Smack-ish: MSTR, PE, MFT

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The bird's doing well, by the way.

So the next milestone is like, he flies?

Is he?

Is he great news?

Is he?

Yes.

So I believe last week I was talking about how we needed to work on flying.

Really good at perching, really good at eating.

Even showing him YouTube videos.

We've been working on on flying.

He's pretty good at flying now.

The thing is...

How are you?

I'm still working on my flying.

It apparently came naturally to the bird.

I have to keep reminding myself, like, this is a baby bird.

Yeah.

When do birds...

When do they have their premise?

When do they?

I think he's, or she, we can't tell because it's a baby, is just entering adolescence.

Because the bird will also like peck at you.

Like, yesterday it was sitting on my shoulder and it was like pecking at my ear.

And then I googled it and they go through a teenager phase where they like get into biting you for a little bit and then they kind of grow out of it.

Anyway.

Congratulations to your bird.

Thank you.

Hello and welcome.

It's going to keep being the bird stuff podcast, isn't it?

I love it.

Anyway, hello and welcome to the Money Stuff Podcast, your weekly podcast where we talk about stuff related to money sometimes.

I'm Matt Levine and I write the Money Stuffcom for Bloomberg Opinion.

And I'm Katie Greifeld, a reporter for Bloomberg News and an anchor for Bloomberg Television.

Katie, in your other life, as an anchor for Bloomberg Television, you've been anchoring some Bloomberg Television.

Absolutely, because we had a little bit of a SmackDown this week.

I'm trying to make this as dramatic as possible.

Everyone loves a financial industry SmackDown now.

Ever since the classic

Ackman icon one from like a decade ago, everyone's like, oh, a SmackDown.

I mean, we'll never achieve those heights again.

That was, that set the bar and no one's passed it since.

But in slightly less interesting SmackDowns,

last week, I believe it was, there was a splashy Bloomberg News article about how Jim Chainos

has a short thesis when it comes to Michael Saylor's strategy.

The idea being that you basically short strategy and you buy Bitcoin because strategy trades at a premium to its actual Bitcoin holdings.

Yeah, and one thing that Jim Chainos said that is entirely accurate

and revealing and everyone ignored is that

MicroStrategy also does the same trade in enormous size.

Like, MicroStrategy's kind of like fundamental business model is like, well, our stock trades at two times the value of the underlying Bitcoin.

So we're going to sell a ton of stock and use the money to buy Bitcoin.

It's like, yeah, of course, it's a great trade.

But like

MicroStrategy has some advantages in putting that trade on that Jim Chanos doesn't have.

They don't have to pay to borrow the stock.

They can't get squeezed out of their short.

But they were doing the same trade.

But anyway.

Yeah.

Well,

that was Chanos' position.

We interviewed Michael Saylor on Tuesday of this week, and obviously he disagreed with.

He was like, no, nobody should sell micro strategy stock to buy Bitcoin.

That's a crazy thing to do.

Why would anyone sell micro-strategy stock to buy Bitcoin?

Yeah.

Except for him.

But whatever, whatever.

No, I mean, to be fair, he's not doing it anymore.

Yeah.

Oh, he also said that, you know, Chainos doesn't understand how his valuation of strategy is offsides.

That was on Tuesday.

Jim Chainos came on Bloomberg Television on Wednesday with my colleague and friend, Scarlett Foo,

and

gave his side of the story.

I mean, he said that Sailor is a great salesman, but basically his argument amounts to financial gibberish.

I think he might have said that on social media and not on television.

I would.

It's really the case that, like.

Oh, wait, wait, wait.

Let me read you the tweet, actually.

It's pretty good.

In response to Saylor's television clip from our interview with him.

this is, of course, complete financial gibberish.

Mr.

Saylor wants you to value his business based not only on the net value of his Bitcoin holdings, nav, at market, but additionally with a multiple on the change in that nav exclamation point, because now he can leverage his balance sheet, LOL.

I mean, like, I'm sorry, that's correct.

Like, I don't want to

say the MicroStrategies thing can't work, right?

Because it's worked, right?

And, like, a lot of people have gotten carried out shorting it, right?

I'm like, I'm not not saying, oh, it's a great idea, just short MicroStrategy.

But like, it is gibberish, right?

It's like the point that they're making is like Bitcoin has gone up a lot.

And so when we buy Bitcoin, we're creating a ton of value for shareholders.

And like at some level, that's true, but another level, you just buy Bitcoin.

This is true.

