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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.
No. 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 their programming. 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 Newsmax is partly owned by Thomas Petterfee, who
Yeah. In addition to being a billionaire Republican donor, he's also like a trader, you know, like he's the founder of a tractor brokers. So like 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's like a
billion 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, are you going to sell? And he said, I can change before the lock. Most big shareholders are locked up in IPOs like that. And
It's funny, like for the same reasons that the stock price, 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. Newsmax 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 on your business, but you make money selling stock. But they're not even doing that. I'm old
fashion, 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.
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. It's got a TV channel. Yeah, that's true. But he was going on other channels. Not Bloomberg News, to the best of my knowledge. I'm on the podcast. That's true. Chris Ruddy, if you're listening, I want to talk a little bit about the mechanics of this IPO. I was chatting with Bailey Lipschultz of Bloomberg News about this. He's
My go-to guy. He's our memes talk report. Yeah, on funky things. He also covers IPOs, which is a really poetic intersection. So this was a
a Regulation A+. 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+, 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. That's true. Who are the banks? I'm so excited. Do you ask? Digital Offering, LLC. Hell 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 about
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...
Those are actually all the facts I have, but I have a quote.
From Mark Olenowicz, 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 banks 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. You put some stuff with retail accounts.
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, I don't want to say Bill Ackman tried that, but like a little bit. A little bit. Friend of the show. Friend of the show, Bill Ackman. He did it. But,
I don't think that's the case here because a Reg A-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. So 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 a certain sort of banker who's happy to work with meme stock companies. There's a lot of stuff going on. Stuff going on that not necessarily every bank wants to be doing. I don't know. I feel like the golden age might have been 2021. Like the D-SPACs kind of thing? Yeah. Obviously, you're still having some meme stock IPOs, but...
There's just not a lot of IPOs. Sure, there's not a lot of IPOs. That's right. Looking at Thursday. Like a relative golden age for the meme stock bankers compared to the large cap tech bankers. Everyone else.
Could talk about Circle. You know what? Also in IPO land. Also in IPO 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 week. 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 T-bills? They do not know how they're making... Yeah, yeah. That's it? Oh, yeah. It's the best business in the world. And it's actually... 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... They take tens of billions of dollars of deposits from customers. I wrote about this. They don't directly put it in T-bills because I think my explanation would be that is too much of a...
banking function or a financial services function and they're 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 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. That's like 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, etc., etc., etc.,
Another big part of it is like, everyone knows this is a good business model. It's not quite 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 stable coin. So like they're the stable coin of Coinbase and like there's a partnership with Coinbase and if their coins are held on Coinbase, like 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 like, you know, this is a good business. And so the customer acquisition cost is kind of, they'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 we don't get interest on our savings accounts. We don't get interest on our money market accounts, so it's fine. And now 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. 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 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 securities
interest-bearing stablecoins that are registered money market funds that trade on a blockchain. And if you look at the Circle IPO documents, they talk about that. 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. Yeah.
Why am I thinking of BlackRock and Securitize? 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 like having their stablecoin money out of BlackRock fund. Yeah. But yeah, everyone's there. Franklin Templeton did it like in 2019. Oh, yeah. They launched their 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. Yeah, it's far ways away. I know. You know, you think about all the other like 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 on top of it. It is, it is. I mean, 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... It's pretty direct. But no, MicroStrategy owns a ton of Bitcoin. Yeah, that's right. So it's not exactly a proxy. It's obviously... It's not a proxy for Bitcoin. I always think about, like, Goldman used to say that, like, their business is a bet on global GDP. And, like, the stablecoin business is a bet on, like, crypto GDP, right? Like, if crypto is booming, like, there'll be more demand for stablecoins. Now, they're separately, like...
the 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 what the pitch to buy CircleShares is, especially if rates- We have billions of dollars. We get paid interest and we don't pay interest. That's great. But what if rates go down? What's the point? The pitch is we are building the future of financial infrastructure. The real upside case is 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'll boop some Circle coins to someone, right? That's the upside case. It's kind of quaint to think we'll still be here in five years. That's the downside case. Yeah, right.
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Man, you know, we were talking about right-leaning social media networks. Oh, gosh, we were. What a transition. Ah, boy. X. X. Twitter. X. X. Now part of XAI Holdings. Yes. Man. So I obviously immediately thought of you on last Friday. I'm like 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 news. It seems like 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 biggest. I mean, like from like the Bloomberg table, which counts announced deals, including announced hostile deals.
And so 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 $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. I don't know how 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 company.
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 who owned XAI got 80 one hundred and thirteenths of the company and the people who on Twitter got thirty three hundred and thirteenths of the company. And that was the ratio that happened. They could have been worth eighty dollars and thirty three dollars. 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 it was $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. Who knows? Who knows?
I don't think that happens. 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 he's
In hindsight, you could sort of be like, well, they were doing that to print a trade at that price so they could justify doing the merger at that price. Because there was talk of 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 you don't have to believe any of those valuations because in a rough sense, what
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 they're 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? Could we see anything? I mentioned usually you have some delay between signing and closing because you have to 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 one thing I'll say is, like, why did he merge them? One possible answer is that these are kind of the same business, right?
One reason that I think Elon Musk has a bunch of separate companies for all of his different ideas is you want to have the companies have some focus and have the employees of these companies have shares or options in their one company, so they're really motivated to do a good job for that one company. Tesla and SpaceX are doing different things, so he'll move people between them, but you want to pay the Tesla people in Tesla options and the SpaceX people in 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 information from the Twitter user corpus. Right. And then you feed that into...
