Uncatchable Mouse Jigglers: TSLA, PARA, WFC WFH

For enterprise organizations, managing all your food needs is a tall order.

But with Easy Cater, you get a single workplace food vendor with the tools and resources to make it easy, giving teams across your organization an easy way to order from a huge variety of restaurants, all on one platform.

All while consolidating your corporate food spend so you can control costs, streamline billing and payment, and simplify reporting.

EasyCater, your business tool for food.

To learn more, visit easycater.com/slash podcast.

Promotional products aren't just giveaways, they're strategic brand tools.

That's why so many businesses turn to 4imprint.

With thousands of customizable options from premium apparel, drinkwear, tech totes, and more, 4imprint offers the variety to fit your goals and budget.

Many items come with no setup charge to help you maximize value even more.

With expert support, fast turnaround, and a 360-degree guarantee, you can be 4imprint certain your order will be done right on time.

Explore more at 4imprint.com.

For Imprint for Certain.

Bloomberg Audio Studios.

Podcasts, radio, news.

He's a money stuff guy.

He's a stuff.

Yeah, you'll be great.

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

And Elon Musk.

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

And I'm Katie Greifel.

I'm a reporter for Bloomberg News and an anchor for Bloomberg Television.

What are we talking about today, Katie?

Okay, we're obviously talking about Elon Musk and the results of the shareholder vote, the two-prong issues there.

We're going to talk about an extremely messy deal.

We're talking about the Paramount Skydance deal.

And then we're going to talk about mouse jigglers and Wells Fargo and getting fired.

Sounds great.

Here's Money Stop Gun.

It's Friday morning in America.

Elon Musk has gotten his money.

He has.

I mean, sort of.

He had the vote for his money.

Did he get his money?

Complicated question.

Yeah, TBD on that point.

So the shareholder vote happened for Tesla, and I think it was...

I think this is the most boring outcome, actually.

So they had to vote on two things, right?

One is should Elon Musk get his money?

And the other was should they reincorporate to Texas, right?

If they voted against him getting his money, that would have been like some real fireworks.

Like, amazing.

Would you have quit in a huff last night?

Who knows?

But they voted in favor of him getting his money, so he's going to stay.

And then I sort of thought they would vote against moving to Texas because my impression was that institutional shareholders like the predictability and protections of Delaware law and that Elon Musk being kind of a whimsical dude, they thought it would be nice to have a court that would rein him in.

But no, more shareholders voted to move to Texas than voted for his pay.

Yeah.

And I mean, and 72% voted for his pay.

So the support for the move to Texas was broad.

Yeah.

So this is all driven by the fact that earlier this year, a Delaware court struck down that 2018 pay package that he got, right?

So in 2018, Tesla gave him a bunch of options that if he hit some very ambitious milestones, he'd get, you know, $56 billion.

He hit all the milestones, he got all the options.

A shareholder sued, saying that like the process of paying him was too conflicted.

And early this year, a Delaware court said, we agree, we're taking back the options.

And so Tesla is voting to give him back the options and to get out of Delaware because they don't like that.

And I remember when I wrote about the court decision earlier this year, I was like, this seems kind of wrong, right?

Like, I'm not like a, you know, devoted Elon Musk fan here, but like the shareholders voted to give him the money.

The court decided that the vote wasn't fully informed, but it was pretty informed.

Like they knew how much money they were giving him and like what the targets were.

And he hit the targets and they were happy.

So it struck me as kind of a a weird decision.

It might have been right in the law, but it was protective of shareholders in a way that the shareholders clearly didn't want, right?

Like the shareholders got the benefit of their bargain, which was Elon Musk took the company to $650 billion.

And this court decision seemed to kind of interfere in the relationship between the company and its shareholders.

And I think that's what the vote last night says, right?

Like not only did the shareholders vote to bring back the pay package, but they also said, yeah, we think that like this Delaware decision was was wrong and we now reject Delaware law, which I think is kind of an interesting outcome, right?

Like,

Tesla's a weird company.

It's got a weird CEO and a weird relationship with him, and it's got a lot of retail shareholders who are maybe more inclined to vote for like a populist move to Texas than like the average institutional shareholder is.

But a lot of institutional shareholders voted to move to Texas.

And like ISS, the proxy advisor said, yeah, you should vote to move to Texas.

So I'm interested to see see going forward, will other companies copy this?

