and therefore go to law school. So that was pretty pretty straight forward decision. But yeah, then I went to walked out afterwards because it seemed like because like, you know, you're you're a law student, you don't know what a law firm is. And then like you can spend your second year summer at a law firm, and if you spend your second year summer at most law firms, they take you out to fancy lunches at the end of the summer, not knowing what a law firm is. But if you go to walk tell, they just put you to work, and so you end the summer knowing what a lot from us. And I was like, I might as well find out.
So I imagine it's endless hours focused on minutia.
What was your experience, Like, there's some of that, but like you have to like like, yeah, you're like writing merger agreements and then the other side is marking up the merger agreement, and like you're arguing over commas and stuff, and I love that. I thought that was really fun. So I was very interested in that stuff. But there's also a lot of like at way Tel. You know, I was at Wachtel in two thousand and five to two thousand and seven, so really mirror the peak of a big merger's boom. And so I saw a lot of deals and it was very much you know, I read Barbarians at the Gate when I was like in high school or whatever, and I was like, this seems cool. And then you had to an MNA law fram being like I'm gonna do like like MNA stuff, and like it really did. I tell people like there's this time when we you know, we had like two sets of bidders for some company, Like I'm in conference rooms on different floors and they'd be like, you know, uh uh, they'd be like, this is our final effert, but don't shop to the other side. And we're like, h We'll go to the bathroom, shop to the other side. It's real, like you know, like the sort of like high drama of of of like the highest drama in finances and like big ticket M and A and as a junior m and a lawyer like I was, you know, doing a lot of marketing up mergergrounds, but I was also like kind of exposed to the highdrama like I was in like these board meetings I was in, like I got to see a lot of cool stuff.
So how do you how do you shift from m and a legal work to structuring derivatives at Goldman?
Uh So I worked in this very weird desk at Goldman that uh it was corporate equity derivatives. And so the thing we were doing was sort of solving like often securities law or tax or accounting problems for people with like derivatives. So like a component of it was like the standard deriv his math right, and so like you know, I got there and I learned through it as math right. But a component of it was also like thinking through all these like legal and regulatory and quasi legal regimes, like the you know, like the counting standards. And I said that everyone on that desk was a good lawyer. Some of us had a lot of degrees, but like the other people, the people who didn't have a lot agrees, who just like were Goldman lifers, were like would have been really good lawyers because it was a very like, you know sort of there was a practice that was like spotting issues and sort of thinking through rules and thinking like how we could get through the rules in a way that advantage us. In addition to like sort of standard financi stuff.
Seems very legalistic. What led you to leap from Walcktail Goldman? Was it the hours? Really?
I tell people I'm the only person who went to Goldman for the hours.
I was for lowering your billable work week.
Yeah, I was working. I loved walktaut. I thought it was really fascinating and interesting. But it was you know, it's like notoriously the hardest working law firm, and this was in like a big m and a boom, and so I was just working all the time. And I got a call from a guy who actually had left, walked out and gone to Goldman, and he said, do you want a job here? And I said, is it better than this job? And he said, it's a little better than this job. And I was like, walk me through your week, and he like walked me through. I was like, yeah, that's a little better than this job. So I left for the hours.
So you stay at Goldman for a couple of years.
For four years, the longest I've been at a job until this job.
So you're there right into the teeth of the financial crisis. What was that.
Like I was just telling someone a friend is going to Sonoma for a vacation, and I was like, I remember, I like woke up in Napa. I took this vacation where you know, I was worried I wouldn't be able to go because with this deal going, and I wrote this long memo to people being like, this is what's going to happen if the deal goes because I was trying to be a responsible citizen at the desk, and then by the time I got to Napa, I was like, I don't think this deal is going to go. And then I woke up in lehmanhead filed, and you know it's like this is a cliche and in finance says this, but like I remember walking around the day Lehman had filed in Napa looking at people who are being normal and thinking, how are you not freaking out? Because like I was freaking out, you know I was. It seemed like the end of the world. But no, it's wild. I Like the thing that I think back on now a lot is what did I do because there was you know, we had this we had this spreadsheet of just like every deal that that like one thing. One aspect of what I did in my job was convertible bond underwriting, and so I had the spadsheet of every convertible bond deal that we or anyone else in the market did. And it stopped in like September of two thousand and eight, and it restarted in I want to say, March of two thousand and nine, but like only a little bit. And so for six months there were no deals, Like we did not like print any revenue, We did not do any deals. And I don't like, I didn't take six months off, Like I came into the office every day, I didn't leave early. I didn't like take long lunches. I don't know what I was doing for six months. I think it was just like sort of walking around panicking, but like you know, like scraping sticks together and like trying to find deals to do. But like we didn't do anything, Like we could have just taken the six months off. And I think back on that time and think, you know, it wouldn't have been nice if we're just not gone to work, But no, it was. It was a scary time, and it was you know, there were there were like a number of layoffs. You know, there were a couple of rounds of layoffs, and you know, within my first two years at goldbun and I didn't get laid off, and I was like, oh, okay, I'm probably safe for a while.
You said about that job, I felt both that the job was bad and I was bad at it.
Over time, I mean, I I liked, I like learned a lot from that job, and it's like really helped me to what I do today because it really touched on a lot of elements of the bank. You know. It was all this like structuring and like tax and legal and accounting stuff. It was derivatives math. It was like working with the traders on like risk management. It was underwriting, you know, it was like doing investment banking and underwriting public offerings. It was dealing with like the sort of guts of the bank and like new product development and capital and balance sheet. So I learned a lot, but like early on, I was really learning a lot because I was sort of like building stuff and learning how to like build you know, like learning how to use Excel and just like sort of just kind of like figuring out all this stuff. And then over time the job more says you get more senior into just like getting on planes and flying around and giving market updates to corporate treasures, and that I found less fulfilling. I was learning less and I was bad at that, Like I was good at the like sitting in the lab during up to Rhotis, I was okay with that, but like I was bad at the like getting on planes and sweet talking corporate treasures, and so over time it was a less and less good fit for me.
So what inspired the pivot to writing.
