Finders Keepers: IPO, XAI, Subs

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

I'm Matt Levine, and I write the Money Stuff column for Bloomberg Opinion.

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

And today is an all-terrace episode of the Money Stuff No, it's not.

Can you imagine?

I actually would be the most prepared out of any episode that we've ever done.

I know you fell in talking about tariffs non-stop for 48 hours.

I was actually at my grandmom's apartment last night, or I guess in the afternoon.

Talking about tariffs.

Well, I was with my dad, and my dad and I both were like, Can we turn on the TV?

My grandma was like, Sure.

Yeah, so we watched it with her.

No.

Yeah, the Rose Garden.

No.

Anyway,

we're not talking about tariffs.

We are talking about a conservative-leaning news network that went public.

Conservative-leaning, yeah.

Yeah, I don't know what Newsmax does.

I probably should.

They're a television channel.

That I know.

I've never watched them.

They've staked out the vast territory to the far right of Fox News, is my understanding of it.

You know, and their IPO, at one point, they had a market value of over $30 billion,

which had them more valuable than Fox for a brief moment of time.

The stock has since started to come back to Earth.

I don't pretend to understand this anymore.

Like the meme thing, like the meme IPO thing.

I think of this in comparison to Trump Media and Technology Group, the other, let's say,

right-wing media network, maybe, that also has a very high valuation relative to its fairly low revenue and net loss.

And Trump Media is owned by people who are like, yeah, great.

But like, Newsmax is partly owned by Thomas Peterfee, who,

in addition to being a billionaire Republican donor, is also a trader.

He's the founder of Adirector Brekers.

And so the FT got him on the phone and he was like, he said he was stunned by the price.

I think Newsmax is a great company and it's going to have a very bright future, but I think that it does not warrant this high price.

It was like, he knows.

In addition to being a real billionaire, he has like a billion dollars worth of Newsmax stock.

Yeah, he owns the second largest stake.

It was at one point worth at least $5.4 billion.

I wonder if he sold.

I think he's locked up.

Really?

And I think they asked him, like, are you going to sell?

And he's like, oh, you know, I can change before the law.

Most big shareholders are locked up in IPOs like that.

And it's funny, like, for the same reasons that the stock prices, some of the commentary that you'll read from enthusiasts is not always well informed.

And I read someone being like, what will Newsmax do with all of this capital?

Will they use it to become the next big media?

They're not getting any capital.

It's just like the stock is trading in the secondary market.

There's like a real move among meme stocks that if your stock is memeing, you should get off at the market stock offering so you can raise money from the people who are buying your stock in the secondary market and pushing up the price.

But you can't do that a week after your IPO or three days after your IPO.

Musemax is not selling any stock.

I mean, they sold stock at $10 before the run in the stock, but they're not making any money from this.

This is just secondary trading.

They're not making money in general.

They lost

$72 million.

These are separate things.

If you're a meme stock, you don't make money in your business, but you make money selling stock, but they're not even doing that.

I'm old-fashioned, Matt.

I like to go back to the fundamentals.

That's true.

I guess it's hard to predict what will become a meme stock.

I would not have guessed that Newsmax was a candidate.

No?

Not really.

Oh, really?

Apparently, Chris Ruddy, though, the CEO, was going on like cable news and pitching the IPO, which I didn't know.

Had I known that, maybe I would have.

It's a TV show.

Yeah, that's true.

But he was going on other shows.

Not Bloomberg News, to the best of my knowledge.

I'm on the podcast.

That's true.

Chris, you're ready, if you're listening.

I want to talk a little bit about the mechanics of this IPO.

I was chatting with Bailey Lip Schultz of Bloomberg News about this.

He's my go-to guy.

He's heard memes talk about it.

Yeah, on funky things.

He also covers IPOs, which is a really poetic intersection.

So this was a regulation A Plus.

It's a mini IPO.

Okay, a mini IPO.

Yeah.

Yeah.

I didn't know that.

And the reason I found out is because I have another Matt in my professional life.

His name is Matt Miller.

And he was like, wow, the bank must have really mispriced this.