Because like, I would have thought that a lot of companies would say, I would like to have a little bit less shareholder protection and a little bit more freehand for the board and the CEO.

But if I actually try to do that, my shareholders will say, no, no, we want the protections.

We see you trying to get away from a sort of strict corporate law and we're going to vote against it.

But now the shareholders voted for it at Tesla.

And I don't know.

Are other companies going to follow along?

I mean, it'll be interesting to see what this means for Texas.

Obviously, the business courts in Delaware are extremely well established.

Comparatively, Texas is not exactly there.

So, I don't know, maybe we'll get some precedent sent there.

But, I mean, you made the point in your sort of walk-up column that if you think about the reasons why the 2018 pay package was voided by that Delaware judge, there was this idea that the conflicts of interest in the board and other details weren't properly disclosed and well-known.

And I feel like with this vote, obviously, everything's out in the open.

So the thing that I wrote yesterday is that like, so the judge found that in 2018, the board was sort of in the pocket of Elon Musk and the proxy didn't fully disclose all of that, right?

And so this, this year, this vote, the proxy just discloses the judge's entire opinion, like it's attached to the back.

So if you're interested to know what conflicts, you know, were involved in the 2018 decision to pay Elon Musk, you can go read the opinion and get like all of the worst case for the conflicts.

But I made the point yesterday that there are new conflicts, right?

There's There's all this stuff about Elon doing AI at other companies,

at his other companies, if he doesn't get his money at Tesla.

Earlier this year, Elon Musk asking for another pay package.

This is back when he still had these options before the judge took them away.

He asked for another big pay package to get his stock ownership up at Tesla.

And he said, if I don't get another big pay package, I won't be able to...

build AI at Tesla.

There's that reporting about how there were like some NVIDIA chips that were earmarked for Tesla that he called up NVIDIA and said, no, let's send them to X instead, you know, Twitter.

So there's all this stuff about his conflicts of interest, his threats, his like, you know, demands for new compensation.

All this stuff is not really addressed in the current Tesla proxy.

And like, I don't know, if I were a disgruntled shareholder, I'd be writing another lawsuit being like, well, there's more stuff you didn't disclose.

But that said, like, you know, as I said, like, I think that the meaning of last night's vote is that.

Delaware's interference here is wrong and not what shareholders want and not what is good for shareholders.

So I do wonder what was on the mind of the large retail retail shareholder base, not to speak of them all as a monolith, but I mean, in many ways, this was just seen as a referendum on Musk and his leadership of the company.

And

the point has been made.

It's very well known that the retail shareholders of Tesla love Elon Musk.

They're there because they love Elon Musk.

Tesla has a much more retail shareholder base than a lot of companies, but like almost half institutional.

And those people voted pretty strongly in favor of moving to Texas and also in favor of the pay.

More for Texas than for the pay.

It's an impressive outcome for him.

A month ago, like he was clearly focused on his AI stuff at other companies.

And five months ago, he was asking for more money from Tesla.

I wonder if this traumatic experience has brought them closer together so that now he will spend more time on Tesla and not demand more money.

Or if it's like after winning the vote this week, he will go back to messing around with XAI and ignoring Tesla.

I don't know.

I don't know.

I kind of lean towards the latter, but what do I know?

But I will say

he's a short attention span, right?

Like he's going to go do something else next week.

Yeah,

that's a very strong bear case.

Like that doesn't, even though we're past the vote, 72%

voted for the pay package.

It doesn't fix the problem of Musk is distracted.

It seems like he has more fun things going on than Tesla struggles right now.

And you've seen all of these big Tesla bulls come out.

I'm thinking about Dan Ives at Wedbush saying this removes a huge overhang for the stock, Tesla market cap to a trillion dollars.

I don't necessarily know if that's the case.

I don't think Elon being distracted is necessarily a bear case.

I think think the counter argument is SpaceX, where he doesn't seem to have a ton of day-to-day involvement.

There's a professional team running it and it's very successful, but also it's got the Elon Musk halo, which helps it like raise money and sort of be high profile.

You could tell a similar story about a Tesla where like some team of managers run it as a competent car company without doing weird stuff and Elon Musk remains the CEO and biggest shareholder and sort of figurehead such that it has a high stock market valuation and can raise money from retail retail investors and is just like always in the news.

That's not the worst outcome for Tesla, I don't think.

I don't know that having him in the day-to-day design process for the cars is super additive.