I don't have a good answer. I like could always vaguely imagined myself as a writer without doing anything about it, and I really I didn't want to be a corporate equity to ride as a banker anymore. And you know, in general, when you have jobs like these, it's very hard to find a new job because you're working all the time. And so my plan was actually to quit and not do anything and figure out what my next step was. And I like went to my very nice boss and I was like, I'm quitting, and he said, what are you going to do it? And I was like, nothing, I'm going to figure out my next step. And he's like, well, don't quit now, like take some time off and figure out, and you know, it's very sweet, like like sort of thoughtful response. And then he was like, we'll give you a bunch of time off, but for now, go back to your desk. And so I went back to my desk and I worked for like three more weeks, and then I saw the deal breaker, the great like comedic financial blog was hiring, and so I shot it in an application and they hired me, and I was like, Okay, I'm gone. But there was really very little thought to it. You know. I had not been like blogging on the side, or like practicing at night or anything like that. It's just like I had this vague itch that I was going to be a writer. I was at a point in my life where I was very willing to gamble, you know. I was, I didn't have kids. I had saved a bunch of money at Goldman in part because I really did think I was going to take time off and figure out what my next thing was. And so it felt like a fairly lowist time to take a gamble on something that would pay a lot less and uh, and that I didn't know that i'd be good at, you know, but I figure i'd give it a shot.
So making a lot of money at an investment bank that you leave to take a much lower paid job as a writer sounds a little parallel to Michael Lewis and Salomon Brothers. Ever, think about that as as someone who blaze that trail before you.
Oh, of course, I mean I wouldn't like go around saying that because like, you know what, you know what I mean, like, yeah, eleven, You're not gonna leave Goldman and be like I'm going to go be Michael Lewis, right, because like that's a little that's a little implausible. But no, I mean, of course, like and I don't think I even thought about it at the time. I just like it's just like in the background of what you think of, like how you perceive the possibilities of like the financial writing world. But yeah, no, I actually talked. I was on his pod the other week and I talked about that, you know, we talked about that exact point. Yeah, in some ways there were parallels between his career.
Really really intriguing. So let's talk about some of your favorite subjects. Everything is securities, fraud.
Explain if a bad thing happens at a public company public company, does a bad thing. This is ceo sexually harassed to someone. If the company gets hacked, if it's polluting. Usually what happens is like the stock drops, and when the stock drops, the shareholders and sometimes even the sec will sue the company saying, essentially, you didn't tell us about this bad thing, and then when it came out, the stock drop, so we bought the stock before at this inflated price because we were deceived. You were lying to us. You were saying that you had a code of ethics, but then your CEO is sexually asking people, or you were saying that you like were careful at the environment, but you were like dumping pollution, or you were saying that you like used good passwords, but used bad passwords and you got hacked. Right, So, anytime like a bad thing happens and the stock goes down, there will be a lawsuit of over securities, fraud and interesting because like often the bad thing has like diffuse victims or unclear victims, or it's unclear how to quantify the harm. So, like you have a sexual harassment scandal, there will be some number of people at the company who are victims of that, and they will have different stories if they were to sue, you need a lawyer to kind of get all of their stories. And then like the company would say, well, these stories are different, and like you know, will argue them separately, and like how do you quantify their damages? And it's it's kind of a mess. Whereas if the stock goes down by a billion dollars, then like some securities lawyer will say, well, the shareholders lost a billion dollars, will bring a very straightforward class action on you half the shaholders. And so you see these cases where like the company pays a big securities settlement because like it's not that like the shareholders of the company are the most direct or the most harmed to victims of whatever the bad thing is, But they're the easiest victims, right, They're the easiest victims for a plaintiffs lawyer to like round up, file a class action on behalf of quantify their damages, settle it for ten cents on the dollar. And so it's just like a fascinating development in American securities law, where like there are so many bad things get litigated as securities fraud because it's like an easy way to litigate.
It and let's do the related topic, is everything insider trading? Because if you're selling stock as an insider and there's some everything is securities fraud going on, seems that that would naturally follow one follow the other.
Yeah, and I've read about that. Yeah, I mean, like you can. Definitely it is unusual for like a CEO to like get arrested for selling stock while he was, you know, doing sexual harassment or whatever, but like it's not unheard of, and there are private lawsuits that do sort of express exactly that theory that everything is also insider trading.
So you wrote a lot about all the meme stocks. What was your biggest takeaway from that era.
I was struck by, like the ability of retail investors collectively to move stock wises right, Like I was not expecting that, I was. I mean, I think people confidently declared it on Reddit and I was like, sure, but it's retail. And then like, in fact, these stocks went up and stayed up for very long periods through like the actions of retail investors and like people creating gamma squeezes by buying options, And I was like, yeah, sure, like that works in theory, that's not really gonna work, and they kind of did work. The other takeaway that I think is interesting is like just from the corporate finance side, I think like there are some companies where they were like, we're going to make our investor relations and corporate finance strategy be about retail investors. And I think that that was never a thing that people did for you know, the last like twenty or thirty years, because you know, everyone sort of understood that the money was in was in institutional investors, and like there's not an efficient way to reach and like rely on retail investors for funding. And in the meme slack craze, AMC very early on was like, oh yeah, we can do that, Like we can we can raise money, we can do tons of at the market offerings to retail investors. We can offer popcorn to our shareholders to keep our stock price up, and we can like really, you know, do our financing in rehail markets by being a memestock. And I think like the way to do memestock investor relations like had to be kind of invented on the fly, and it's fascinating the way people did it now. I don't think it's like permanent, right if you're a CEO. Now you can't be like, let's become a memestock and rely on retail investors because I think it's like it's always been a crapshoot, and you know, it's much less common than it was two years ago. But I think it was like a fascinating like lesson from that.
And some of these companies managed when the stock price went went meteoric. We're able to do secondaries, We're able to do refinancings. They took me full advantage.
AMC, like you know, was like recapitalized, like filing going concern warnings like we're going to go bankrupty, you know, we run movie theaters in a pandemic. We have all this debt. And then they just refinanced their debt and like and you know, bought a lot of it down because they could sell stock at very high prices. They had an asset that was not you know, that was a very untraditional you know, like we have this ability to tap retail investors to refinance, and they played it really fascinatingly.