And I think I've probably said this on the podcast before, but like a thing that is just wild to me about MicroStrategy in particular and Bitcoin treasury companies generally is like

you have to tell some story about why you're not just a pot of Bitcoins, right?

And there are a number of ways to tell that story and like all credit to MicroStrategy.

They've done all of it.

They're smart.

Like they're good at finding like this is a well-run Bitcoin treasury company with a model that I fundamentally don't understand, but like they're great at it.

But the sort of central story that they tell is like, well, we can be levered Bitcoin holders, right?

Like we can be, instead of just, you know, buying Bitcoin and putting it in a pot, we can like borrow money to put Bitcoin in the pot.

We can, you know, Michael Seller is like, like, we can issue preferred stock that pays 10%

and we can buy Bitcoin that goes up by 47% a year.

And therefore, we're like, we're doing an arbitrage, which is like,

nobody should ever say the word arbitrage again after that.

But the thing that I find fascinating about MicroStrategy is that from the shareholders' perspective, it is just not levered Bitcoin exposure.

The way MicroStrategy works is there's a 60 billion-ish dollar pot of Bitcoin.

that trades at 120 billion-ish market capitalization, which means it's not levered Bitcoin for you.

Like, if you put in a dollar, you get back 50 cents worth of Bitcoin, which is the opposite of leverage.

Leverage is like you put in a dollar, you get back $2 worth of Bitcoin.

So

I just find it somewhat crazy-making, but here we are.

But the thing is, even if Jim Chainos is correct, which you're saying he is, that doesn't mean his trade is going to work.

No, no.

Sorry, I'm going to be clear.

The thing that he is definitely correct about is that it's gibberish.

Right.

Just from an aesthetic point of view, it's gibberish.

It doesn't mean mean the stock will go down.

That's the thing.

And that's something we've talked about before with these Bitcoin treasury companies is that in the stock market, people are happy to pay double, basically, in the case of strategy.

The trade is fundamentally about that that can't last.

Yeah.

And like you see cracks in it, right?

GameStop is now a Bitcoin Treasury company and issued converts this week and the stock was down like 20% at some point.

Like two weeks ago, I would have said like, yeah, any company can announce it's a Bitcoin Treasury company and it'll trade at 2x the value of its Bitcoin.

Isn't that not quite as true anymore yeah like kind of immediately it became not true yeah which is great but like uh but micro strategy still does i mean it's coming a little bit yeah

but it is a little bit weird to me for sailor to criticize chainos because as chanos has said and as i just said Sailor was doing the same trade, right?

Selling MicroStrategy.

MicroStrategy is in the business of selling its own stock to buy Bitcoin, right?

So clearly, at some point in the fairly recent past, like this year, like MicroStrategy has thought that Bitcoin was a better asset than its stock, right?

Like you could sell a stock to buy Bitcoin.

That's no longer as true, right?

Now they're doing a lot of weird stuff.

Yeah.

And they've moved kind of further away from equity.

They started doing

stock and convertible bonds, and then they moved into like this very

high-premium convertible preferred.

And they moved into, I think, higher-premium convertible preferred that has less and less equity content.

And now they're selling straight 10% preferred that doesn't convert into stock.

So

they're basically, you know, if you just look at their actions, it suggests that they thought their stock was overvalued at some point, and now they think their stock is fairly valued.

And I think he said on TV something like,

you know, watch out, Jim Chanos, because we could issue preferred, and, you know, if the premium comes down, we'll just issue more preferred.

Yeah.

Which I took to sort of mean that they might buy back stock, which is also crazy making.

This might be what you're referring to.

He said, if the stock trades at a weak premium, we're just going to sell the preferred.

And if the stock rallies up, he's going to get liquidated and wiped out.

Yeah, which doesn't exactly say we're gonna buy the stock but

but I don't know whatever so he also said so if the premium declines enough he will issue preferred also in that scenario and then buy back the common shares well whatever I mean like he has a few different game plans

buy back the stock Something that I thought was interesting from that interview, which I'm still trying to formulate an opinion on, so maybe you can give me one, is, you know, I asked him, you have all these copycat Bitcoin treasury companies that are coming out.

do you view them as competition and he said i don't view them as competition i view etfs that track preferred shares as competition such as investco has one i think the ticker is pgx it has like four billion dollars in assets so i guess he's trying to compete for investor attention like he wants investors to buy his preferred shares not broadly preferred shares i don't really know interesting yeah the bitcoin treasury thing is interesting because he has like for a long time been a proselytizer for other companies should do this right?

Yeah.

