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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.

Welcome back, Katie.

Welcome back, Matt.

You didn't go anywhere, but in my mind, I took a vacation from

this morning.

I'm currently trying to remember how to record a podcast.

Yeah, no, I also forgot in our week off.

It was

honestly nice.

Yeah.

The way this usually goes, though, is we have three topics.

Sure.

What are those three topics today, Katie?

So we're gonna talk about Endeavor.

You're on a three-day streak of writing about this deal.

Quite an endeavor.

We're gonna talk about the baby Berkshire boom because that is underway.

And then we're gonna talk about public-private prices.

Endeavor.

Endeavor.

I think when we first spoke about this deal, we ended with something close to watch this space because it was going to close on March 24th and it did.

Right.

It's funny, like, I sometimes will write an M ⁇ A deal will have a lot of drama.

And so I write about it successively for days or weeks.

Nothing's really happened in this deal.

Just the interviews.

It was closed on Monday.

Like, nothing's happened since.

Like, this company doesn't exist.

Right.

So Endeavour is a company.

It went private.

There was like a long lead up to it going private.

Like, they signed their deal about a year ago.

Silverlake, the biggest shareholder, agreed to take it private at $27.50 per share.

And they announced a few weeks ago that it was going to close this Monday, March 24th.

And then this Monday, March 24th, it closed at $27.50 per share, exactly on schedule.

So not really a lot of news there.

But what was weird is that the previous week it traded well above $27.50 per share.

And in fact, the last day before the closing on Friday, it closed at $29.25 a share.

So like $1.75 over the merger price.

And like a lot of shares traded.

And, you know, if you know you're going to get cashed out at $2,750 on Monday, it's a little weird to buy the stock at $29.25 on Friday.

And,

you know, the reason for that seems to be that everyone expects there to be a class action lawsuit saying that the deal was underpriced.

And they're looking forward to getting in on that class action.

Yeah, you had three possibilities.

Yeah.

So when we talked about this last time, there was a lot of noise about appraisal,

which is one way you can basically sue for a better price.

But to do that, you have to demand appraisal.

And there are reasons that can be advantageous to you, but like one problem with it is you need to have owned the stock continuously since like early February.

The other way to sue to get a better price is just a class action lawsuit saying that

the board that approved the deal was like failing in its fiduciary ideas to shareholders.

And here that's like a pretty tempting lawsuit because you know, as we talked about last time, the deal price turned out to look really low.

You know, Endeavor's main asset is shares of another publicly traded company.

Right.

That company traded up a lot.

So by now, the deal price for Endeavor looks really low.

And, you know, it's being bought by its controlling shareholder.

So there's always a conflict of interest there.

There wasn't a vote of the independent shareholders.

Like, no, like, independent person really ratified the price, right?

Like, the board did, but like the shareholders didn't.

So, you know, there's a lot of

stuff for a lawsuit.

And people seem to be valuing that lawsuit at about $1.75 a share.

Well, clear this up for me, because I was a little bit confused.

So, there's a possibility of a class action lawsuit, but that is different than

appraisal, yeah.

Appraisal is like this price should have been higher, right?

It doesn't require any like allegations of wrongdoing.

The class action lawsuit is like the board didn't do its fiduciary duty for shareholders.

But in this sort of conflicted situation, like they almost get to the same place, and it's a little bit easier to do the class action because you don't have to have held the shares continuously.

So your third explanation was...

People might have thought that Silverlake would recut the deal to give people a better price, but

I don't know why they would have thought that because Silverlake did say they wouldn't do it and then they didn't do it.

So it looks like the possibility that your readers seem to agree with was that maybe you bought the stock betting on this lawsuit happening.

You bought the stock thinking a lawsuit would happen.

You wanted to be in that lawsuit because you thought that lawsuit was worth more than $1.75 a share.

Maybe that's what Carl Icon did.

I would be surprised if there was any other reason for it.

But yeah, Carl Icon bought about 8% of Endeavour.

It's not exactly clear when because the disclosure doesn't have the trading records, but it kind of seems like he bought it all on Friday.

As of Friday,

he had 8.4%.

Yeah.

And there were a lot of shares traded on Friday.

He might have bought all of his shares on Friday.

Might have been why the stock spiked.

But in any case, yeah, he seems to have bought the stock fairly recently.

And

he's Carl Carl Icon.

Like, he doesn't mind a lawsuit.

No.

He doesn't mind getting his hands a little dirty.