Yeah, and it seems like it was clearly not the sort of thing buy and hold investors want to play with. Off the highs. Most of these stocks are down. The meme stocks are down seventy eighty ninety plus percent. They've all gotten taken a big hit.
Yeah, I mean it was. It lasted much longer than I expected, but it didn't last forever.
Let's talk about another subject that you come back to regularly, which is the philosophy of active versus passive investing. It seems like active managers, who have been underperforming according to the academics for a long time, are constantly throwing novel new theories at the passive worlds, trying to take them down a notch. You cover this on a regular basis, tell us a little bit about that space.
So my favorite part of it is not really about active passive. My favorite part is right now, is this notion that like, owning all of the companies is bad.
Owning all the companies in a sector because you're an index investor somehow leads to price fixing.
So's the That's like the starting point of it. But I think it's like a bigger theory than that, right, I mean, I think it's that, And sometimes my headline is sometimes like should index ones be illegal?
Right?
The basic idea is that if all of the companies in a sector, or all of the companies in the country or in the world, you know, all the company if they are all owned by twelve people. Right. John Coates, the Harvard law professor, has a book out called The Problem of Twelve where he's like, yeah, there's like twelve people and the people are like, you know, the people who run Black Rock, Vanguard, you know, State Street, but also like Fidelity, Right, Like, this is not really a passive question. This is a very large diversified investor question. Right. If like twelve people control you know, fifty one percent of the stock in all of the companies, then it sort of stands to reason that those people will want stuff to happen that is broadly good for all of their companies, rather than for one company to compete against another company, and that the CEOs of those companies who are for douce shares for these shaolders will think like, yeah, I got to do what is right for these shareolders. And so that happens in a lot of ways, and the alleged to happen in a lot of ways. And like the starting point for all of this is some papers that people published about price fixing. Like the idea is that if all of the airlines are owned by the same dozen investors, then the airlines will not compete hard on price, and like they will try to divvy up roots in a way that keeps prices high. Because if you compete on price, you're essentially, you know, mostly taking a dollar away from your competitor, and like that dollar ends up in the hands of your shareholders anyway. So why would you compete. Why wouldn't you just try to grow the pie for everyone? And it's like super controversial, and like the empirical evidence where it is not super clear, and.
Like especially focusing on airlines as opposed to tech or industrials or they cherry pick that sector, which kind of reveals how bankrupt the argument is. But keep going, like.
They are fascinating stories about like this is not in public companies, this is not the problem as well. But like ride sharing startups, like soft Bank was financing all these ride sharing startups and then like the kind of didn't feeding against each other, and they kind of like divvate up the world, you know, and it's like, well, yeah, they're like subsidiaries of SoftBank, right, And if you think about the world as being like all companies are subsidiaries of black Rock, then it's just like an interesting analytical framework.
But you but you need that leap, which is inally the part that nobody talks about is, hey, we're running a ten trillion dollar company. I know, let's put that at risk to reduce competition in the airline section. Okay, but such an absurd argument.
Okay, But but like here's where it is universally accepted to be true, which is ESG think about like what black Rock is, right, Like, they don't really gain from one company like improving its competitive position against another company, because they own all the companies.
What they get, that's their business. Their business is to own all the companies, and they gain when they run that business better.
Yes, and so like broadly speaking, competition is good for them because like competition sort of you know, does ultimately grow the pie. But like there are places, and like the place that I think is sort of obvious is like Blackrock has and they do less of this now because of political pressures, but they have put up papers and they put out you know, strongly worded letters to CEOs saying you need to take climate risk seriously because climate risk is a systemic risk that affects all of our companies, and like that strikes me as straight forwardly true. And Blackrock is saying, you know, we have to care about not just like year to year bottom line of these companies. We have to care about like the systemic, like long run sustainability of like the entire capitalist system.
Which by the way, is their way of doing business. Vanguard hasn't done that, statement hasn't done that. Yeah, I agree, And the competition amongst the three of those is why there's no real price fixing. If I don't think it's going the other way.
I don't want to argue for like there's price fixing in airlines because of Blackrock, But I do think that, like, if you are a broadly diversified, enormous asset manager, you do have to think about your portfolio primarily in systemic ways and not in like competitive decisions that your individual companies are making. And if you're thinking about your portfolio systemically like that creates different incentives for you and for your portfolio companies managers. Then if they all had shareholders who only owned their company and they were just trying to maximize their company's share all sorts of like ESG stuff is about externalities, right, It's about a company saying, we can make more money by doing bad stuff that causes externalities to other companies, but we're not going to do that. I think part of why they're not going to do that is because like their shareholders absorb those externalities, right, and like that's like the simplest form of the story, right, and like then you can be like, well, one thing that causes externalities is like airlines cutting prices, and like that seems bad, and stopping them from doing that it seems bad. Another thing that causes externalities is like pollution, and stopping them from doing that is good. Right, Like there's all sorts of things, and some of them are good and some of them are bad. But like this notion that like a systemic shareholder is doing systemic stewardship and that it wants its companies to act in a way that benefits all of its portfolio rather than just that one company, I think like makes total intuitive sense. And then like you're gonna have questions about the individual cases.
So I wanted to bring it up because you bring it up every couple of months, there's always some crazy law review article or some wacky that that are at the outer limits of how the world really works, how how indexing works, and how big asset managers like black Rocker vangor to state street work. But if we pretend that they're colluding, well maybe index funds are illegal.
I don't really think they should be illegal. But there are people, and I I've made fun of the people who like really strongly believe they should be illegal.
Now do they really believe that or are they just hired by active managers to push them facility because I ideal going on, hey push the fish.
I don't think most of them even believe that index fund should be leg I think they I think that, like me, they find they find this like an interesting sort of theoretical point. And I agree with you that like a lot of them feel like empirically sort of pushing the limits of what is plausible, but like there's some nub of it that like just seems uncontroversially true, and then it's just about like sort of figuring out like what the like, how to frame it and understand.
It, where's the line how far you could take it?
Right?
Last topic that you talk about on a regular basis derivatives, high frequency trading, hedge funds, and down and short selling. Let's talk a little bit about SPACs, which you covered pretty aggressively during the SPAC frenzy over the past couple of years. Yeah, it's over, it's done, right, Are you going to see this again or is this another another ten years have to go by before this pops up again? Because you remember mid two thousand SPACs were a thing as well.