And when you think about like the model, like Jim Chanos and I can talk about the premium all we want, but like fundamentally Michael Saylor views MicroStrategy as I bet that Bitcoin will go up.

And so like the main thing they want is for Bitcoin to go up, right?

Yeah.

And the more companies that devote themselves to buying Bitcoin, like the more Bitcoin will go up and the better off MicroStrategy and its shoulders, right?

So they're not competition, right?

Yeah.

Like in a world of like enormous competition for

people to invest in this thing, like would MicroStrategy's premium come down?

Maybe.

But if MicroStrategy's premium comes down by like Bitcoin going up 10x, then like that's great for Michael Saylor.

The preferred thing, yeah, like I don't, I actually don't know who

I've always thought of straight preferred as a pretty niche financial product, right?

It's like a lot of banks issue it and there's like some like utility ones.

It's not like a huge

you don't regularly have tech companies being like, I'm going to issue a straight preferred, right?

That's not like a real thing.

Like bankers don't go around marketing 10% preferred stock to tech companies.

And banker strategy is doing it in size.

And yeah, I guess they're competing for like the fairly limited pool of like retail investors who want preferred stock.

You know, they're offering 10% and they're like, take our 10%.

And I guess surely somewhere out there, there's a fixed income investor who is like, I just want a safe, high dividend.

And the best dividend paying stock that I can get is this micro strategy preferred.

And And I don't care about the business model, it's fine.

Don't tell me about that.

Yeah, don't tell me about it.

As long as they keep paying the dividend.

And yeah, that's a thing that someone might buy.

I could have seen him embracing these ETFs and other funds that track preferred shares.

Because theoretically, MicroStrategy.

Yeah, so I don't know.

Yeah, yeah, I don't fully understand it either.

But like, right.

To the extent that instead of buying a diversified dividend fund, retail investors are like, I want that micro strategy dividend.

Fair play.

Yeah.

Who won?

Who won?

Yeah.

Like, to the extent that, like, I'm the judge of this match, like, I'm going to award it to Jim Chanos on points.

To the extent that, like, you know, we'll find out when someone gets knocked out.

Like,

Jim Chanos is going to exit this trade before Michael Saylor does.

That's true.

That's true.

Saylor Son is going to do great.

He's going to do great.

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On-cycle recruiting.

You wrote that no one likes it.

It's amazing.

They fixed it.

They just fixed it.

Well, Jamie Dimon especially didn't like it, and you're right.

He solved the problem.

So I have some backstory here.

So I clerked for a federal judge after law school.

And clerkship hiring has the same issues where, like, basically

there's a pool of candidates and there's a pool of judges.

And there's like a ranking of prestigious judges, there's a ranking of prestigious candidates, and everyone wants the best candidates or the best judges.

And,

you know, it used to be that like towards the end of law school, you'd interview with the judge to get a clerkship.

And then some judges were like, we'll interview a little earlier for clerkships to start in two years.

And then we'll get the first cut at the best candidates.

And it crept up earlier and earlier and it became like untenable.

And when I was a clerk, my judge was like the leader of the like clerkship hiring plan that told people you can't hire before like, you know, the beginning of the third year of law school.

And it was like kind of mostly enforced, but like a couple of judges defected and hired in the second year.

And, you know, I couldn't enforce it, but I was like in a dudgeon when people would hire clerks too early.

And so I saw this process play out where like it got too early.

Everyone was like, this is dumb.

It's too early.

Let's move things back

and hire on a normal schedule where we can like see people's grades and like know what they're like and not just like hire at the beginning of law school.

And we set it back and then like immediately it started decaying again.

So I think that like private equity hiring is a little of that where

there's a logical time to hire new private equity associates and it's you know as they get to the end of their investment banking jobs right it's like for sure three months before those jobs end or whatever and

because prestigious firms want prestigious candidates they'll be like we'll just interview a month earlier and then everyone rushes to to you know keep up with them and so now it's the hiring is like before the investment banking jobs start

and everyone thinks that's dumb and so jamie dimon is like that's dumb and we we won't let you do it.

And because he's Jamie Dimon, because JP Morgan is a big, prestigious bank, like, you know,

they've had some traction where I think Apollo and General Atlantic have already said they're not going to hire people this year for their 2027 start dates.

Aaron Powell, but it sounds like you're saying you don't think that this truce of sorts will last.

Aaron Powell, I think in five years, we'll be reading articles about how private equity hiring is

starting before investment.

I'm talking about it on this podcast.