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 premium feature of X. The only reason I know what Grok is is because of Twitter, obviously. But that's not weird. Like every AI company is different, like trying to figure out business models. But like a lot of stuff is like there's a consumer distribution, right? Where like OpenAI is,
among other products, sells access to-- you could subscribe and have ChatGPT, right? And you pay a fee every month to have 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 like the outputs are through X and like the model in the middle has done through X. So everyone should be kind of working for the same goals and like motivated the same way. So we should merge it so that like the employees are, you know, 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. There you 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 stuff.
sort of using all of your data. Right, for sure. 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 write, 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 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. There's no buying. It would be a merger. It would be an all-stock merger. A smush?
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 XAR are the same business. Yes. Tesla's a different business. Yes, that's true. There's overlap. 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? Well, it is an AI company. It's a self-driving car company. It's an AI company, but they're different. But anyway, there's some overlap, but it's not...
the same business model or distribution. But then also, this deal is so easy because they're private companies. There are shareholders other than him in both of these companies, but they're there because they love him. They're not going to complain. This is a different situation. Every shareholder in XAI or X is there because they 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. I wrote this week about the comptroller of the city of New York. New York pension funds own a lot of Tesla stock. This is not because they're huge Elon Musk fans. Some of it is because they're sort of indexy.
Yeah. 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 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 they're like, you say Tesla's in the herd locker. It's because there's 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 comptroller of the state 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 EV side. That's very possible, right? But like...
If you think about the people who are in the addressable market, people are like, I love an EV. And the people who are like, I also love far-right politics. There's some disjunction there. Anyway, though, so the New York might sue for securities fraud for Doge, which is 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... Will it happen? Things mattered back then. Oh no, no. A little bit. Seven years ago? What, 29? I actually don't know what it was. 2018? It might have been any number of years ago. It's more than three and less than 15. Pre-pandemic. Yeah, that seems right. That's how I think about things.
Thrivent can help you plan your finances for the people, causes, and community you love. What makes Thrivent different? A combination of financial services and generosity programs. Thrivent offers advice, investments, insurance, banking, and generosity, as well as resources to fund service projects or direct dollars to causes you care about. With more than 120 years serving clients, you can plan your finances with confidence. Visit Thrivent.com to learn more. Thrivent.
where money means more. When your company has a position to fill, are you really seeing the best professional candidates? Sure, you get plenty of resumes, but you may be missing an untapped resource. Ideal candidates not currently job searching. People not actively looking, but who may be open to the right opportunity. It can be the difference between a good hire and a great hire.
Specialized Recruiting Group is ready to find the talent you need. Go to srgpros.com and see how the recruiters, with a deep understanding of the experience and expertise you need, can find the right fit for your business.
After all, you deserve to see the best candidates, both active and passive. Whether you're looking for a long-term or project-based professional, Specialized Recruiting Group is ready to find the talent you need. Go to srgpros.com right now to get started. That's srgpros.com. Specialized Recruiting Group, a tailored approach to professional hiring.
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Money Movement Services by Intuit Payments, Inc., licensed by NYDFS. Should we talk about substitute teachers? We absolutely should. Have you seen lately what substitute teachers in Maryland are making? No.
$7 million for three days of work. $7 million? Jeez Louise. What are we doing? Yeah, so there's this story about 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
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 happened.
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. Yeah. I get 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. I love that. 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 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 a trading firm.
He's like, you should go to an insurance company or trading firm and buy insurance on this. You should be like, I will give you, this person said 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 $7.
$6.8 million, and someone might take that trade, and then you keep the $200,000. Here's 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 at all. 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 magic. 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's 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, it depends. 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, but you really changed my life. I'd probably call and be like, hey, I'm a nice person. Let's sort this error out. But at $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 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 buy a horse. If it was enough to buy a pretty young green broke horse, I would probably not call about it. But like that when you spend it?
On the horse? No, no, but you would like the next day go out and buy a horse. Well, I'd have to find the horse first, you know, and probably do a few test rides. 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. Yeah. 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 $7 million, but it was, I think he was like a young person. I don't know. It was tens of thousands of dollars. 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...
He waited out the six years. Wow. And he's like, and at the end, I threw a clam has lapsed party. Awesome. Because they didn't ask for the money back. Man, that is a great email. But like, I just imagine like the mindset of like,
This money has been mistakenly deposited in my account. Let me ask a lawyer. I wrote once about the Citigroup error. Which one? 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 you 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. That's a good point. Probably not. But now they know. I should say this is not legal advice. I have no idea. Was it Citigroup? I know, that'd be too perfect. Citigroup, check.
And that was the Money Stuff Podcast. I'm Matt Levine. And I'm Katie Greifeld. 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 Masarakis and Moses Andam. Our theme music was composed by Blake Maples. Brendan Francis-Newdom 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.
Something unexpected happened after Jeremy Scott confessed to killing Michelle Schofield in Bone Valley Season 1. Every time I hear about my dad, it's, oh, he's a killer. He's just straight evil. I was becoming the bridge between Jeremy Scott and the son he'd never known. At the end of the day, I'm literally a son of a killer. Listen to new episodes of Bone Valley Season 2 starting April 9th on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.