Right, there was a long period where SPACs were like a known technology but like notoriously shady, and then in like the recent boom, they became kind of like mainstream and popular. I don't know if they'll go back to being like a notoriously shady thing. I think it's a plausible tool, right, I think that, like you know, before SPACs there is a bit of a boom and direct listings US and that's still.
Kicking around, been talking about that forever.
You'll still see an occasional direct listing. Like that's just like a technology that like someone built and that was it's kind of domesticated and is now part of the toolbox. I think SPACs are different because like you can't just like go to a company and be like, well you can do an IPO, you can do a spec because you need to have a pre existing spack lying around. Right. The spack experience, you know, was very lucrative for spack sponsors for you know, the first half of that boom, and then more and more sponsors got into it and a lot of them ended up stuck and like with spacks, that will expire and they will eat a million dollars or whatever of setup costs and feel burned. So I think that you'll be less likely to see people starting spacks like on spack as it were, and trying to you know, find a deal. So I don't know, I think it will kind of dissipate. But there's still stuff. I mean, like I really like Bill Ackman's spark, you know his like ah, his spack where you don't raise the fund first. Like that solves like a number of issues. But one issue that it solves is like it's not as risky for the sponsor upfront, right, like because you said up the thing and it's like, well, you have as long as you need and like you're not raising a specific amount money you have, like you know, you can raise as much moneys you want and so it's like a tool where like seven years from now, a bank can go to a company and be like, well you can go pupic with an IPO. You can do a direct listing, or you can call it Bill Blackman and see if he's got a sparkling around, right, And so there's something as a technology. It's interesting, but like because it needs to be set up in advance, like it's possible that like there mostly go away.
Any other topics that you've been looking at lately that are going to become regulars, and I'm holding crypto to be its own, you.
Know, crypto, You're right, like crypto was a regular topic and it still is, but you know, a large subset of my readers or second it I mean crypto was fascinating because lake Elon Musk, it was a laboratory for understanding financial concepts, right, Like people who were like kind of rebuilding the financial system from scratch, and so you could have like great discussions about like what is margin lending? Right because like crypto exchanges were like thinking of new ways to do it.
Right.
The retrenchment of crypto has been has meant that there's just like much less of that there's much less like interesting financial experiments in crypto, because like crypto is just like there's just less new stuff happening in crypto. The thing that, like, that's been on my mind a lot recently because of the open AI saga. It's just AI, right, Like, I just like the influence of large language models and other sort of AI tools in finance. It's still kind of early days, but you're just like, oh, is an article about how AI tools are being used, you know, to do new stuff, to like take over jobs from humans, to like find new ways to do things in finance. And I think that's like, you know, obviously going to be a central theme.
All right, so let's let's talk about a few of your other favorite topics. I just love the way you put this quote. I have to say, nobody makes being a billionaire look like less fun than Elon Musk. He's the richest person in the world. Exclamation point. He decided to buy his favorite toy and to make it more closely aligned with his tastes. So he did that, and it worked, and yet it seems to make him more miserable every day. So when when the Twitter acquisition was early days, it was front page with you all the time. It was top of mind. Tell us a little bit about why you find it so fascinating to write about Elon Musk.
So, in terms of like my professional interests, I'm really interested in like kind of financial stuff, and Elon Musk is a fascinating like financial guy because he really rethinks everything. And I think, like his biggest supporters would say this, he really rethinks everything from first principles, and that's kind of a terrible way to do almost everything in like regulated financial markets. And so like, I write a lot of like imagined dialogue for Elon Musk, and a lot of it is like Elon calling his lawyers and saying, why can't I pretend I'm going to take Tesla private or whatever, and his lawyers being like, you can't do that. And I think, you know, you read stories where you're like at space X, they're like, well, the laws of physics don't allow you to do whatever you're doing. Right in like the laws of like financial markets and the laws of the sec everything's like a little grayer, you know, it's a little bit less clear what's allowed and what's not allowed. And so he's constantly pushing up against what's allowed. So he's always doing weird stuff that one is funny, and then two that kind of illuminates how these mechanisms work, right. I mean I wrote so much about his acquisition of Twitter because I you know, I was an M and A lawyer, and I have written over the you know, twelve years of my career in financial journalism there have been M and A deals where like there's been some dispute about whether some deal had to close, and like where you could be like, oh, this is how merger are going to work, this is how remedies work in merger disputes, right, But I didn't do a lot of that because people find it kind of boring, right, and you're, yeah, yeah, like merger dispute remedies in in merger contracts, and then Elon Musk makes it like hilarious front page News. I'm like, I can write about merger disputes and you often don't see those mechanics because usually people just kind of do the expected thing. And Elon Musk is like, no, I'm going to test every like pressure point of how mergers work. It turns out they do work, right, Like we might have been wrong, right, we might have like all done merger argreements in ways that were vulnerable to Elon Musk finding flaws in them, but in fact it held up, you know, And there's just like a lot of stuff like that. There's a lot of you know, he like pushes the boundaries of what he can get away with. He does weird things and sort of pushes people to acquiesce to them, and sometimes they do and sometimes they don't. It's always just like illuminating about how finance and how the law works.
I love this description. Nobody has been penalized more in history for their inability to manage their impulse control.
Well, you know, like in like dollar terms, but like you know, other people have been penalized worse, like in terms of their own utility. Like he's had to pay a lot of money for his inability to resist Twitter, but like I mean still quite rich.
Right, that's that's forty four billion dollars. I always wondered why he didn't just write the billion dollar breakup of FEEB.
Well, this is this is what we're telling about. Like he couldn't do that. That wasn't how it worked. The merger agreement isn't that simple. It had a specific performance Clauset said, you can't walk away for by writing a billion dollar breakup fee. The breakup fee is payable and specific circumstances where you're sort of allowed to walk away. But he was not allowed to walk away by writing by paying a billion dollar fee.
Who is advising him to waive due diligence? I recall you wrote about that.