I'm talking about it on this podcast.

For sure.

This is, yeah,

this is long-run content for this podcast.

Will this equilibrium decay like next month?

I don't think so.

Like, I think there's going to be like a real impact where like people who started private equity in 2027 might get interviewed in 2026 rather than 2025.

Like that could really happen because it has gotten sort of comical and like there is like some goodwill around like moving things back, but like will it last forever?

I don't know.

I don't think so.

Well, it's interesting.

I took a dig in some of the Bloomberg historical archives.

Morgan Stanley tried to do something like this.

Everyone's tried to do this.

This is like a thing, yeah.

Well, in 2013, Morgan Stanley then abandoned their attempt to block first-year bankers from talking with recruiters for outside firms.

Employees complained, and the complaint, this is all according to people familiar from the time, the complaint was that they're being put at a disadvantage to, you know, other entry-level bankers at other firms.

I don't think J.P.

Morgan could enforce this if the private equity firms hadn't come out in support of it.

Like the calculation of JP Morgan is not just we will stop people from taking offers too early because like that is really hard to do because

everyone going into banking wants to be in private equity.

And like you'd lose analysts if you said you can't go into private equity.

But I think because also the private equity firms don't love it, like

it has a chance to succeed.

Trevor Burrus Well, that's what I'm curious about.

So, I mean, Apollo kicked this off.

Mark Rowan said in an emailed statement to Bloomberg, when someone says something that is just plainly true, I feel compelled to agree with it.

But is part of the calculation on Apollo's part that they're going to earn some brownie points with Jamie Dimon, and that's more valuable than

getting an early shot at some of these analysts?

I think it's both.

I think they're not kidding that it's dumb to hire people before they graduate from college

for a job that starts in two plus years and interview them about LBO modeling when they've never worked on a deal, right?

It's genuinely dumb.

Yes, being in the good graces of Jamie Dimon is not a bad idea for any private equity firm, but like, no, I think I mostly agree with them.

I want to tell you about a couple of like reader emails I've gotten about this topic.

Yeah.

So one is I heard from someone who was like, yeah, I started in banking.

I accepted my PE job like immediately.

And then after a couple of weeks in banking, I realized I didn't like to do deals.

And so he like backed out of his PE offer.

Which,

first of all, like, yes.

And generally that and Apollo talk about this.

They're like, like, we want to get recruiting right.

But if you're recruiting people before they start in banking, you don't really know that you're getting the people who really want to and will be good at doing private equity, right?

Yeah.

They don't know anything about it.

Yeah, they've ever worked on it.

Whatever.

This is part of a bigger process where everything has crept up earlier and become more intense.

So now you internally.

Well, we talked about university finance a few weeks ago.

Like I'm like, oh, they don't know anything about banking, but they've been doing banking since they were children.

But still, you get a better sense of who actually wants to do it if you interview people after a year in banking than if you interview them after 20 minutes in banking.

I thought it was interesting that this doesn't happen that much, people backing out.

He was like, yeah, my firm was then advertising for someone to fill the spot really quickly because they don't overhire.

It's not like an airline where they sell 20% more seats because they figure people will drop out.

They just figure everyone they hire is going to start two years later, which is pretty wild.

The other thing that I got is a couple of people

are

like, you ask, like, why is Apollo jumping to agree with JP Morgan?

Like, one possibility is they think that recruiting this early is not a good idea and they would like to recruit later to get more, have a more informed recruiting conversation.

Another possibility is I want to curry favorite with JP Diamond.

A third possibility is that they don't need as many people.

Yeah.

Like a third possibility is you're hiring for 2027.

You're like, okay,

in two years, first of all, like there's all this stuff about how private equity firms have nothing to do.

They can't get any exits.

Because they're kind of bored.

They're not doing as many deals.

They can't raise money.

Might be good to tighten this wigot for 2027.

And then there's also just like

the theme of what

AI will do for junior hiring and financial services.

So if you're running a big private equity firm and you're looking at your need for junior headcount two years out, it might feel a little uncertain.

And you might say, you know what?

We don't need to hire everyone for 2027 right now.

We can take a pause on that and see how many people we actually need in 2027.

So I genuinely don't know.

Like if you were a junior, like if you're about to start your banking job,

I don't know whether you'd rather have private equity recruiting now or not.

It's kind of nice to have your...

you know, entire future sewn up for the next five years.

But at the same time, it's like stressful to interview now without knowing anything and without having done any deals and commit yourself to

your jobs for the next five years.

I would think it's better for candidates to have a little bit more time.