Like, I don't know, everyone seems to think the Cybertruck is really ugly and that's clearly his baby.

So maybe like a distracted but happy Elon is the kind of best outcome for Tesla.

Maybe.

I'm just thinking about, again, like the fundamentals of the EV industry right now.

It feels like every single automaker has, I'm exaggerating, but has scaled back EV production.

There's this big leaning into hybrids where it seems like the American driver is also going, Tesla's never going to make a hybrid.

Maybe I'll be proven wrong.

It's not with

Elon paying more attention to it is not going to make it make a hybrid.

True, true.

I don't know.

I mean, SpaceX is a good example, a good counterweight, because it seems like cracking the private space industry would be harder than cracking the EV industry.

So, and SpaceX did that.

So maybe, maybe things will be fine at Tesla.

I guess the point that I'm making is that I've interviewed all of these automaker chief executives.

I'm talking to the Kia COO in like two hours.

Like the EV market is in a short right now.

Yeah.

Like the governance is sort of like unrelated to that almost.

Elon Musk is not going to fix the EV market.

And I don't know.

I mean, like, you can tell the story that like the EV market is in America is partly politicized and like that slows down adoption and Elon Musk could help, you know, depoliticize EV adoption or politicize it the other way.

But I don't know, I don't really see that.

Like I just, I think that at this point, Tesla, the company faces the same headwinds as every other, you know, EV manufacturer, except that it is only an EV manufacturer.

And Tesla, the stock, has just the sort of vague halo effect of like, it's the one public way to invest in Elon Musk.

And so it trades at a premium because if you like Elon Musk's whole shtick and you don't care much about EVs, but you're just like, how do I buy like the Elon Musk thing?

The only way to do it as a public investor is to buy Tesla stock.

And so it trades on that.

And,

you know, what particular parts of the Elon Musk Empire are conducted in Tesla as opposed to at his private companies, like doesn't necessarily matter that much for the price of the stock.

I'm more thinking of like not him making good decisions for Tesla, but him stopping good decisions that could be made at Tesla.

Like you think about him, what, firing the supercharger team and then rehiring a bunch of them.

That wasn't great.

Like wavering on plans for a much cheaper ev model that wasn't great that did shake a lot of even the biggest tesla bowls conviction in the stock and then i don't know the robo-taxi dreams seemed to be and cyber the cyber truck too seemed to be like an expensive waste of money we could have done this on yesterday is the thing like yeah we probably should have we thought that there would be like late breaking news but in fact there was early breaking news and then it turned out to be true by the way i would have been so excited like the outcome I was really rooting for once he tweeted yesterday

Thursday once he tweeted on Thursday that that he had won the vote.

Obviously the outcome I was rooting for is that he'd lost the vote and was going to get sued, but didn't come to pass.

The tweet was true.

That would have been delicious.

How many vendors does it take to meet all your organization's food needs?

Just one.

EasyCater, the workplace food platform that lets teams order from a huge variety of restaurants, over 100,000 nationwide, all through a single vendor.

In addition to all that variety, EasyCater also gives you full visibility of your organization's food spend with invoicing, centralized reporting, and seamless integration with expense management systems, all on one platform.

EasyCater, your business tool for food.

To learn more, visit easycater.com slash podcast.

Ever wanted to stay on vacation longer?

Us too.

With Verbo's long stay discounts, you can stay longer and save more on select properties.

Gotta love a win-win.

Book the perfect summer getaway today with Verbo private vacation rentals.

Your future self will thank you later.

And now we're back from the ad break.

We heard from our future selves.

I think I said last week that we're really learning that time is a concept and we're doing that again because now it's you and I talking on a Thursday afternoon.

We have traveled back in time to Thursday afternoon.

It was nice to see afternoon.

Here we are on Thursday again.

Here we are, and we traveled back in time.

Yeah.

Why live in a Friday when you can live in a perpetual Thursday?

That's the motto of this podcast.

Absolutely.

Let's talk about Skydance and Paramount and the deal that will never be.

Question mark.

It's pretty wild.

Yeah.

We have talked about it once on this.

I forget what we said, but now we're sort of talking about,

we're talking about its obituary because

Paramount's obituary.

No, not yet.

At least this deal's obituary because National Amusement read Sherry Redstone stopped the deal.

It's not going to happen with Skydance, at least.

Yeah, I love it.

I love it.

It's such a complicated deal because of a very simple thing, which is that.