Well, he so I actually think that in hostile public company m and A, it is not that uncommon to not do due diligence, right, And that's how hostile m and A works, Like you don't talk to the management, We'll talk to you, and you're like, I'm gonna put in a bid anyway. These days, normally the hostile deals sort of end up going quasi friendly and like you get to do some due diligence. But like, I mean, the reasoning is Twitter's financials and you know, it's business were all fairly well known publicly, and there was no information that he didn't have that was relevant to his bid, so like he had all the information he needed. Like what happened is like, first of all, he was kind of overpaying, you know generally, but more importantly, like kind of the market tanked, right, between when he and the deal and when it closed, the waiving due diligence was not the problem there, right, Like, like he he was buying a very well known public company and he knew what he needed to know about it.
So your your headline for that story was Musk lost interest in pretending to buy Twitter, which is kind of vibral. Well that's what I thought at the time, right, ironic because he ends up being forced to buy Twitter because he made a firm offer. Yeah, which raises a big question. How could you be the wealthiest person in the world and not have one or two lawyers and accounts on staff that say, hey, genius, you're going to be forty five billion in the hole if you don't stop this, Like nobody says note him.
Well, there's two points right before he signed the deal, Like, I think that, Like there are a lot of people signing a public company merger agreement is sort of different from like signing a letter of intent to buy at computer. Like I think that, like he might have some experience in doing deals where like you sign a piece of paper that is not a final binding commitment, right, whereas in a public company merger, like it doesn't really work that way. You sign a piece of paper, your pretty committed it done. I think it's possible that he had lawyers who told him that and he didn't listen. I think it's also possible that it did not occur to a lawyer to say, when you signed the definitive merger agreement, that's a definitive merger group.
Right.
Think it might have been like the lawyer might have assumed that was obvious right after he signed the deal. The reporting on this suggests that he did that. His lawyers did tell him, you know, you signed a binding deal, but I think that they probably accurately told him he had some chance of winning.
Not exactly the same.
He was like, let's roll the dice. Man like, I don't think he minds going up against long odds.
Really really interesting stuff. Let's talk a little bit about how money stuff got started before it was the most red item on Wall Street? How did it begin? Tell us a little bit about the background.
You know, I don't. I don't really know. It's sort of like accrewed in stages. So I was blogging at del Bicker for a while, you know, writing like you know, one to three blog posts today about the financial industry back when people wrote blog posts. And then I came to Bloomberg and they sort of it was at a time when they were sort of thing, you do the same thing. You know, you'll blog a couple of times a day, and like many blogs like deal Breaker, like some other financial blogs, you know, there's this notion that in the morning you just sent out a roundup of links, and so it became like my morning link round up was like a couple of paragraphs about four stories, right, And at some point I was like, I want this link wrap to be an email that goes to your inbox. I didn't like do a lot of thinking and market research about this. I think I was mostly inspired by this great media newsletter called Today in Tabs by Rusty Foster that was like hilarious and uh.
Just very like stylish still still around.
Still around. Yeah, it's like gone through different direction day Today and Tabs that's great and.
Back in the pre substat days.
Yeah, this was fourteen something like that. And so I was like, I'm gonna make this an email newsletter and everyone was, you know, Bloomberger was like sure, whatever, h And I don't know.
Exactly that's precisely what they said sure.
There was a kind of like real thinking about it, and we were like, we should give it a name. And I do think that Tim O'Brien, now the head of Bloomberg Opinion, came up with the name money Stuff, but he thinks it was me. But any any case, someone came up with the name money stuff wi I, which I adore and.
Is like, cause it's so it's so perfectly ambiguous and generic. Yeah, and yet it's so winking at the same time.
One of my editors once called my tone and headlines blandly sarcastic, and I think I think of money Stuff as being blandly sarcastic. But so we came with the name, which is which was great. But then like you know, I started sending out it's an email, and then like over time, more of my work went into the email, and it got longer and frankly got later in the day, and less of my work went into the standalone blog post until I realized, like I had this audience on email, it would be obscene for me to write a long, good post and put it up on Bloomberg and not send it to my email subscribers. So instead the email is gonna be the whole thing, and like, if I have something good, I'm gonna put it in the email, you know. And so I no longer write like standalone blog posts, and the word blog has sort of vanished from the Internet, but I still kind of think of myself as a blogger. It was such a good strategic decision to like capture this audience and people who expect to hear from you each day, who know your name or get an email from your name, rather than like, you know, a column that they don't necessarily look at the pieline, who expect it every day, who feel some sort of like parasocial relationship with you, where they're like, were there in some sense in correspondence with you, rather than just like reading some stuff on the internet.
So let's talk a little bit about your audience. And I have a few quotes I've pulled from the Internet. Matt's one of the best writers today chronicling the ironies, paradoxes, and absurdities of modern business and finance. That that's Jim Chanos of Kinnicos Associates. His work is some of the most sophistic analysis of what's really happening on Wall Street says Bill Ackman. These are some pretty big hitters blowing kisses your way. What's it like to know that your daily email is being read by some pretty big Wall Street titans.
I try not to think about it too much because, like sometimes you write about.
Them when you when you write something, do you know this is going to be read by them? Is that in the back of your head?
The thing is that, like the tone of the email is so like it is written for like me and my friends. You know. It's like I used to think of my audience as being like the analysts on my desk, who are like sort of like young people who know a little that finance play. You can still explain a lot of things to them. I no longer really think about that way, but I still think of it as like, like the audience is to like to make myself laugh. I don't think of it as being like Bill Ackman's going to see this, you know.
The New York Times described your analyzes as humor with a nerdy, confident tone. Sounds like you're writing for your buds on the in the analysts room.
Yeah a little bit. Yeah.
So so so let's talk a little bit about some of that nerdiness. What's with the endless humorous footnotes?
I don't know, Like it's just like it's a tick that started a deal breaker and then I sort of brought it over because like people complain if I don't have footnotes that you know, It's like an email newsletter is a very linear thing, but like sometimes there are like digressions that you want to have and the best way to do that is in a footnote and you have some rudimentary HTML that allows you to jump back and forth. Although in an email newsletter it's like pretty rudimentary. As it's gone on longer, like you know, the audience has broadened, right, and so it's not like I'm literally writing for, like, you know, an audience of analysts at a bank. I'm writing for a kind of range of audiences. And there are times when I will say something general and straightforward in the text, and then I'll be like, I know you're going to complain about this, So in the footnote I'll be like, this is like not quite right, and here's why, you know, And I try to like be like not in the direction of like a sort of deeper understanding with that necessarily cluttering up the description of the text. But there's other things too. Some of things there are just like funny jokes that are that are distracting in the text, and so I'll put a joke on the phoot.