And Billy made the good point that because it's a Reg A Plus IPO, they can only raise up to $75 million.

So it's not like this was mispriced or anything.

I mean, you can sell fewer shares to raise the $75 million.

But really,

who are the banks?

I'm so excited you ask.

Digital Offering LLC.

Oh, yeah.

Yeah.

Business Insider, I don't think you've seen this yet.

Business Insider just, as we're talking about this on a Thursday, published a story titled, Meet the Tiny Investment Bank Behind Newsmax's Rip Roaring Stock Debut, Laguna Beach, California-based digital offering LLC was the bank behind this.

Can I tell you more facts about them?

I want to hear all of the facts about them.

I'll tell you at least three.

They have 10 full-time registered banker, three of whom act as principal investment bankers.

They typically advise companies valued at a billion dollars or less.

Those are actually all the facts I have.

But I have a quote from Mark Alenowitz.

I hope I'm saying his name correctly.

He's a managing director there.

He said that Newsmax, as you might predict, has been huge for them.

The small cap community knows who we are, but the rest of Wall Street didn't.

But now they're on the map.

So I'm still hung up on the idea that the bank's mispriced it, right?

Because I used to be an equity capital markets banker.

I think of like the way you do an IPO is you go out to institutional accounts and you build a book of institutional accounts and you put some stuff with retail.

But if you go to an institution and you're like, well, we lost $70 million on $170 million of revenue, there's some cap to the valuation you're going to get, right?

And if you trade on the secondary market to retail, there is not that cap or any cap, right?

Like you can be a $30 billion company for briefly if you have those kind of numbers.

And so if you

go to institutional investors and say, this is going to be a meme stock, so we're pricing it at $200,

they will laugh at you.

By the way, like, I don't want to say Bill Ackman tried that, but a little bit.

A little bit.

Friend of the show.

Friend of the show, Bill Ackman.

They did it.

But I don't think that's the case here because a reggae plus offering done by a small bank might have been, you know, it was for the small cap community.

It's not like they were selling this to Fidelity necessarily.

Maybe they did misprice it as a meme matter.

I don't know.

I don't know.

Well, it'll be interesting to see their follow-up to the Newsmax debut.

Digital offering, LLC.

It does feel like a

real golden age for like a certain sort of banker who is happy to work with meme stock companies.

Right, does it?

Does it feel like stuff going on that like, you know, not necessarily every bank wants to be doing?

I don't know.

I feel like the golden age might have been 2021.

Like these are.

It's like the D-Spacks kind of thing.

Yeah.

Obviously, you're still having some meme stock IPOs, but there's just not a lot of IPOs.

And I don't know.

That's right.

Looking at Thursday.

It's like a relative golden age for the meme stock bankers compared to the

large cap

tech bankers and everyone else could talk about Circle.

You know what to?

Also, in IPOs.

Also, in ITI news.

This one hasn't happened yet, but it's going to, theoretically, Circle of Stablecoin Fame has filed for an IPO.

Yeah, they filed like a long time ago, but their filing became public this year.

They filed under another special IPO rule, which is you can file confidentially, but now they're unconfidential, so you can read their filings.

Got some numbers.

$156 million.

That's their net income.

That's on revenue of $1.68 billion in 2024.

My only simple question for you is, how does a stablecoin make money?

Is that just because they're backed by?

Yeah, yeah.

That's it.

Oh, yeah.

It's the best business in the world.

And it's actually like, it was surprising to me that their margins are so low.

And it's a little interesting why their margins aren't 100%.

Yeah.

But no, they make money by like they take tens of billions of dollars of deposits from customers.

You know, I wrote about this.

They don't directly put it in T-bills

because

I think my explanation would be like that is too much of like a banking function or a financial services function and they are like a fintech.

So what they do is they take all the money and they put it in a BlackRock money market fund that puts it in T-bills.

That's amazing.

Effectively they put it in T-bills.

They pay BlackRock to be a sort of like adult's custodian of their T-bills.

Yeah.

They put some of it in bank accounts, but it's like 85% T-bills.