So Sherry Redstone owns National Amusements.

National Amusements owns some movie theaters and also a block of Paramount stock.

Paramount is like an $8 billion public company.

It has a lot of interesting, you know, TV and movie assets, and people want to buy it.

And Sherry Redstone, who inherited it from her father, seems to want to sell it, although no one's really sure.

And the thing about National Amusements is that it owns around 5% of Paramount's stock, but it owns most of the voting stock.

Most of Paramount's stock doesn't vote.

So Sherry Redstone, although she has like a fairly small economic interest in Paramount, has voting control over Paramount.

So that means means anyone who wants to buy Paramount has to get her approval because she controls the vote, even though she doesn't have that much stock.

But it also means that, like, anyone who wants to deal with her, you know, has to pay her off at a premium.

And then the rest of the Paramount shareholders, if they don't get the same deal, are going to complain.

And that's the problem with doing a deal here.

And it sort of looked like someone would find a way to overcome that problem.

And nobody did.

And the deal just fell apart.

It fell apart really quickly, too.

And it is an incredible end because, first of all, this is something that Sherry Redstone originally was campaigning for for months.

And Ellison and Skydance did switch it around a lot and tried to make this work and revise their offer a bunch of times.

And then just this week, it fell apart.

And there's been a lot of different reporting as to why.

A lot of people familiar with the matter have commented on this to different outlets.

The Wall Street Journal, I found this explanation satisfying, that basically they reported that she feared potential shareholder litigation over a deal that her critics said would disadvantage ordinary investors in Paramount and the seems key legal fees that might eat into her family's fortune.

That would make sense.

When you say she was advocating for this deal and then it fell apart really rapidly, I think that what happened is that originally Skydance came to Shia Redstone and said, we want to do a deal with you where we give you money for national amusements.

And then we simultaneously negotiate a deal with paramount so that like when we acquire national amusements we end up in control of paramet and we can sort of do the merger that we want with paramount and sherry redstone is like yeah it sounds good and they offered to pay her a lot of money for her national amusements take but then over time as they negotiated with the board the board of paramount wanted more stuff for the regular public shareholders.

Like they said, if you just give Sherry Redstone all this money and don't give anything to the regular shareholders, one, that's going to look bad.

It's going to be bad for our judiciary duties as a board to protect the public shareholders.

But then, also, like, we'll get sued, you'll get sued, everyone gets sued.

So, what we need to do is strike a better deal for the public shareholders.

And Skydance was like, sure, yeah, we can do that.

We can take some of the money we're going to give to Sherry Redstone and give it to the public shareholders instead, and then everyone will be happier.

Except that Sherry Redstone wasn't happier because they were taking money from her and giving it to the shareholders.

So, I think part of why the deal fell apart is because it's almost impossible to like just accomplish this, to like do a deal that is good for Sherry Redstone and also doesn't get you sued by shareholders and I think she eventually concluded that she was gonna get sued by shareholders and it wasn't worth it but also they did try to accomplish it but that meant taking money away from her part of the deal and that made her less inclined to do it right if she was getting all the money she could pay the legal fees but if she's getting less of the money then like ah she still has to pay the legal fees she doesn't want to do the deal it almost feels like a golden shares situation which doesn't really exist in america but it exists more formally in the uk and increasingly in china And it just seems impossible to have good governance in this type of situation.

This company has always sort of had famously bad governance.

I mean, like, the situation is just bad governance, right?

I mean, someone who inherited the company and has a fairly small minority economic interest in it, but who has complete voting control and can can sort of block any deal she doesn't like is an unusual situation.

And because it is a big public media company, it has like a fairly independent board of directors, or it has had a fairly independent board of directors at some times, who have gotten in fights with Sherry Redstone and have tried to take away her voting control.

And even now, you know, like, I think the impression is that some members of the board were the ones sort of saying to Sherry, like, this deal is not going to work.

You're going to get sued.

It's not sufficiently, you know, protective of minority shareholders.

The other thing is, like, if Sherry Redstone is worried about getting sued, one thing that could potentially help is like asking

the other shareholders to vote to approve the deal.

So most of Paramount's stock doesn't have any voting rights.

And so it's just like, whatever the board agrees to,

Sherry Redstone can just ratify.

But she was thinking about conditioning the merger on a majority of the non-voting shareholders, you know, holding a vote and having them vote to approve it.