Yeah.

But not if the reason for that is that

the dystopian.

The dystopian future.

Yeah, that AI will just replace them anyway.

Also, I wanted to talk about this a bit more from the perspective of an Apollo or another PE firm.

The reason why everything has been pushed, are we saying back or forward?

Probably the reason why.

The reason why everything is getting pushed earlier is theoretically because they want the best analysts.

And it almost seems like a trade-off that to get the best analysts, part of the price you pay is probably some of the folks that you hire two years early before they have any experiences, some of them are going to be duds.

Oh, yeah.

Yeah.

And

this is what they say when they agree with Jamie Diamond.

They're like, we want to get the recruiting right.

You know, I did get one reader email.

I was like, it's really hard to do recruiting.

We've never found a way to be really confident that we're getting the right people.

And so like,

who did the good job in the interview and is going to Goldman is like fine.

To me, it seems like this would be a bad recruiting system because you would not know anything about people's performance.

But like the counter argument is like, yeah, you never know anything anyway.

And that's fine.

But yeah, I would think that you'd get a lot of

duds or people who aren't motivated or, you know, you'd miss a lot of people who like don't have the most prestigious backgrounds, but actually kill it in banking.

You know, like,

it seems like a worse recruiting process than like waiting until people have done deals for for a while.

Trevor Burrus, Jr.: Also, in all the coverage I've read about this over the past months and past couple of years, it just seems like there's only one pipeline to get into PE at the entry level, and that's to come from banking.

Do they hire from anywhere other than IB?

Yeah,

historically, some number of management consultants, some number of post-MBA people.

But I think it's increasingly hard and increasingly like the pipeline is the pipeline, and there's one way to do it,

you know, particularly because they're interviewing so early.

Well, we'll see how long this truce lasts.

Yeah, I think there's something interesting about like people emailed me to be like, if they want to compete for the best people, why don't they just wait and pay more?

There's a weird fungibility about like both the people and the firms where it's like we all have to do the same recruiting at the same time because we're getting the same people to do the same job.

Like, you could imagine like one private equity firm going to people

a week before the job starts and say, look, I know you've accepted a job at another private equity firm, but like we think you're good.

We'll double your salary, right?

You could imagine doing that.

But I think it's like not done and sort of frowned upon and it's like small enough industry that people wouldn't do it.

But it is a strange thing that everything feels so fungible and like

it's such a direct competition for the same people to do the same thing rather than like, you know, trying to differentiate yourself in some way other than hiring 20 minutes earlier.

Yeah.

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The Grand Convergence.

Right, there's a story in the Financial Times about Tower Research Capital, the

very

delightful high-frequency trading program.

Yeah.

One of the oldest ones.

Yeah.

If not the oldest.

I don't know.

It's hard to know what counts as a high-frequency trading firm, but they're a sort of big

established high-frequency trading firm.

And they're starting a, they're apparently launching a hedge fund to run outside capital because like,

you know, you're a high-frequency trading firm.

You run your own capital.

You get like market signals that tell you what stocks to buy in the next.

three seconds.

Yeah.

And like those signals throw off enough exhaust that you can be like, I'll know what stocks to buy in the next three minutes.

Right.

Yeah.

And you like, you know, you reach your capacity for how much of that you can do with your own money.

And then you're like, well, open up to outside money and charge people 20% for telling them what stocks to buy in the next three hours or whatever.

So it's an interesting convergence of like what hedge funds do and what high-frequency trading firms do.

Yeah.

This is an interesting one.

I liked this phrase that was in the FT article.

Let me find it where I put it in my notes.

Oh, yeah, I like this.

Mid-frequency strategies.

I haven't heard that before.

We talked about high-frequency, but now we're talking about mid-frequency.

You guys run in different circles.

Oh, we do.

I don't know what it means because, like, I think different people have different, like, I think there are definitely people in the world who you're like, oh, yeah, I'm a high-frequency trader.

I trade like every couple of days, right?

But, like, when like HFT people say it, they mean like, when HFT people, you're like, I trade every second.

They're like, oh, that's so low-frequency.

What a pedestrian case of trading.

You know, I've said milliseconds in articles, and people have been like, milliseconds are so slow.

What are you even talking about?

But no, mid-frequency is somewhere between a microsecond and an hour.

Yeah, I'm sorry.

It's between somewhere between a microsecond and a month, somewhere in that range.

I do like to imagine like a full circle moment, though.

Like tower being an example of, okay, they're,

you know, going out the time spectrum, and maybe just we end up with long-only fund managers at a certain point.