They say they make a discount to SOFR, but they kind of make T-bill rates.

And

then they pay,

as a first cut, 0%

interest to their customers.

Now that's not quite right.

It's basically right.

So they're making, you know,

4% or so on tens of billions of dollars.

And that might be a slight exaggeration, but it's like, you know, they're making a lot of money.

And then where does it go?

I mean, some of it is like they have expenses because they are a tech company.

They're building technological infrastructure to transfer stable coins on the blockchain, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera.

Another big part of it is like everyone knows this is a good business model.

It's not quite

a business, a winner-take-all business model, but it's a little bit like you want to be the most liquid stablecoin.

And so they are paying platforms to be like a preferred stablecoin.

So they're the stablecoin of Coinbase.

And there's a partnership with Coinbase.

And if their coins are held on Coinbase, they're paying Coinbase a lot of the interest, right?

They're paying fees to Binance to be on Binance.

So there's some amount of

this is a good business.

And so the customer acquisition cost is kind of, you're paying something for it.

But it feels like it's only a good business when rates are high.

So, right.

It's such an interesting business because it stumbled into being a good business.

It started, the stablecoin business started when rates were low.

And everyone was like, well, it's fine if we don't get paid interest because even if it was interest, you know, we don't get interest on our savings accounts.

We don't get interested on our money market accounts.

So it's fine.

And now like rates are high and you do get interest on your money market account.

And the stablecoin issuers are raking in money.

And there are reasons that you can't just easily natively get that interest on your stablecoin.

Like one reason is like, you know,

that's like historically not how it developed.

And like, you know, the biggest stablecoin issuers have a liquidity advantage and they don't want to pay interest.

But another reason is like there's securities law problems with doing it.

If you were paying interest on a stablecoin, it's not in like the sort of crypto y gray area where it's probably fine.

It's a money market fund and it's a security.

I mean, this is at least the SEC theory as of four months ago.

And one thing that I have written about for a long time is that clearly people are going to just start issuing interest-bearing stablecoins that are, you know, registered money market funds that trade on a blockchain.

And if you look at the Circle IPO documents, like they talk about that, like they have an issuer that does that, that has a small money market fund, and they are doing essentially an interest-bearing stablecoin that you can convert into their regular coin.

And they kind of hint, and I'm sure that there will be more of that.

And ultimately, some of this free money will be returned to customers.

Why am I thinking of BlackRock and Securitized?

Don't they have something?

Everyone has it.

Yeah.

BlackRock has a tokenized market fund.

Circle, I think, owns a company that does it in addition to having their stablecoin money out of BlackRock fund.

Yeah, everyone's doing it.

Franklin Templeton did it like in 2019.

They launched the tokenized fund.

I remember that.

Yeah.

And I was like, why is it not called the Benjamin?

And no one had a good answer.

I am excited to see how this is received when it eventually does become public.

Because

I know.

You know, you think about all the other

crypto equities.

I imagine this is going to trade similarly to the price of Bitcoin, even though maybe it shouldn't.

I mean, it's really just a money market fund with a lot of layers.

It is, and it is, right?

I mean, like, you know, as a first cut, their business is kind of like, what is the market cap of like their coins outstanding?

And like, the market cap of stable coins outstanding does have a lot to do with like demand for crypto.

Yeah, that's true.

It's not as direct, though, as like

direct.

No, MicroStrategy owns a ton of Bitcoin.

So it's not exactly a proxy.

It's obviously.

It's not a proxy for Bitcoin.

I always think about Goldman used to say that their business is a bet on global GDP.

And the stablecoin business is a bet on crypto GDP, right?

Like if crypto is booming, there will be more demand for stablecoins.

Now, there's separately a competitive...

dynamic in stablecoins where like they might lose out to other stablecoins.

And there's like the business model of like we get interest and don't pay interest might be compressed and they might have to pay more interest.

But like, you know, broadly speaking, like the more crypto there is, the more people will want their stablecoin.

I wonder like what the pitch to buy circle shares is, especially if rates have billions of dollars, we get paid interest and we don't pay interest.