Because then if they approved it, she'd be less likely to get sued.

But my understanding is that Skydence didn't like that idea because they were like, you know, we're giving you this money.

We want to actually have a deal.

We don't want to have to worry about the non-voting shareholders turning it down.

Well, they have to do something.

This is a company in a struggling industry with enormous amounts of debt.

But Matt, I have good news.

The good news is that in a moment like this, when your searching eyes are looking for the CEO, the good news is that there's not one CEO.

There's three CEOs in this situation.

I think when we last talked about this situation, I said something like, having three CEOs is really a sign that you're going to do a deal really soon because you can't just run the company with three CEOs.

But now here they are.

They've got three CEOs.

And they're just...

I know.

I love it.

There are some rumors they're going to replace those three CEOs with a fourth different CEO, but who knows?

Yeah, there's sort of this monolith just called the Office of the CEO, which is incredible.

And definitely at the time, it was like, okay, this is just a Band-Aid, weird situation holding pattern until a deal is done.

Then maybe it'll go back to being a more typical structure.

But for right now, they have three CEOs and apparently it has a plan for going forward.

The Office of the CEO, CNBC, obtained a memo that they released on Wednesday saying that they're going to remain open to exploring strategic alternatives that create value for shareholders.

They also said that they're going to continue to focus on executing the strategic plan that they unveiled in the last couple weeks.

So we'll see.

I love it.

They're fighting for their jobs.

They're really fighting.

But again, they need to do something.

In one of the reports, there's just been so much on this, but apparently a special committee of directors recommended that Paramount could not continue as a standalone business.

So something needs to get done here.

And then Moody's was out this week warning, and this was prior to the collapse, that unless there's some sort of strategic transaction that comes along with cost-cutting opportunities, basically they're going to get downgraded as well.

Yeah, it's not a good situation.

The impression I get is that this deal is pretty dead.

There was another suitor, right?

Sony and Apollo were looking at the company, and that deal seems to have faded away because, in part, I think because they were never really in with Sherry Redstone, and she, you know, has the controlling vote.

So it's a little unclear what happens next and also in deal talk there's Edgar Bronfman Bronfman Edgar Bronfman who's like talking about buying national amusements I think yeah the impression that I get is that as this deal collapses the next plan besides like finding out who the CEO is the next plan is for Sherry Redstone to think about selling national amusements as just like a single thing so she would just sell national amusements and then whoever buys it it would be their problem to deal with like the weird governance structure at Paramount and to try to find a way to impose their will on Paramount and like, you know, appoint a new CEO and take control of Paramount and deal with the minority shareholders and everything else.

That just wouldn't be her problem.

She would just sell national amusements and then the new person would step into her shoes and figure it all out.

One reader emailed me to suggest a really good trade, which is that she should sell national amusements to AMC, which one, owns a movie theater chain and two, keeps raising money from meme stock investors.

And then AMC could sell the Paramount's shares to Skydance and everyone could be better off.

I don't know if that's a viable alternative.

That's a pretty good idea.

It's pretty good.

They might have antitrust with AMC.

I don't know.

There was one sell-side note that suggested this was from Loop Capital, that Warner Brothers Discovery should buy it.

This hasn't been proposed.

They haven't shown any interest, but then they also said that that's probably not going to happen under the current administration.

And also, you'd need to see Paramount shares go down much more, more than they already have, for it to even be palatable.

I just want to read this from Wells Fargo.

I mean, first of all, Bloomberg Intelligence was out with a note saying that Paramount is probably in a weaker position than it was six months ago before this dragged out MA process.

Well, that's always true.

It's always bad to do an MA process after people walk away.

Although, here it's not like it fell apart in due diligence, it's like it fell apart in weird governance.

Yeah, weird governance.

But Wells Fargo then said, the analyst Stephen Cahill, Miss Redstone has created a legacy of equity value destruction, and this should overhang Paramount's valuation given her unpredictability.

This will add to the long shadow over Paramount as yet another misstep.

The last six months have seen governance weakened, the CEO fired in favor of management by committee, likely internal disruption to rank-and-file morale, massive golden parachutes, and probably a lot of deal-related expenses.

So, Stephen Cahill from Wells Fargo not holding back.

A lot of companies in recent years have gone public with super voting stock.

And there's always this rationale of like, there's this brilliant visionary founder who runs the company for a sort of like long-term social purpose and is not just beholden to the whims of the short-term equity markets.