So, so you mentioned the audience, how often do you hear from them? How often are readers hitting you up with emails?
I often get emails from people who are very much on my wavelength, right, So I wrote recently about this like trading mistake by a power company that led to finish electric prices being negative, and so there are like these news stories about like finish people running their saunas all night to like to make money because they're getting paid to run their saunas, and so many people emailed at me about that, being like, oh, here's the time that my electric presses were negative, and I, you know, like that. It's like when I write about like weird trades, I have enough of an audience who does weird trades and who like think about this in the same way that they'll be like, oh, here's a weird trade. I did that. It's hilarious and like I always love those, and so I often am able to like, if I write about something weird, I will have like then a week of follow ups of readers corresponding and saying being like, here's an even weirder story.
You know, I have a vivid ruck election when oil prices went negative and your headline was something along the lines of there's no place to store oil. It's smelly, it's it's dangerous, it's this, it's that, and so we'll pay you to take this oil off our hands. You you probably affected, certainly my understanding what was going on with negative oil prices, but I bet a whole lot of other people as well.
Thanks. That's the goal, Like I like to, you know, the best things are like things were like there's some weird story, and like the headliness like, oh, here's a weird thing, and I can be like, here's like a sort of intuitive conceptual framework for understanding that weird thing. You know, here's like how to think about that weird thing. But that's always like super satisfying to do.
But it's a little more than that. I'm going to quote the New York Times on that he makes readers feel in on the savage joke that is late capitalism, and the Times was referring to what I thought was a pretty hilarious acronym that's about thirty letters wrong long about a city group shared downside protection derivative that you decided to abbreviate, and it was a really really funny tongue in chic line.
I think there's like a sort of standard mode in financial journalism of like you look at like stuff that banks do and you're like, this is really bad, and then like my mode is I often find it really funny. And I think that resonates with a lot of readers in different ways, sometimes because they work in capital in finance and also find it funny, sometimes because they don't work in finance and find it funny. You know. I have a lot of readers these days who work, like broadly speaking, in tech, and like what they are interested in is not like specifically descriptions of finance, but like this like sort of like system z, like nerdy algorithmic way of thinking about the world, and so like, I have a lot of tech readers who are sort of like, I like your style. I don't really care about finance, but I think this is like a explanation of finance that resonates with tech people. I have a lot of readers who are like very strong critics of banks and of finance, and who like what I do because sort of neutrally explanatory and tries to get at what's actually going on and how people are in the industry are actually thinking about things. And the people who are like strong critics of banking often find that useful. Right, will as supposed to just be like, oh oh, banks are evil.
Right, You're critical without seeking to be critical in a way that once you understand the absurdity of certain situations, it can help.
But be critical, I work from them opinion. I joke that I'm an opinion columnist without any opinions. That's not really true, but like I'm not, like, it is not high on my list to be like this is bad or this is good, right, Like, it's always like this is interesting, right, Like, look at this interesting thing. Let's try to understand it. Yeah, I definitely think that a lot of readers come away being like, you have explained this thing, and now I think it's much worse. But like that's not always my goal, you know.
That's that's hilarious. So let's talk a little bit about a somewhat infamous podcast you did with Sam Banking Freed and FTX on odd lots a good year before or so before it crashed. What was your sense of FTX at the time.
I've no story that makes me look good. I thought FTX was really interesting. I thought FTX seemed like a well run crypto exchange that seemed to be printing a lot of money, and that had interesting, you know, aggressive ideas for how to change the structure of derivatives, margining, and what's your endgame as a crypto exchange. I thought that Sam Bankmin Freed had a like reasonably clever endgame, which is like he was going to consume the regular financial system. He was going to be a place where you could like tokenize stocks and run a crypto exchange that gradually became like the main financial exchange for the world. Right. I don't want to say it like I thought that plan was inevitable, but I thought that was like, that's a better plan for your crypto exchange than like, well, crypto will take you know, all of like financial life will be in bitcoin. Right. I thought he had like a pretty good idea for like how we're going to be a you know, enormous company.
Well, well, he clearly came up with a better mechanism for extending credit and liquidating portfolios that were in the red then other exchanges had. He just kept building FTX and kept focusing on being the biggest, baddest crypto trading platform and crypto exchange that could have been wildly successful. It certainly looked like he was printing money for a while. It turned out there were some com mingling funds and other issues there.
Yeah, I think it's interesting to ask if he was doing what he said he was doing, was that a good idea, because I was like, yeah, that sounds like interesting. I don't know. He was very much about like we're going to have an automated margining system where we're never going to call you for margin calls. We're just going to blow you out if you fall below a certain level. It's going to be all twenty four to seven mark to market. It's going to be much less subjective. And he was talking about this at a time when like the London Metals Exchange had had this like sort of semi scandalous problem where like this big trader accumulated this huge deaf as a position and like he couldn't meet margin calls and they couldn't do anything about it because like, if you know, they would have like blown up the exchange. So they just sort of like pause trading for a week. And it just looked bad, right, And it's like, oh yeah, this like system of like subjectively doing margin calls and like doing margin calls once a day, and if like if it's moved too far, then like you're like, oh no, it's too big to fail. That the SBF endorsed system of like we're going to do everything automated. You know, you're like, oh yeah, I see the appeal of that. I don't know that it was a good idea. I think that like there are obvious downsides to it too, But like what brought FTX down was not any of those downsides, because like what was in fact happening was that he had simply exempted his own big hedge fund from the automated margining rules and it accumulated a vastly bigger deficit position than like the London Metals Exchange guy did, and then it did in fact blow up the exchange and take customer money down with it. The thing he said he wasn't doing was what caused them to blow up. But as far as I know, FTX was printing money, Like the exchange was very valuable in terms of it made a lot of revenue, and some of what they did was just they overspent that revenue. And then what they did was like they had this affiliated hedge fund that you know, lost bajillions of dollars, right and because it was just taking enormous margin loans from the exchange, when it lost the bajillions of dollars, it took the exchange down with it. But the exchange itself is very profitable. And one thing you could say, like there was a time I think like over the summer when like they considered shutting down Alameda the hedge fund, and you do look back and say, like could they have managed to do that in a way that you know, it was like embarrassing it whatever, you know, like lost money, but that left FTX intact and then FTX could continue printing money and maybe I don't know, like maybe they had already gone too far by that point. The other thing is like there is a theory that one reason that FTX was printing so much money was that it was a very good trading experience for customers because Alameda was on the other side of a lot of trades, and Alameda was losing money on all these customers. So you'd go to FTX, you'd trade, you'd make money. You're like, oh, this is great, I'll come back right. But it was all sort of like an indirect Ponzi scheme, where like you were making money from Alameda and Alameda was stealing it from you. I don't think that's really true, I think, but I think there's like a element of truth of that. I don't think that's like what mainly explains FTX. Like I think FTX was a good business and now Alimita was like a hilariously bad business, and like they were interminkled.