Yeah, but what if rates go down?

Like, what's the point?

The pitch is like we are building the future of financial infrastructure.

Like, there's like the real upside case is like in five years, the way that you normally pay for stuff will be with a regulated US stablecoin.

Instead of Venmo or credit cards or checks or whatever, you will boop some circle coins to someone, right?

Like that's the upside case.

It's kind of quaint to think we'll still be here in five years.

That's true.

That's the downside case.

Yeah, right.

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Man, you know, we were talking about right-leaning like social media networks.

Oh, gosh, we were.

What a transition.

Ah, boy.

X.

X.

Twitter.

X.

X.

Now part of XII Holdings.

Yes.

Man.

So I obviously immediately thought of you on

the chronicler of Elon Musk's mergers.

And this, technically

is an Elon Musk merger.

I thought about texting you, but I was.

I was done.

You spared me.

Yeah.

Right.

I remember seeing that day.

Wow.

It seems like in your view, this, though, isn't like that huge of a deal.

Like, this didn't rock your world as much as some might have expected it to.

It's the biggest M ⁇ A deal this year.

Yeah.

And the second biggest, actually maybe the first biggest is Elon Musk's.

By biggest, I mean like from like the Bloomberg root table, which counts announced deals, including announced hostel deals.

And the biggest deal this year is Elon's deal to buy OpenAI, which is not a deal.

It's just a bid.

And it's not really a bid.

It's a...

piece of performance art.

But the second biggest is this deal, which is a, let's say, $45 billion acquisition or like a, you know,

$125 billion total enterprise value of an all-stock merger.

I don't know.

It's a pretty big deal.

Except it's like, you know, it's two companies he owns or now one company that he owns.

I want to talk about valuations a little bit.

Sure.

Because it kind of feels like the XAI valuation, you could poke a lot of holes in it.

So a couple of things.

So XAI, the AI company,

bought X, the Twitter company, in an all-stock deal.

So XAI assumed, let's say, $12 billion of Twitter debt, and it paid, let's say, $33 billion of stock for X.

What does $33 billion worth of stock mean?

Well, it means if you value XAI at $80 billion,

then you give Twitter, you know, 33 80ths of that, and that's $33 billion worth of stock.

You don't have to believe either valuation.

What actually happened was that like they merged at a ratio, right?

The people people who owned XAI got 80, 113ths of the company, and the people who owned Twitter got 3,313ths of the company.

And that was the ratio that happened.

They could have been worth $80 and $33, right?

Or they could have been worth $80 billion and $33 billion or any other number in that ratio.

So you don't have to believe the valuations.

And it's interesting, like the last round where XAI raised cash, it was like, I think at $51 billion.

It was $51 billion in December.

You did point out that in mid-February, Bloomberg reported that XAI was canvassing potential investors for a $10 billion funding round that would value it at $75 billion.

But

meanwhile, X raised money recently at a,

you know, I've been saying $33 and $45, $33 billion equity valuation, $45 billion enterprise value.

Like, that was a weird round.

And one thing about it is like Elon Musk put in some money.

And

in hindsight, you could sort of be like, well, they were doing that to like print a trade at that price so they could justify doing the merger at that price.

Because like, you know, there was like talk of like X being down 50% from where he bought it.

And I think it's nice for him to close it out at the price that he paid for it.

Yeah.

But like, you know, you don't have to believe any of those valuations because in a rough sense, like what happened here was that Elon Musk owns two companies and he's mushed them into one company.

It doesn't matter what the valuation was.

Now, that's not quite true because there are minority shareholders in both companies, but like, they're like along for the ride.

They don't get a say.

They're not going to complain about the valuations of any of these things.

I mean, are there any antitrust concerns here at all?

Like, can we see anything?

I mentioned, like, you know, usually you have some delay between signing and closing because you have to like fill out antitrust forms.

But someone pointed out, they're both owned by the same guy anyway, so there's really no antitrust concerns.

In many respects, the thing to say about this deal is those companies were already the same company.

So it doesn't really matter for antitrust or for fiduciary duties or for valuation or for anything else that they're merging, right?