And we want to preserve that.

And so the founder's shares need to have super voting rights.

And that's really better governance and better like value creation for the long term for public shareholders than letting every share have one vote.

And like this is the sort of degenerate final case of that, right?

Like this is a person person who's not the visionary, but who just inherited the shares from the visionary who put the company together.

And

she doesn't own 40% of the company, she owns 5% of the economics.

And her incentives are just very different from those of other shareholders.

And she seems to be making choices that are not great for other shareholders.

And it's just hard for anyone to kind of come in and fix it because she controls all the votes.

How many vendors does it take to meet all your organization's food needs?

Just one.

EasyCater, the workplace food platform that lets teams order from a huge variety of restaurants, over a hundred thousand nationwide, all through a single vendor.

In addition to all that variety, EasyCater also gives you full visibility of your organization's food spend with invoicing, centralized reporting, and seamless integration with expense management systems, all on one platform.

EasyCater, your business tool for food.

To learn more, visit easycater.com slash podcast.

Do you want to talk about some lighter fare?

Wells Fargo, man.

This was an incredible scoop by Bloomberg News's Anna Levitt.

It's so good.

It's so good.

Wells Fargo fires over a dozen for, quote, simulation of keyboard activity, Matt.

I assume they were working from home, although it's not entirely clear.

Like she reported this based on like a FINRA filing that Wells Fargo did.

What it sounds like is that they were working from home.

And so these are like people in wealth management and investment management.

They were working from home and Wells Fargo was monitoring them and making sure that they weren't just like going to the pool all day by installing some sort of tracking software on their computer that made sure that they were like typing at least once every five minutes or moving their mouse or whatever.

And these people acquired devices, apparently called mouse jigglers.

I picture like the, you know, like the bird with water in it that like bobs up and down and pecks their keys.

Like the Homer Simpson.

Yeah, the Homer Simpson bird, exactly right.

And so like someone is hitting a key every four minutes so that the system keeps them logged on while they go off and run errands or whatever.

And Will Sparker somehow found out and fired them all, saying we don't, you know, accept any unethical behavior.

Yeah, I mean, it's just amazing.

Reading directly from the filing, apparently the staffers, all of whom were in the firm's wealth and investment management unit, were, quote, discharged after review of allegations involving simulation of keyboard activity, creating impression of active work.

My first reaction was, if we're talking about wealth managers, I feel like they should be out golfing anyway.

And then also the term mouse jiggler really sounds like an insult, but it is a real device and you can buy it for $20 from Amazon.

Yeah, I agree with you that like, so one, if they're wealth managers, they should be out on the golf course, not at the keyboard.

But two, like, just in general, making sure that you're typing all the time is like the worst way to measure productivity and contributions of like a financial professional, right?

It's like, that can't be what the job is about, right?

The job can't be like, how many keys do you hit in a minute, right?

There has to be some other form of value add there.

And Wells Fargo is measuring like the sort of like lowest thing they could measure, which is just, are you hitting the keys?

I mean, what I find most amazing about this whole situation is that like Wells Fargo has been here before in like much more egregious ways, which is that they had like a famous scandal in 2016 where they set up millions of fake accounts because like they had all their like branch employees were basically held to a standard of like they had to open like eight different products a day, right?

So if you came in to open a checking account, they'd be like, hey, do you want to add online checking?

Do you want to add a credit card?

Do you want to add a mortgage?

Do you want to add a savings?

Because, you know, they wanted to open eight different products every day.

and so a lot of people realizing how hard that was instead were just doing it like illicitly by they'd open a checking out for someone and just slip them a credit card without them knowing about it and i love that it's like eight years later most farger still seems to have this culture of like one using these very crude metrics to manage its employees performance and two having the employees like game them in egregious ways yeah it's pretty painful.

I mean, you think about specifically the wealth management unit, and this has been a focus for the bank trying to beef up their wealth management, as it feels like a lot of the big banks are.

And this probably doesn't hurt them, but it is just embarrassing.

And it feels like they haven't quite recovered from that 2016 episode.

People talk about like bank culture.

And it really, like, all of these stories paint such a bad picture of Wells Fargo's culture.

There's another story a few years ago where Wells Fargo fired a bunch of investment bankers for expensing seamless too early.

Yeah.

You know, like you could order dinner if you stayed past eight or whatever.

and people were ordering dinner at like 6:15 and then like altering the receipts so that they looked like they stayed later.