And, you know, I wrote on Thursday, like, if you're a shareholder who was hoping to get in on a lawsuit, like, you got to feel good about this, right?

He's going to have some fun with that lawsuit.

Yeah.

You want Carl Icon on your side complaining about the deal price?

I don't know.

Seems like an encouraging fact.

Makes for good TV, makes for good TV.

Podcasting.

So perhaps Carl Icon wanted in on this lawsuit specifically, but there's also the possibility that maybe short sellers wanted out, question mark.

I really don't know.

There's a weird, fascinating history of this.

So like this is not the first deal that has kind of gone like this, where there's been a going private transaction.

It looks kind of conflicted.

Shareholders are disgruntled.

The stock trades above the deal price right until the last minute.

And then the deal closes and the shareholders sue and like years later down the line, they win their lawsuit and they get some money.

In that case,

if you see a stock trading at $29 a share and you know that it's going to be cashed out at $2,750 on Monday,

you may be tempted to sell that stock short because you sell it for $29,

you pay back the $2,750 on Monday, you make an easy $1.50.

So

in a lot of these deals, they end up...

the deal closes and there's some number of shorts and the shorts make a quick profit because the deal closes at below the last trade price.

And so like if they shorted it above the deal price, they make a quick profit.

And then they go about their business.

And years later,

the class action lawsuit gets decided in favor of the shareholders.

And someone, like their broker, comes to them and says, remember that deal that closed at $2,750 and you paid $2,750 because you were short?

Actually, the real deal price is $32.

So you owe us another $4.50.

Uh-oh.

There's a lot of like

lure on this, and it's not clear what the actual rules are.

My understanding is there are people who have done this trade, and like years later, the brokers have come to them and said, You owe us more money.

And they've said, No, we don't.

We closed out our short.

What are you even talking about?

This is not a corporate action that we owe money on.

And there are some like FINRA arbitrations where the customers and the brokers have gone to arbitration.

And it's kind of, I think, gone both ways.

There are some where the customers have lost, but some, I think, where they've won.

So there's like an interesting trade here where you can like make a free, risk-free profit on your short and then years later try to stiff your broker so you can keep the profit.

But it's a little dicey.

Yeah.

But I don't know, for a good two to three years, you did make a profit on that.

And that has to feel somewhat good.

Yeah, I get a lot of emails from people who be like, well, what if I did this?

What if I moved out of state?

You know, like, there's a lot of ways.

You know, it's easy to imagine how you would avoid your broker's phone call in three years, right?

So I think people are interested in that trade.

Okay, so where does this go for here?

Like you said, you should see.

I keep looking for the lawsuit.

I haven't seen the lawsuit.

It's a class action lawsuit.

Usually, like, you know, lawyers are putting that pressure.

So why is that more likely, just judging from the tone of this conversation, than appraisal?

Oh, just because so many shares have traded hands after the appraisal deadline.

So if you're buying shares of $29 last week, you couldn't be doing it for appraisal because you wouldn't get appraisal.

You have to be buying into the loss, the class action.

Could there be both?

Yeah, there could be both.

The big case that I wrote about was Dole, and there were both appraisal.

They're not the same thing.

You could imagine an appraisal court saying, oh, the actual value of the company was this.

And the class action court saying, oh, like the fiduciary duties were violated and that's worth this.

They're not the same thing at all.

But

they're kind of roughly the same idea, which is you underpaid for this company, give us more money.

So it seems like this continues to be a watch this space situation.

There's the promise of drama.

It just hasn't necessarily happened.

It wouldn't be weird if nothing happened because people

would

right?

That'd be kind of beautiful, though, if truly nothing happened.

If everyone was like, I think this is a $1.75 a share lawsuit, I'm looking forward to that lawsuit.

And he actually remembers to file the lawsuit and just goes away.

I kind of was just like, I don't know, I feel possessed to buy 8.4% of these shares on Friday.

I kind of was like, I was hoping someone else would bring a lawsuit down.

Yeah, right.

I'm feeling shy now.

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I told you that I went to the Blue A experience.

We've almost certainly talked about this.

Did I remember that?

No, but tell me about it.

They built Bluey's house in a building near Union Square.

That sounds kind of fun.

I really like Bluey experience.

Yeah.

Yeah, I can't wait to have my own children to watch Bluey.

Bluey is very much like a show for parents.

Yeah.

It's very mature.

You know what else is

very mature?

The private equity business model.

Yeah.

Oh, yeah.

Oh, here we go.

What do you got?

What do I got?