It's just like, yeah, sure.

It's like he's reshuffling the paperwork for his own companies.

Yeah.

The only thing I'll say is like, why did he merge them?

One possible answer is that these are kind of the same business.

And so one reason that I think Elon Musk has a bunch of separate companies for all of his different ideas is like you want to have like the companies have some focus and have the employees of these companies have shares or options in like their one company so they're really motivated to do a good job for that one company.

And so like Tesla and SpaceX are doing different things.

And so it'll like move people between them.

But like you want to pay the Tesla people and Tesla options and the SpaceX people and SpaceX options.

And I think that there was a reason to separate X and XAI because AI was really hot and he wanted to raise money and get employees and press for doing AI.

But increasingly, I think that they're the same business, which is that you collect a lot of data, like natural language data and like information from

the Twitter user corpus.

Right.

And then you feed that into

models that are built by AI engineers who work at XAI.

And then you produce a large language model that you distribute through Twitter, right?

Like their model is distributed.

It's like a pretty good idea.

The only reason

I know what Grok is is because of Twitter, obviously.

But that's not weird.

Like every AI company, you're different, like trying to figure out business models.

But a lot of stuff is like, there's a consumer distribution, right?

Where like OpenAI, among other products, sells access to, you know, you could like subscribe and have ChatGPT, right?

And you pay a fee every month to have like the consumer version of ChatGPT.

And Grok is like that, and like their distribution is through X.

And so it's increasing.

It's like, this is the same business.

It's like the inputs and the outputs are through X and the model in the middle is done through X AI.

So everyone should be kind of working for the same goals and motivated the same way.

So we should merge it so that the the employees are getting incentivized to help the whole system.

Well, it's a nice reminder that like nothing truly matters.

And I guess that my experience on X as a user won't change.

So I'm not particularly fussed about this.

I do want to go to the second element in your.

People were like, you know, like I wrote about this.

I got a lot of people being like, but now they're going to like steal all your data.

They already are.

It's like they already were.

Like they all, like the commercial relationship like already existed.

XAI was already paying X for like data and distribution and like it was already stealing all your data and sort of using all of your data.

So there's no real change, I don't think.

I do want to go to the second element in the Musk Mars conglomerate that you penned.

You're right, nothing is permanent.

And if one of the companies succeeds while another one has some temporary struggles, the winner can subsidize or buy the loser.

Talking about Musk's portfolio of different companies.

This is like...

Tesla acquired SolarCity years ago in a deal that people sued over, and they kind of

looked like a bailout of SolarCity.

Yeah.

Well, you could see the reverse logic in like Tesla buying XAI in a distant reality because Tesla is really in the hurt locker, but I don't think XAI could buy Tesla.

It still has a market cap of something insane.

It wouldn't be buying.

It would be a merger.

It would be an all-stock merger.

And I think it would be hard for a number of reasons.

One of which is like, I just made the case that X and XAI are the same business.

Yes.

Tesla's a different business.

Yes, that's true.

You're doing AI stuff to make the self-driving cars, but it's a pretty different business.

Hasn't he said that he wants Tesla to be an AI company?

I might have said that.

Well, it is an AI company.

It's a self-driving car company.

It's an AI company, but they're different, you know.

But they're right.

There's some overlap, but it's not the same business model or distribution.

But then also, like, this deal is so easy because they're private companies.

There are shareholders other than him in both of these companies, but like they're there because they love him.

They're not going to complain.

Tesla's a different situation, right?

Like every shareholder in XAI or X is there because they like trust Elon Musk and they want him to do stuff, right?

And they will give him a lot of leeway to do the stuff he thinks is good.

Many vocal retail investors, vocal institutional investors too, in Tesla are like that, but not all of them.

No.

The one thing that exists in Tesla is there are people who really don't like Elon Musk, who will buy Tesla stock in order to be able to complain about Elon Musk, right?

Like I read this week about the comptroller of the city of New York, right?

Like,

New York pension funds own a lot of Tesla stock.

This is not because they're huge Elon Musk fans, right?