It's like

all of this stuff.

It's like the most petty micromanagement of their people and the most like cynical gaming of that micromanagement.

Yeah, I feel in some ways like a naive, innocent person because I hear that and I'm like, oh my God, you can get fired for that.

And I think about my own life.

I get a car to the office because I get in at 6 a.m.

But sometimes I get in at 6.06 a.m.

and not 6 a.m.

And I wonder if I'm going to get fired for expensing my Uber.

But altering your receipts is a different level that I wouldn't do.

Right.

Like the thing is, you're not going to get fired because like, well, I shouldn't say that.

No, say it.

Put it on the record.

Both you and our employer take more intelligent, long-term view of what's going on.

And like everyone understands that you're acting in good faith and that the program exists to encourage you to do the good work that you do.

Right.

And then there's the other thing where it's like nickel and diming people, and like everyone is kind of doing the minimum and like trying to check the boxes.

Yeah, that leads to bad outcomes.

Well, speaking of things that made me nervous, I was searching on Amazon for some of these mouse jigglers on my work desktop.

And

let me say, for the company right now, it was for research for this podcast specifically, but I found one, cost $22.99.

That price is actually down 23%,

but more than a thousand of them have been bought in the last month, at least according to Amazon.

Bills itself is undetectable.

And again, being an innocent person, I thought that not a lot of people did this.

But just looking at how frequently people are buying mouse jigglers on Amazon, apparently it's still hot.

People are still doing this.

I am very interested in the cat and mouse game, no pun intended.

How people are catching these uncatchable mouse jigglers, right?

Like someone is like building the algorithms that like detect suspiciously regular mouse jingling and like report it to HR.

Or do you know?

Well, to that point, can I read you some of the reviews?

I thought these were really illuminating.

Oh, yeah.

This is a five-star review from June 1st.

So recently, they said that it was a great little device, but if you're being monitored by your employer, it only moves back and forth.

So if they can see your screen and you want to use this to be able to walk away, I would be careful.

They would clearly be able to see you're not there.

And then here's a four-star review from March.

This person wrote, at least with my mouse, it moves the cursor all the way across the screen.

So if you're being monitored by management, this would not look at all natural.

These are all Wells Fargo employees, by the way.

Just kidding.

That's a joke.

Right.

I sort of assumed that there was some sort of like algorithmic tracking of, like there's some like a computer system, make sure that you're typing every, at least, you know, every once in a while.

But like the idea that the managers just have like a screen up with like six of their employees' screens and they just watch it all day to make sure that the workers are working is like even more dystopian than what I thought.

Like, that's really grim.

Like, what is why can't the manager do some work instead of just monitoring their employees' screens?

Maybe that's someone's whole job, you know, in this bright new world that we live in.

You're the vice president of screen monitoring at Wall Street.

Right.

And then, like, you get like a big win when you fire 12 people for installing Mouse Triggers.

You're like, look, I've added so much value as the screen monitoring vice president because I've caught the people who were just using Mouse Triglers instead of really moving their mouse around the screen.

I wonder if that person works from home.

Like, do you need to be in the office to do that?

We're in a command center with like eight screens.

And that was the Money Stuff Podcast.

I'm Matt Levine.

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 between 10 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, or we might answer it on the 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 Andon.

Our theme music was composed by Blake Maples.

Brendan Francis Newnham is our executive producer.

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.

Elite basketball returns to the Elite Caribbean destination.

It's the 2025 Battle for Atlantis men's tournament happening November 26th to 28th.

Don't miss hometown team St.

Mary's, along with Colorado State, Vanderbilt, Virginia Tech, Western Kentucky, South Florida, VCU, and Wichita State, playing 12 games over three days.

It's basketball at its best, plus everything Atlantis has to offer.

Aqua Venture Water Park, White Sand Beaches, World Class Dining, and more.

Get your tickets and accommodations at battleforatlantis.com.

Booking a trip?

Don't skip the travel insurance part.

Ensure My Trip makes it super easy to compare plans that actually fit your trip.

Whether it's a weekend getaway or a semester abroad, we've got you covered.

From cancellations to lost luggage and medical emergencies, no shady providers, just smart tech and real help from licensed agents.

Plus, we don't play favorites, just what's best for you.

Be the main character when you travel.

Protect your trip at insuremytrip.com.

That's insuremytrip.com.