KKR.

KKR.

Not just regular holdings, but strategic holdings.

Holdings that they will hold for a while is the plan.

Decades.

Yeah.

Yeah.

They've got about 18 of them.

18.

Yeah.

Right.

So KKR is like historically a leveraged biot firm where they manage funds.

They raise funds from limited partners.

They take those funds and they write equity checks to do leveraged buyouts.

They borrow money to buy companies.

They take over the companies.

they lever them up, they improve their operations, they strip off the stuff they don't want, they incentivize managers, they get everything all nice, and three to five years later, they take them public again or sell them and

get a big check that they return to their limited partners and

take 20% for themselves.

That's the traditional LBO business model.

And

all these LBO pioneers of the 80s and 90s are now giant public companies like kkr and they run funds for investors like now the term is alternative asset managers because they do a lot besides classic leveraged buyouts but they still basically do that kind of model where they run funds and uh take 20

and kkr is shifting let's say or like introducing more of a model where what they do is they just

on their own balance sheet as a company, buy stakes in companies or infrastructure projects or whatever, and just own them forever.

And they're just part of the company.

They're like a big industrial conglomerate.

That's an interesting shift.

Yeah.

The logic here, I mean, looking at Allison McNeely's story, KKR has this plan to quadruple its earnings per share over the next decade.

Strategic holdings would be a strategic part of that.

They also want to build a portfolio that kicks off more than a billion dollars a year in dividends.

So it's different from the fee model, of course.

It's, you know, one thing I write is that the ultimate success for a hedge fund is to get rid of all of your outside investors and convert to a family office because you've just made so much money for yourself that you'd rather earn 100% of the returns on your investments than

20%.

This is like a little bit like that, right?

The fee model is good enough that

KKR has made a lot of money.

And where do they do that money?

Well, one thing you do is you transition from being a service provider who collects 20% to being just an asset owner and a capitalist, right?

And you just own the companies instead of owning the 20% promote on them.

That's like one way to analyze what they're doing here is like, it has been a good enough business for long enough that now instead of KKR being like, we're going to manage funds to buy companies, they'll be like, we'll just buy the companies.

But it's different from being a family office because like most hedge funds are like...

The hedge fund management company is privately owned.

And transitioning to a family office means like the guy who owned the hedge fund now owns all the investments.

Here, KKR is not like a guy or even the three, you know, Colbert, Kravis, and Roberts.

It's a public company.

So the public company is sort of becoming its own family office.

And like the public company is going to own all these investments directly rather than taking fees to run a fund.

In a way, it's beautiful.

Just the natural evolution of things.

Don't we all aspire to something similar?

In some ways, it's like the whole private equity business has done this, right?

Like private equity was like a small, scrappy business taking over like poorly managed companies and like making them more efficient.

And that was like so wildly lucrative for so long that now it's like, we have all this money.

We could just own the companies ourselves.

We don't need to run funds anymore.

Like that's not, you know, it's an exaggeration because most of them, including KKR, mostly run funds.

But there's this shift to like we can own stuff on our balance sheet.

Yeah.

In a way, I feel really drawn to this.

I think I've talked before on this podcast how I really like and admire the old school strategy of just stock picking.

This is a little bit different, but you're right.

It's sort of the same basis.

Like old school private equity is like, people in it would disagree with this, but like, it's a financial engineering story, right?

It's like, we can put more leverage on this company than the public markets can, right?

But this is like, yeah, we like that business.

Let's own it forever.

Yeah.

Let's never think about it again.

It's going to compound over time and become better.

And you just got to be patient.

And we're going to hold this for a few decades.

No, I'm with you.

I also admire the business.

To my mind, like, what better job could you possibly have than like waking up and being like, here are 12 stocks I want to own.

I will buy them and my job is over for the rest of my life.

The answer is right in front of you.

Being a podcaster, obviously.

But I take your point.

I find it really compelling.

And of course, this comes as KKR has phrased this.

The co-CEO said at Bloomberg Invest earlier in March that basically it's in some ways to become a mini Berkshire Hathaway.

Sure.

Mini Berkshire Hathaway.

Everyone wants to be warned about it, including friend of the show, Bill Ackman.

I think it is interesting that you do have at least a size of two folks saying that we are basically wanting to model ourselves after Berkshire Hathaway.

You're so young.

I feel like

people wanting to be Warren Buffett is like a longstanding.

I was thinking about it.

But in the past.

Joe Bay and like Bill Ackman grew up in a world where the pinnacle of investing was Warren Buffett, right?