So last summer, you write this giant piece in Business Week about Crypto. Essentially you were that entire issue of Business Week. Tell us about what led to that massive piece and what the thinking was that had you say, I know, I'm going to take over Business Week for a week and write about nothing but crypto.
Joel Weber, the editor of Business Week, came to me and it was like, hey, do you remember what is code? So what is code? Is Paul Forth, this great computer programmer, wrote a Business Week issue took over the entire issue of Business Week to write a thing called what is Code? I was trying to explain computer programming to a like I get sophisticated business audience, but not coders, right, And it was just like this really fabulous, like just piece of writing and explaining and thinking. And I loved it when it came out, and Joel came to me, is like, remember what is code? We'd like to do that for Crypto, and I was like, I found it appealing because I like to write long and I was like, I have a whole magazine. Two. Crypto felt to me like a big enough subject to warrant a whole magazine, but a small enough subject that you could like almost do all of it, Like I didn't do all of it, but you can almost like sort of start at the most basic building block intuitions and build up to a full understanding of the entire Crypto universe in the space of like forty thousand words. And that just seemed like a really interesting, like just technical challenge to be like take a reader from nothing to like not like some vague intuitions, but like a detailed understanding of like all the stuff that matters in crypto that felt really interesting. But also like in my day job, I was often writing about crypto, and you have this question of where to start, right, do I explain what a blockchain is in order to like make a joke about this, like you know, crypto exchange that got hacked, right, And so the idea of writing this this magazine piece is partly like selfishly for me, I could be like, I've explained what a blockchain is over there, so I can just tell you about this thing that got hacked, right. So it felt like a useful, like like reference piece for me to do from then on. Oh. The other thing that I was thinking at the time, to be honest, is that Joel came to me and like in June or whatever, and I was like, summer's always slow. Let me be so bored writing my newsletter every day. I'm not gonna have enough to write about, so why don't I take some time off from the newsletter to write this long thing. And then of course that was the summer of Elon and Twitter and so like I was like, oh damn, And so then yeah, like that's that was that was kind of the motivation for it. My my biggest regret is that, you know, this is really directly inspired by Paul Ford's What Is Code? And the Joel sort of like working title was like what is Crypto? And I was like we should call it what was Crypto? And we were like that's too mean, We're not gonna do it. And then it came out and like, I don't know they'd come out in October of twenty twenty two. It came out like, you know, like two weeks before I have to Exitxploded. And had we called it what was Crypto? You were like, what about all the awards? Man, that what a great title that would have been, and we just like we didn't have the courage or conviction, so we didn't call it what was Crypto?
Well, this leads me to a sort of curve ball question that was almost the book. When is the Matt Levine book?
Yeah? When I write it, I don't know. I mean, like, I like, there's they're sure there'll be a book. I want to do a book, but like I I really like my day job.
A lot, and it goes to get in the way.
Yeah, like involves writing a lot of words, so like I don't have any more words to go when I go home at night. But I really like that my my, you know, I like the day job, but like, I don't know, I found that what was crypto exercise really fun and I would like to do something like that for you know, not crypto.
All right, well, we only have you for another ten or so minutes, so let's jump to our favorite questions that we ask all our guests, starting with what are you streaming these days? Tell us what you're either watching on Netflix or listening to In terms of podcasts, what's keeping you entertained.
I don't really watch television. I have like a lot of children's television in my life, so streaming a lot of Eleanor Wonders Why, a lot of Frozen two things like that. I used to listen to weirder podcasts. Now I listened to like the long form podcast I love. I love song Exploder, the like yeah music podcast that's great. Yeah in PoCA, like I find myself like long form is the same thing, right, Like it's like people who are really good at something explaining like at a like a like a truly like mechanical specific level, like how they do what they do. It's like always satisfying and like how they do what they do, and also like they're sort of psychological traumas as they do it. I find it very useful.
Tell us about your mentors who helped shape your career.
The person who I most think of that way, it was just like, yeah, my first job out of law school was clerking for a judge, right, And like that's a very weird job, right, like because it's it's like you and like two other people with like cloking for one sort of powerful figure. And I clerked for this judge, Ed Becker in Philadelphia, who was like one of the great judges. Like he was you know, brilliant, highly respected, but also like a mensh a nice guy, a guy who like in your interview would be like I have a zero deference policy and like really meant it and like wanted to hear from his clerks and like wanted to hear your opinions, and who just like had like a work ethic and a just an ethic that was really inspiring. Like he went, in doubt, do it the right way, and like he just like that's how he lived his life, you know, like he really like wasn't interested in short cuts or like he was just like he wanted to get things right, and that was just very inspiring to see, like, you know, in my earliest career to be like, oh yeah, this is a guy who like has been doing it forever and has a lot of accolades, but who is just like totally focused on doing the right thing.
Let's talk about books. What are some of your favorites and what are you reading right now.