Some of it is because they're like sort of index-y,

but also you could just do it to be like, I'll keep an eye on that Elon Musk character.

I'll own some of his stock.

And so, like, the comptroller sent a letter to the legal department of the pension fund saying, we should sue Elon Musk because he is distracted by his role in the government and he is advocating policies that are bad for Tesla.

And, like, you know, there's like, you say Tesla's in the hard locker.

It's because, like, you know, there's been like boycotts and stuff because people don't like Elon.

That's one part of it, but yeah.

Yeah, sure, right, right.

They had some pretty ugly delivery numbers.

Which I think some people, including the controller city of New York, would say is in part due to slackening demand because people are mad at Elon Musk's politics, right?

I'm also anti-EV, and I think that, I don't know, they've reached their addressable market on

the addressable, right?

But like if you think about the people who are like in the addressable market, or like people who are like, I love NEV, and the people who are like, I also love far-right politics, like, you know, there's some disjunction there.

Anyway, though, so like the New York might sue for like securities fraud for Doge, which is, you know, a real everything is securities fraud moment.

But anyway, my point is only that Tesla, if it were to merge with XAI, there would be all sorts of lawsuits that you don't have when it's all private companies.

That's true.

Well,

I guess it would make more sense with SpaceX since they both make things that go fast, but that's a gross oversimplification.

There was that time, I think about all the time that Elon Musk tweeted that the next Tesla model would have rocket boosters and be able to fly.

And like, there were articles that were like, how feasible is this?

It's just like

CEO of a public company saying this stuff.

And, you know, this is like seven years ago.

Did he mean it?

Back when things happened.

Things mattered back then.

Well, no, no.

A little bit.

Seven years ago?

What, 29?

I actually don't know what it was.

It might have been any number of years ago.

It's more than three and less than 15.

Pre-pandemic.

Yeah, it seems right.

That's how I think about things.

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Should we talk about substitute teachers?

We absolutely should.

Have you seen lately what substituted teachers in Maryland are making?

$7 million.

$7 million.

Jeez, Louise.

What are we doing?

Yeah, so there's this story about like a Maryland state audit of the Prince George's County school system that found various administrative errors, sloppiness.

And the one that I was drawn to is that a substitute teacher taught for like three days.

And they entered this teacher's information into the system to send them like a check for their few days of work.

And they put the teacher's ID number into the hours worked field.

And the ID number had more digits than you want in the hours worked field.

And so they sent the person a check for $7 million.

God.

And they noticed that 50 days later and asked for it back and the teacher gave it back.

And I just liked to imagine what this person did.

I keep saying this person.

I don't know the gender of the teacher.

I imagine what the teacher did in those 50 days.

And so do my readers.

A lot of emails about this.

Most of them were to the effect of, you take that money, you put it in a money market fund.

50 days later, when they ask for the money back, you give it back.

And you keep the $30,000 to $50,000, depending exactly how you count, the tens of thousands of dollars of interest is yours to keep.

You're briefly the owner of $7 million, but you can collect interest on $7 million and it's a meaningful amount of money.

Absolutely.

That's like the most reasonable thing that you can do with it.

The other thing that someone sent me was like, you should go to a trading firm.

This is someone who works at like a trading firm.

He's like, you should go to like an insurance company or a trading firm and buy insurance on this.

You should be like, I will give you, this person said like like $3.5 million.

I'll give you $3.5 million.

And if they come to me for the money back, you give them $7 million.

And if they don't, you keep the $3.5 million.

So you're paying an insurance premium for, are they going to ask you for the money back?

Now, I don't think any trading firm would do that at 50% odds, but you could give them like

$6.8 million and someone might take that trade.

And then you keep the $200,000.

You know,

just the trade you can do, maybe.

I would love to know what this person actually did, though.

I don't think that we can get this person on the podcast.

I leave it in their checking account for.

Are you sure?

No, I'm not sure.

I mean, this is the whole point of what we're reading, but you are magic $7 million.

You're just an ordinary person.

You just leave it in your checking account.

You weren't magicked.