I do wonder if that's the same thing.

I mean, i kind of

want to be warren buffett but i don't know there was that time uh during the pandemic where buffet was getting dunked on a lot by like the dave poor noise of the world but i feel like he's back in vogue

but he's certainly in vogue among friend of the show bill ackman like that crowd yeah

why wouldn't you want to be berkshire hathaway i want to talk about their current lineup of investments so as i mentioned 18 includes lens retailer 1-800 contacts which actually texted me today to tell me that it's time to order $800 worth of contacts again.

Cybersecurity company Barracuda Networks, also Australian stack food manufacturer, our No's Group, our Notts Group.

But anyway, again, it's just, I mean, 1-800 contacts, that's a household name, but it's cool because it's not like flashy, like AI sort of stuff, at least from what I can tell from Allison McMealie's article.

Yeah.

That could keep going.

Those are sort of like, you know, those are like classic private equity kind of investments, right?

Like unglamorous, like nice cash flow kind of companies but you know now they just own them directly yeah for me an absolute consumer staple just shout about 1-800 contacts you are a reliable source of cash flow for kkr's strategic holdings just a little more color there they own an average 20 stake in these 18 firms that is about three point seven billion dollars of revenue nine hundred million dollars of adjusted earnings which is a small share overall of their operating earnings right now uh but they're predicting that strategic holdings will generate 1.1 billion by 2030.

The main way I think about this bet is like when you've generated enough money during a like high fee, high return financial services business, like you can just use that money to own things yourself.

But there's also like, you do wonder if there's like pressure on those fees or those returns, right?

Like private equity in the 80s, there's a lot of low-hanging fruit.

Later vintages of funds have not always returned as well.

And like, you know, people talk about how there's pressure on private equity exits now.

And you don't hear a ton about fee pressure in private equity, but you hear that every now and then.

Like, you might be one of these alternatives asset managers looking around and saying, like, you know, the long-term trend of like financial services fees are like, you know, Katie Greyfeld keeps telling me that you can get an ETF for one basis point.

It's coming.

If you think like, you know, in 20 years, what will our earnings mix look like?

You might say, like, we might earn less in fees, but we'll own all these companies that like sell contacts to katie greifeld and so we can we can we can get our money that way right like if you think that fees over time will come down like owning businesses is the way to avoid that so they're future-proofing in a way yeah

man if i could go back to the 80s like anything like private equity like feels really institutional now but if you run like i always think like if you run like a crypto exchange like you gotta like take all that money and put it into like like laundromats or like you know like real businesses you know vending machines yeah vending because you like you can't rely on like that

lottery winnings to keep continuing, but you couldn't put the money into a real business.

You buy land.

I don't know.

Oh, my God.

Yeah.

Yeah, they're buying land.

They should buy land.

Everyone should buy land.

I would love to be land rich.

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Okay, so we have been talking for months, really the entire existence of this podcast about how private markets are becoming public.

Private markets are the new public market, and now we have some prices to put to that.

I really feel like it's a big step in private markets becoming more public when Yahoo Finance starts putting up like daily or you know like real-time real-time-ish stock charts of SpaceX and OpenAI Stripe Stripe and 97 or so other private companies that don't trade on the stock exchange but that

are tracked by enough like private company tracking kind of things that they can be like yep here's a stock price chart and so you can go look at a stock price chart of all these companies and that feels like

you know you could read news articles that were like secondary trading suggests stripes value is blah, blah, blah.

But like, now you can just go look at a chart on your Yahoo finance.

Seems like a big difference.

Seems like a real step toward making them look public.

I appreciate the effort.

It's like an opening volley.

I don't think these prices are perfect.

No, they're fascinatingly imperfect, right?

So like these are, these prices, Yahoo gets them from two marketplaces, two companies that provide a marketplace for, you know, like sort of employees, ex-employees of these companies to sell their stock to like.

Forage and equity zen yeah forge and equity zen basically it's like on the selling side you have like employees and ex-employees of these companies who want an exit and on the buying side you have dentists right like that's roughly the model and i was like those trades have to be like illiquid and small and

you know driven by

weird dynamics and not really reflective of valuation of these companies.

But if you look at how these prices are driven, they're not really derived necessarily from those trades.

Like these prices are sort of like algorithmically determined from things like funding rounds and tender offers and also like bids and trades on these platforms.

But it's unclear like how the prices are determined.

And you look at some of these companies and the prices like don't change very much.

