Land Rich: EDR, KKR, SPAX.PVT
32:50 Share

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It's convenient, flexible, and you can switch therapists anytime. Your well-being is worth it. Visit BetterHelp.com slash podbusiness to get 10% off your first month. That's BetterHelp.com slash podbusiness. Bloomberg Audio Studios. Podcasts. Radio. News. 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... From me. Yeah. It's been a minute. For the listeners, service has continued uninterrupted, but for us, it's been two weeks. I know. I know. I had to remember how to anchor television 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 not the same. Yeah. The way this usually goes, though, is we have three topics. Sure. What are those three topics today, Katie? So we're going to talk about Endeavor. You're on a three-day streak of writing about this deal. It's quite an endeavor. We're going to talk about the baby Berkshire boom, because that is underway. And then we're going to 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. I sometimes will write an M&A deal will have a lot of drama, and so I'll write about it successively for days or weeks. Nothing's really happened in this deal. Just the anticipation. It didn't close on Monday. Nothing's happened since. The company doesn't exist. Right. So Endeavor is a company. Mm-hmm.

It went private. There was like a long lead up to it going private. Like they signed their deal about a year ago. Silver Lake, 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 a lot of shares traded.

And, you know, if you know you're going to get cashed out at $27.50 on Monday, it's a little weird to buy the stock at $29.25 on Friday. 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 one problem with it is you need to have owned the stock continuously since early February. Right.

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 duties 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. 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, um,

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. Different from appraisal, yeah. Appraisal is like...

This price should have been higher, right? It doesn't require any 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, 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 Silver Lake 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, and that 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 Icahn did.

I would be surprised if there was any other reason for it. But yeah, Carl Icahn bought about 8% of Endeavor. 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 was 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 Icahn. 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 Icahn on your side complaining about the deal price? I don't know. Yeah. Seems like an encouraging fact. Makes for good TV, makes for good podcasting. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So perhaps Carl Icahn wanted in on this lawsuit specifically, but there's also the possibility that maybe short sellers wanted

wanted out? I really don't know. There's a weird, fascinating history of this. So 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 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 $27.50 on Monday, you might be tempted to sell that stock short because you sell it for $29, you pay back the $27.50 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, 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 $27.50 and you paid $27.50 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...

lore on this, and it's not clear what the actual rules are. My understanding is there are people who have done this trade, and 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 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, you know, 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 being like, what if I did this? What if I moved out of state? It's easy to imagine how you would avoid your broker's phone call in three years. I think people are interested in that trade. Okay, so where does this go for here? Like you said, usually— I keep looking for the lawsuit. I haven't seen the lawsuit. The class action lawsuit. Yeah, yeah.

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, like, so many shares have traded hands after the appraisal deadline. So, like, if you're buying shares at $29 last week, you couldn't be doing it for appraisal because you wouldn't get appraisal. You'd have to be buying into the class action. Could there be both? Yeah, there could be both. Okay. The big case that I wrote about was Dole.

And they 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, you know, were violated and that's worth this. Like they're not the same thing at all. But like, you know, 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 yet. It would be weird if nothing happened because people were paying for drama, right? That'd be kind of beautiful though if truly nothing happened. Right, right, right. If everyone was like, I think this is a $1.75 a share lawsuit.

Looking forward to that lawsuit. And no one 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 was hoping someone else would bring a lawsuit. Yeah, right. It's not worth it to me. I'm feeling shy now. Yeah.

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Thank you.

I told you that I went to the Bluey experience at the camp. We've almost certainly talked about this. Did I remember that? No. But tell me about it. They, like, build Bluey's house in a building near Union Square. That sounds kind of fun. I really like Bluey. It's a good show. 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. They've got strategic holdings. Yeah. Not just regular holdings, but strategic holdings. Holdings that they will hold for a while is the plan. Yeah. Yeah. They've got about 18 of them. 18. Yeah. Right. So KKR is like historically a leveraged biofarm 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 reestablish

get a big check that they return to their limited partners and take 20% for themselves. That's the traditional LBO business model. All these LBO pioneers of the '80s and '90s are now giant public companies like KKR, and they run funds for investors. 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 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 and

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 Alison McNeely's story, KKR has this plan to quadruple its earnings per share over the next decade. Strategic holdings would be

Yeah. 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 like 20%. Right. This is like a little bit like that, right? The fee model is good enough that...

KKR has made a lot of money. Yeah. 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 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, Kohlberg, 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. Oh, yeah. 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 now.

We could just own the companies ourselves. We don't need to run funds anymore. Like, that's an exaggeration because –

Most of them, including KKR, mostly run funds. But there's this shift to 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. No, but you're right. It's sort of the same basis. Old school private equity is like, people in it would disagree with this, but it's a financial engineering story.