You were mistakenly paid it.

Yeah.

Now, there's a range of things you can do.

You can call the school system and be like, you mistakenly paid me $7 million.

Teacher seems not to have done that.

There is a number where I would do that.

You know, if I was accidentally paid, you know, an extra $200, I would probably call.

Really?

I don't know.

I mean, but yeah.

I don't think I would have noticed.

If I were accidentally paid an amount that I noticed, but that would not materially change my life, not like really materially change my life, I'd probably call and be like, hey, I'm a nice person.

Let's sort this error out.

But it's $7 million.

You're like, hmm, let's see where this goes, right?

See, I'm the exact opposite of you.

If it was, it's hard to do this without talking about numbers.

If it was $7 million,

I would probably call because that is so egregiously an error.

There's like no way way i'm going to be able to keep this if it was far less than that like not enough to change my life but enough that i could you might just pick a horse

if it was enough to buy uh a pretty one horse worth of a young greenbroke horse i would probably not call about it but like then would you spend it

on the horse no no but like you would like the next day go out and buy a horse well i'd have to find the horse first you know okay probably do a few tests but like while you're test riding there's a good chance that they'll ask for the money back.

That's true.

That's true.

I wouldn't spend it immediately, but I would start the process.

The choice is not like you call and say, hey, there's an error here, or you keep the money forever.

Yeah.

Like there's the vast middle ground of you don't call and you worry, right?

Which is what this person did, right?

That's true.

You're not keeping that money.

I probably would not spend it immediately, like in any situation, but I'm not really an impulse buyer.

My favorite reader email about this

came from someone who worked at a bank and got overpaid.

He was mistakenly paid like a bonus or something.

And it was like not seven million dollars, but it was, I think he was like a young person.

I don't know, it was tens of thousands of dollars.

And he says he consulted an employment lawyer and learned about the time period for latches, which is a legal concept of like basically

how long do you have to wait before you don't have to worry about it anymore?

It's like a statute of limitations for stuff like this.

And the lawyer told him it was six years.

Wow.

And he

waited out the six years.

Wow.

And he's like, and at the end, I threw a claim has lapsed the party.

That's awesome.

Because they didn't ask for the money back.

Man, that is a great email.

But I just imagine the mindset of

this money has been mistakenly deposited in my account.

Let me ask a lawyer.

I wrote once about the Citigroup error and about

yeah, I know, right?

When they sent the $900 million to hedge funds that were mad at them and the hedge funds kept it, I wrote about the hedge funds consulting Finders Keepers lawyers because they did actually bring a claim being like, no, we're allowed to keep the money.

But there are Finders Keepers lawyers out there in the world, and you can consult one and be like, you have six years.

If you get through six years, you can keep the money.

And he did.

I would love to have gone to that party.

That sounds like a blast.

It's a good party.

Yeah, it's a good theme.

I love a theme.

That's a good one.

It's a good theme.

Man.

It's not, I got a mistaken bonus.

It's six years later, they haven't asked for my mistaken bonus back.

It's so good.

I wonder if he told the bank.

this is not.

That's a good point.

Probably not.

But now they know.

I should say, this is not legal advice.

I have no idea what this is.

I know, that'd be too perfect.

Oh, yeah, yeah.

Citigroup, check.

And that was the Money Stuff Podcast.

I'm Matt Livian.

And I'm Katie Greif.

You can find my work by subscribing to the Money Stuff newsletter on Bloomberg.com.

And you can find me on Bloomberg TV every day on Open Interest between 9 to 11 a.m.

Eastern.

We'd love to hear from you.

You can send an email to moneypod at bloomberg.net.

Ask us a question, and we might answer it on air.

You can also subscribe to our show wherever you're listening right now and leave us a review.

It helps more people find the show.

The Money Stuff Podcast is produced by Anna Mazarakis and Moses Andam.

Our theme music was composed by Blake Maples.

Brendan Francis Newton is our executive producer.

And Sage Fauman is Bloomberg's head of podcasts.

Thanks for listening to the Money Stuff Podcast.

We'll be back next week with more stuff.

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