I never have a favorite book. I'm like, I read a lot. I feel like having a favorite book is like I have too many books to have a favorite. But like the finance e books that like when people are like what should I read? Knowing nothing, the books I recommend are Liar's Poker Barbarians at the Gate, which I already mentioned right Like, it's just like I read it at a formative age and I was like, oh yeah, this finance stuff is cool. And the other one that I love is a diary of a very bad year. It was put out by like N plus one the magazine. It's it's Keith Gassing. There's a N plus one utter interviewing this anonymous hedge fund manager over the course of like two thousand and seven to two thousand and nine. He's just like a series of long interviews with this hedge fund manager talks about the financial crisis, but also just about like what it's like to run a hedge fund. He's just like very thoughtful and it gives you a sort of real flavor for like what finance is like, but also like what it is like to think about at a high level, and like like what the mindset is of someone who's very good at this. What am I reading now? I'm reading a book called a Nansi's Gold, which is about this con man in Ghana in like the seventies and eighties who was running a Nigerian prince scamp.
If I have all this money waiting for me, if you sat me exactly, I'll split it with you.
His version of the scam was that the first president of an independent Ghana had spirited hundreds of millions of dollars out of the country as and then was then deposed, and the money was in trust in a bank in Switzerland. He was going to get the money back and use it for the benefit of Ghana, but he just needed investors to whatever fill out the formalities, and so it's like this is just fascinating story of I love cons right, I love like financial frauds. And what to me is so incredible about this story is just that it lasted for decades because like the problem with this is is you're like, I need money, and in two months, I will get all this money and I'll pay you back tenfold. And then you do that for twenty years, and like your investor, you have like investors who stick with you for twenty years, and like the like the just the charisma and like the ability to get those you know, probably some of a return in two months, and then twenty years later they're still waiting for it. It's crazy.
So our final two questions, what sort of advice would you give to a recent college grad interested in a career in m and a derivative structuring or financial writing.
Well, it depends on which of those three things. So if you're interested in career and financi're writing, I recommend a career in finance first, because I do think it is really helpful to have subject matter knowledge and also just like sort of cultural knowledge of like what it feels like to work at a bank or whatever. You know. I would not be where I am today if I had like pursued this, you know, like I came to this in a haphazard way after having several other careers.
First subject matter of expertise matters.
Yeah, it's just like it's I find it like I'm very glad that I did not try to be a writer when I was twenty two. If you want to be interrivatives the advice I sometimes I don't want to say I regret that I have. But a dumb thing I did was like when I left law, I was like, I want to be in finance, and so I'm going to take the first like finance job I get right, And finance is like this enormous, you know, varied industry where there are a lot of different roles, and like if you are essentially like a math person and a tinkerer, like you will want different roles than if you're like a people person and a salesman, you know, and so there's a lot of like, uh, it's hard to know in advance what you'll be good at, but like it's important to know yourself and sort of understand what roles exist and try to find a role that matches your characteristics rather than just like be in finance generally. The other piece of advice I love to give young people is like, like I did a very standard career path, Like I went to college, went to a fancy college. I went to a fancy law school. I went to a fancy law firm, and then it was like two thousand and seven, so like, if you're a fancy corporate lawyer, you want to be an investmentker. So I went to a fancy investment back. Right, everything very standard until I was like, you know, in my early thirties, and then I was like I'm going to quit for deal Ricker. And that was a big change. Right. I tell people, I've made one career decision in my life, right, like everything was set for me and then I went to deal Ricker. And I think that if you are, like, you know, if you're a lot of like young people like looking you know, like an analyst job at Goldban, like you've been on this prestige seeking career path that is very set for you. My advice is like, that's good. Do that, and like there's some point at which you have to jump off that like standard career prestige path and you have to just kind of like know when that point is, and like be really calibrated to where that point is, because there are people who are miserable law firm partners because they stayed on that path too long and they were like I'm gonna do the expected thing and do the expected thing, like oh no, I'm trapped in this thing. I can't do anything else. I need the money, and like I don't like it, right, And then there are people who jump off too early and they're like I don't need to like pursue these hard jobs. I can just like go be a poet. And then like they're not happy either, right, And like there's some like optimally calibrated point where you can like the like optionality and prestige of the standard path and then like exercise your optionality and like do the thing you actually want to do. And it's not immediately, but it's not like never.
You know, you seem to have exercised that optionality.
Yeah, I mean my timing was great and like, you know, accidentally, but like I do think that like people in these jobs think of themselves as a carering optionality and like eventually that starts to decay.
So our final question, what do you know about the world of finance today you wish you knew twenty five or so years ago when you were first getting started.
This is a mixed bag because like, I love what I do now, and it is so fortuitous that I landed here, and like, there are a lot of ways that I could have been luckier early and then been sadder overall, because I would have found a really good job early on that really fit me, and then it wouldn't fit me quite as well as this one, but I would stay at it. But I do think that, like what I said earlier, like I didn't know anything about like what the different types of jobs were, and I thought finance was this undifferentiated like world where like it's all like you know, the same spreadsheets or whatever. And I think had I known better, like what I was good at and like what kind of jobs there were, I might have like more intentionally pursued jobs in finance and I might have gotten rich. But I might have been like you know, miserable and overworked. So I don't know, I mean, I don't know anything now.
It all worked out in the end. Thanks Matt for being so generous with your time. We have been speaking with Matt Levine. He is the author of Bloomberg's Money Stuff daily newsletter. If you enjoy this conversation, well check out any of the five hundred previous interviews we've conducted over the past nine years. You can find those at iTunes, Spotify, YouTube, wherever you get your favorite podcasts. Sign up for my daily reading list at ridults dot com. Follow me on Twitter at rid Holt's. Follow Matt Levine on Twitter at Matt underscore Levine. Follow all of the Bloomberg family of podcasts at Twitter, and check out my new podcast at the Money, where each week we share a quick investing insight with an industry expert. Those are on Apple Premium Podcast for the end of the fourth quarter of twenty twenty three. It will be everywhere in twenty twenty four. I would be remiss if I did not thank the Crack staff that helps put these conversations together. My audio engineer is Meredith Frank, My producer is Anna Luck. Sean Russo is my head of research. Attika of al Broun is our project manager. I'm Barry Rutolts. You've been listening to Masters in Business on Bloomberg Radio
