This week, we speak with Matt Levine, Opinion columnist at Bloomberg. He is the author of Money Stuff, one of the most popular daily newsletters on Wall Street. Previously, he was an investment banker at Goldman Sachs and a mergers and acquisitions lawyer at Wachtell, Lipton.
He explains how his career meandered from studying classics, teaching Greek, clerking for a Federal Judge, working on M&A at a big firm, and eventually doing derivative transactions on Wall Street. It was all an education for what became his favorite job, writing about all of Wall Street finance, investing and business on a daily basis.
He explains the genesis of the special Business Week edition “What is Crypto,” where he took over the entire magazine for a week to delve deep into Bitcoin, Blockchain, FTX, and all things crypto. And, we discuss why (lol) everything is Securities Fraud, and as a corollary, why everything is Insider Trading.
Levine also explains why “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…”
A list of his favorite books is here; A transcript of our conversation is available here Monday.
You can stream and download our full conversation, including any podcast extras, on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, YouTube, and Bloomberg. All of our earlier podcasts on your favorite pod hosts can be found here.
Be sure to check out our Masters in Business next week with Chris Wright, Crescent Capital, an alternative credit investment firm with $42 billion in AUM. He oversees all of the firm’s private markets strategies as Head of Private Markets. the firm provides first lien, unitranche and junior debt to over 3,700 European middle market companies since 2014.
Matt Levine’s Favorite Books
Liar’s Poker by Michael Lewis
Barbarians at the Gate: The Fall of RJR Nabisco by Bryan Burrough & John Helyar
Diary of a Very Bad Year: Confessions of an Anonymous Hedge Fund Manager by Anonymous Hedge Fund Manager
Anansi’s Gold: The Man Who Looted the West, Outfoxed Washington, and Swindled the World by Yepoka Yeebo