And it's just very clear that they're sort of essentially pulling in like prices from funding rounds and tender offers and it's not a real-time stock chart.

It's like Crunchbase in chart form.

You know, it's like prices of funding rounds.

It's not like real-time secondary market trading prices.

Which again, I appreciate.

But then you take a look at OpenAI's chart, for example, as you mentioned, it is pretty flat.

It's pretty flat, which is funny and probably, again, not reflective of real-time pricing when you consider the news this week that they're close to finalizing a 40 billion.

But there isn't real-time pricing.

OpenAI stock does not

really trade among

on these secondary trading platforms, right?

Yeah, I know, but I'm saying

an example of how

not real time this is.

They're close to finalizing their $40 billion funding round, at least according to Bloomberg reporting.

That would value the company at $300 billion.

If this was close to real time, I would imagine you would see the line wiggle a little, but it hasn't.

Right.

It's like psychologically interesting to have what looks like a real-time price chart, even if it's not a real-time price chart, because it just makes you think, ooh, that's a...

company whose stock I can buy.

And by the way, you can't necessarily, right?

Like the other thing is...

You can try hard.

These platforms are like places that will let you buy many of these stocks, but it doesn't mean they have stock to sell you, right?

Like, you know, these companies often try to restrict their

employees and investors' ability to resell stock.

The news this week is both that Yahoo Finance is taking prices from Equities and Forge to like show these stock charts, but also that Equity Zen and Forge are lowering their investment minimums so that now you can, if you're an accredited investor, you can buy stock in these companies with as little as $5,000.

But again,

that's just their rules.

It doesn't mean that someone's going to sell you $5,000 of SpaceX stock.

And in fact, I think it's kind of hard to source a lot of the really hot private companies on these platforms.

So I'm comparing,

I hate to talk about ETFs.

I just hate it, Matt.

But

I'm going to do it right now.

I know that there's a subset of listeners who absolutely hate when I bring up ETFs, but I just came back from an ETF conference and we have a lot of fans there.

So

shout out to

the friendly couple that stopped me in Las Vegas in the casino in the Virgin Hotel.

In any case,

there is this ETF called the ER Shares Private Public Crossover ETF.

The ticketer is XOVR crossover.

It actually, 10% of its portfolio is SpaceX.

This is pretty much meaningless, but you take a look at the performance of this ETF.

It's down about 7% on a total return basis year to date.

And SpaceX, at least according to Yahoo Finance, is

at least up slightly.

According to Yahoo Finance, it went from $2.11 per share to just under $2.15 per share.

Again, this is very close to a meaningless comparison, but there is some way I guess you could back into what SpaceX is doing.

Not really, but

I do think it's a little bit interesting.

You do have this ETF with real-time pricing.

We know that 10% of it is SpaceX.

Yeah, but that doesn't give us real-time SpaceX pricing.

I don't know how people do the ARB, but I assume that Jane Street is not delivering a basket of a little SpaceX stock to get shares of X over.

In some ways, this stuff where Yahoo is putting up price charts and you can theoretically...

get into these private markets with as little as $5,000.

In some ways, that is like psychological signaling rather than like a real thing.

And it's not like you can go buy $5,000 worth of SpaceX and like there's a real-time chart on Yahoo.

But in some ways, it is pushing it towards being a little bit more real.

So private markets theoretically are open only to accredited investors in the U.S., whereas public markets are open to everyone.

But if you look at like the number of people who are accredited, because like the accredited standards have not gone up since like the 80s, to be accredited, you need to have, I think, $200,000 a year of income or $300,000 as a couple or like a million dollars in assets.

And that works out to something like 20% of the population, which is like roughly the percent of the population that like own individual stocks and brokerage accounts.

So the investor class that like buys public stocks and the investor class that can legally buy private stocks is like kind of the same class, kind of.

Yeah.

You do wonder a little, like, what is the need for a company to go public?

And then conversely, like, what is the need for it to stay private, right?

Because like one thing that CEOs sometimes say is they don't like the distraction of having a public stock price and, like, they don't like managing to the stock price, and they don't like the short-termism of the stock price reacting to news.

Yeah.

Like, now you have the stock chart on Yanni Finance.

That doesn't move very much.

But, like, you know, in the future, if it moves a lot, you might be like, I might as well just go public because my stock price is public anyway.

You know, another counter to that would be, though, that they don't have to report earnings four times a year.

It's wild to me that, like, basically, retail investors can put $5,000 into a stock and there is no expectation.