I don't think we're going to end up with a, well, I don't, like, sure.

Like, this is the thing, like

people who are doing a lot of quantitative research into signals that tell them what stocks to buy and sell, there are different ways to use that.

And often it's like at different timescales where

if you have a pretty good method for knowing which stocks are likely to go up or down,

one natural thing to do is to like...

buy the ones that'll go up and short the ones that'll go down, right?

But another thing to do is you buy the ones that will go up and not short anything and run a long-only fund.

And so you have like, you know,

aqr and other people who run you know hedge funds and also like we'll just take the long signals and run long-only money because people want long-only products or like you know i was thinking about like other examples of this kind of thing and like you look at renaissance and it's never clear exactly what the dividing line is but like renaissance you know yeah has

a

very famous extraordinarily successful hedge fund called medallion that has been closed to outside money for decades now because it's too good.

And it only has so much capacity, right?

Yeah.

And so they close it to outside money and they run their own money and they make themselves billionaires.

And then they're like, well, you know, we have all this like, you know, it's like pretty good signals that, you know, like we reach capacity on our own money, but like we can use those signals to run institutional money and like not quite as good, but good enough.

So there's a lot of that where like, you know, people who have really good signals that have limited capacity will run their own money with those really good signals.

And then, like, there's some second tier of like, we can run other people's money and still be pretty good.

Yeah.

I mean, by the way, I don't know that Tower is advertising that.

Like, maybe they're like, oh, our like mid-frequency signals are even better.

You should definitely get in on this, right?

But like, I do think in Renaissance, it's quite explicitly the case that they're like, we have really good stuff for us and like, okay, stuff for you.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Yeah.

The article doesn't go into that, but it does say that this would mark one of the first examples of a large, high-speed proprietary trading shop opening a product for outside investors.

Yeah, sort of, although like Jane Street is a shit bonds, right?

Yeah.

Not a product for outside investors per se, but like the idea that like you are a big successful proprietary trading firm and so you use outside money to grow your business is not like completely unheard of.

True.

And also I think some of them have taken like outside equity investments, although I'm not sure about that.

You touched on this, but one of the quotes in the article attributed to a person close to Tower is that there's just a finite limit to the amount of money money that you can make with the really high-frequency strategies.

Why is that?

It's just because they're dealing with the likes of Citadel and Jane Street and trying to compete against them?

Or what does that mean?

Well,

like

stocks don't go up that much.

And

that's in a microsecond, right?

Like, what is investing, right?

Like, you're

sort of a deep question here.

It was like, why should you make money by buying stocks, right?

And the answer is in, like, the long term, because you're allocating capital to its best uses and you are saying this AI company is going to transform the world.

And so if I invest in it now, it'll like 10x my money because like it'll be transformative to the world, right?

And if you're like, why should you make money holding stocks for like

one one-thousandth of a second?

The answer is because you're providing a tiny, tiny liquidity service to somebody, right?

And like, it turns out that you can make a really nice living providing a tiny liquidity service to people, but you can't like, you know, make a trillion dollars, right?

Like, you're not like allocating capital to like changing the world.

You're like, yeah, like providing a little service, right?

So there shouldn't be that much money.

Like, there's a lot of money in very high-frequency understanding what stocks will go up in the next hundredth of a second, but there's more money in understanding how the economy will transform in the next 10 years, right?

Yeah.

Because I read that quote and I was like, isn't that true of

a lot of things?

What do you mean?

Like, there's only a finite amount of money that you can make.

I don't think there's a like, I think the one place where there is not a finite finite amount of money is in like understanding

what companies and technologies will be transformative for the world, right?

Like if you like pick where economic growth will be, like you can make a trillion dollars, right?

Like not really, but like, I mean, you can't, right?

I mean, like, you know, Facebook is a trillion dollar company, right?

Like, you can, like, know what the future will look like and make a trillion dollars, right?

Like, you can't

in most businesses.

Like, you know, you're like providing a service.

Yeah, there's a limit to how much money you can make.

Well, there's a quote in here from a professor over at the University of Illinois who also, here's another quote that just made me think a little bit.

If you're a firm that gets really good at mining gold, why stick to just mining gold?

It's like, well, because you're good at it.

That was another thinker.

Nice living.

Yeah.

Mining gold, right?

But

that's like asking you,

why not?

Why not launch a podcast?

And that was the Money Stuff Podcast.

I'm Matt Levine.

And I'm Katie Greifeld.

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