It's like we can put more leverage on this company than the public markets can. But this is like, yeah, we like that business. Let's own it forever. 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

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 Warren Buffett, 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. Yeah.

You're so young. I feel like people wanting to be Warren Buffett is like a longstanding... But in the past... Joe Bay and Bill Ackman grew up in a world where the pinnacle of investing was Warren Buffett, right? I do wonder if the kids these days want to be Warren Buffett. I don't know. There was that time during the pandemic where Buffett was getting dunked on a lot by the Dave Portnoy's 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. That crowd. Yeah. Why wouldn't you want to meet 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 snack food manufacturer. Our nose group? Our knots 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 Alison McNeely's article. Yeah. I 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 talk 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 $3.7 billion of revenue, $900 million of adjusted earnings, which is a small share overall of their operating earnings right now.

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 Greifeld 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 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. It's 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 laundromats or like real businesses. Vending machines. Yeah, because you can't rely on like that like lottery winnings to keep continuing. But like you can put the money into a real business. You buy like land. I don't know. Oh my God. 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-ish stock charts of SpaceX and OpenAI. Stripe. Stripe, yeah.

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 Stripe's value is blah, blah, blah. But 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. So these prices, Yahoo gets them from two marketplaces.

Right. Two companies that provide a marketplace for, you know, like sort of employees, ex-employees of these companies to sell their stock to like... Forge 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 to 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 derived, they're not really derived necessarily from those trades. 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 how the prices are determined. And you look at some of these companies and the prices don't change very much. And it's just very clear that they're sort of essentially pulling in prices from funding rounds and tender offers, and it's not a real-time stock chart. It's like Crunchbase in chart form. 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. But there isn't real-time. OpenAI stock does not really trade among...

Like on these secondary trading platforms, right? Yeah, I know, but I'm saying it's 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. Yeah.

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 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 like- 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, you know, employees and investors' ability to resell stock. The news this week is both that Yahoo Finance is taking prices from equities and Enforged to like

show these stock charts, but also that equities 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. Yeah.

So I'm comparing, I hate to talk about ETFs. I just hate it, Matt. 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 ticker 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... Not really. 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. No. 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. Like, 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, like, is pushing it towards being a little bit more real. So, like, private markets...

are open only to accredited investors in the US, whereas public markets are open to everyone. But if you look at the number of people who are accredited, because the accredited standards have not gone up since the '80s, to be accredited you need to have $200,000 a year of income, or $300,000 as a couple, or 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. They don't like managing to the stock price. They don't like the short-termism of the stock price reacting to news. Now you have the stock chart on Yahoo Finance. That doesn't move very much. But 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. Another counter that would be, though, that they don't have to report earnings four times a year anymore.

It's wild to me that 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. And like, of course, of course, no one who buys stocks in a brokerage account looks at financial statements for the companies they buy stock in, right? So like, of course it makes sense that no one cares about seeing financial statements. But it's weird that like we have like 100 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 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 like trading in the secondary market in large size. Like you're sort of drafting on like venture capitalists'

valuing the company in funding rounds. And like 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. Not all of them, supposedly. I don't know. Again, looking at open AI, I mean, so much has happened in the AI landscape. There's no pricing of what happened with DeepSeek, et cetera. Right, right. It would be really funny. It would be really fun if when the DeepSeek news had dropped, if you could go and

to your browser and look at a real-time stock price for OpenAI. Yeah. But that would be really, really funny if it was just a flat line. 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 OpenAI stock price thing, the other thing that you would expect to affect 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 an employee tender, I think, at an $84 billion valuation. They were almost done, and then they fired their CEO. Two days later, they hardened back. And then, they continued doing the tender, and they finalized it. And I think it was still at $84 billion. And I wrote about it.

What a weird fact that this news didn't change, like in either direction, didn't change the valuation of OpenAI. It was perfectly priced in. It was just like, all of it was as expected. Everything's totally normal. This is not really true. And then like, you know, they like very quickly went on to raise it much higher valuations, actually. This is my way of saying, if you looked at a real-time stock chart of OpenAI 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 X feed right now. I feel like you don't really... I'm not an X. You're not an Xer. Yeah, I'm an 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. You saying it's all over my ex-fee makes me think, I understand why CEOs don't like to have a real-time stock price. It's like, 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 I

You ask them on air, do you care about the stock price or 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 Asness'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 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. Yeah, right. It's very intuitive. 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 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 Andong. And special thanks this week to Cal Brooks. Our theme music was composed by Blake Maples. Brendan Francis-Newton 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.

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