Nobody cares at all that they will ever see financial statements for the company.

Yeah.

And of course, of course, no one who buys stocks into brokers accounts looks at financial statements for the companies that buy stock at right.

So of course it makes sense that no one cares about seeing financial statements.

But it's weird that we have a hundred years of securities law that's based around like we need full disclosure about a company.

We need like audited financial statements to allow people to make informed investing decisions.

And everyone's like, no, we don't care about that stuff.

We'll buy SpaceX.

It doesn't matter.

But you couldn't directly say that they need them and care about them because they form the basis of a lot of great articles written by financial journalists who do read the financial statements, et cetera, and do the work.

That's definitely the theory of public markets is that there is a lot of work done,

including based on regulated public financial disclosure.

There's a lot of work done to make prices efficient.

So when you buy stock in your brokerage account, you are probably getting an efficient price, right?

Like you're paying sort of roughly the, you know, market expected fair value of the company.

With private companies, like you could probably make similar arguments, right?

But like not really.

The financials are not public.

Institutions are not necessarily trading in the secondary market in large size.

You're sort of drafting on like venture capitalists valuing the company in funding rounds.

And the incentives there are not quite like, it's not quite the same thing as in public markets where there's like, you know, informed people on both sides of the trade

yeah funding rounds obviously are the basis of these yahoo finance price charts all of them supposedly i don't know secondary market trading but yeah looking at open ai i mean so much has happened in the ai landscape there's no pricing of what happened with deep seek etc

it would be really fun like if when the deep seek news had dropped if you could go to your browser and look at a real-time stock price for open ai yeah that would be really really funny if like it was just a flat line and you're like wait where's the reaction we are actually pricing in all information that we have available to us at this time i will tell you the other big open ai like stock price thing the other thing that like you would expect if there had been a real-time stock price was when they fired sam altman for a weekend that would have been fun i wrote about it at the time they had just done

I think they finalized like an employee tender, I think, at like an $84 billion valuation, I think.

And

they were almost done.

And then they fired their CEO.

Yeah.

And then two days later, they hired him back.

And then

they continued doing the tender.

And then they finalized it.

And I think it was still at $84 billion.

And I read about, what a weird fact that this news didn't change, like in either direction, didn't change the valuation of OpenStreetMap.

It was perfectly priced out.

It was just like, all of it was as expected.

Everything's totally normal.

This is not really true.

And then, you know, they very quickly went on to raise it much higher valuations, actually.

This is by way of saying, if you looked at a real-time stock chart of Open AI during DeepSeek and it didn't move,

you might be like, oh, that's right.

That's how venture capitalists think about Open AI.

Just a flat line.

You know, and it's still flat this week, even with Studio Ghibli.

You can do that on ChatGPT right now.

That's pretty cool.

Well, it's all over my Twitter feed, my ex feed right now.

I feel like you don't really.

You're not an ex.

You're not an Xer.

Yeah, I'm an ex-Xer.

Well, that's what you can expect if you go there right now.

But maybe that would have pushed the stock price higher if these were real.

Isn't it nice?

Go on.

Like you saying, like, it's all over my X feed makes me think like, I understand why CEOs don't like to have a real-time stock price.

It's like, ah, this distraction has moved around our stock price.

It's like, let's just not have that.

So I talk to a lot of CEOs in my other job, which is being a television anchor.

And you ask them on air do you know do you care about the stock price or are you did you notice this in the stock price and they always say no i don't really look at the stock price blah blah blah and then you get lunch with them you get coffee you ask them in the commercial break and i often get from them yeah i'm constantly watching it and of course you are if i had a real-time measure of my performance i would never not be looking at it which i guess is distracting this is like cliff astus's theory about private equity which is that like

it is not less volatile than public stocks, but it reports less frequently.

And so it feels less volatile.

And so everyone knows that.

But his point is like that is actually valuable to a lot of investors.

And that's why they're willing to pay a premium for private equity because like

not knowing what the stock price is is like really good for you.

I mean, probably, but I would

check.

I read every YouTube comment.

I read every Spotify comment.

I look at every tweet tweeted at me.

I just am desperate for feedback.

And that was the Money Stuff Podcast.

I'm Matt Levian.

And I'm Katie Greyfeld.

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.

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We'd love to hear from you.

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

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The Money Money Stuff Podcast is produced by Anna Mazarakis and Moses Andam, and special thanks this week to Cal Brooks.

Our theme music was composed by Blake Maples.

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And Sage Bauman 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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