An OK Horse

Summary

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Money Stuff: The Podcast

Episode: “An OK Horse”
Host: Matt Levine (Bloomberg Opinion)
Co-host: Katie Greifeld (Bloomberg News/TV)
Date: January 23, 2026

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Overview

In this episode, Matt Levine and Katie Greifeld banter about New York weather and the J.P. Morgan office pub before diving into topical issues in finance. They cover the politics and legal risks of "debanking," meme coins and their (un)intentional overlaps with journalism and software, CEO "moonshot" compensation packages, and the New York Stock Exchange's plans for 24/7 tokenized stock trading. Throughout, Matt maintains his trademark dry humor, Katie offers grounded observations, and the episode whirls between finance wonkery, internet culture, and a surprising amount of horse-related math.

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Key Discussion Points & Insights

1. Banter: Storms, Snow, and the JP Morgan Pub (01:19–06:13)

• Weather Chat (01:19–02:15):
  The pair discuss the forecasted snowstorm in NYC, reminisce about past storms, and joke about suburban woes.

  • Matt: “I used to like snow a lot more before I became a suburban dad, and now it’s like shoveling a foot of snow. It’s not fun anymore.” (01:46)

• JP Morgan Healthcare Conference Correction (02:48–03:41):
  Katie corrects a previous podcast error, noting that Jamie Dimon did attend the JP Morgan Healthcare Conference, though not in her vicinity.

• The JP Morgan Office Pub (04:19–06:13):
  Katie shares her excitement about visiting the legendary new pub inside JP Morgan’s office.

  • They detail trivia: drinks only served after 3 PM, screen-printed Guinness foam with images of the building (and possibly Jamie Dimon's face).
  • Matt: “It’s been 20% of the content of this podcast. They have a pub at their... Their brand new office.” (04:43)

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2. Debanking Donald Trump & Bank CEO Politics (06:13–08:13)

• Trump’s Lawsuit Against JP Morgan (06:21–07:40):
  Trump sues JP Morgan (and Jamie Dimon) for $5 billion, alleging "debanking" for political reasons after January 6, 2021.

  • Matt contrasts banks’ withdrawal from unsavory clients (i.e., Jeffrey Epstein) with political sensitivities surrounding Trump.
  • Matt: “After January 6th, it might have been reasonable for JP Morgan to think, we don’t want to be involved in banking people who have been involved in certain sorts of criminal activity.” (06:52)

• Broader Debanking Politics (07:40–08:13):
  Katie notes Bank of America's CEO Brian Moynihan’s exclusion from a Davos reception, possibly also for “debanking.”

  • Katie: “...the White House excluded Brian Moynihan ... and one of the reported reasons was potentially debanking. Yeah, the suspicion of debanking.” (08:07)

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3. Meme Coins, Royalties, and Journalistic Ethics (08:43–16:18)

• The Gastown Meme Coin Story (08:43–13:09)
  Matt explains how a meme coin was launched referencing “Gastown” (a software project), with royalties directed by the coin’s creator to the open-source developer as an incentive mechanism.

  • Matt: “A meme coin was foisted upon me. Let me take a step back and tell this story...” (08:50)
  • The developer was initially skeptical, likening the offer to a scam, but after setting up a wallet, withdrew about $70,000.

• Is it like Patreon? (12:16–13:09):
  Katie wonders if this is akin to Patreon; Matt clarifies the key difference—speculators get rich too, and creators’ benefit is indirect and unpredictable.

  • Matt: “It is not just a way to funnel money to creators, it’s a way to funnel money to creators while also giving a lot of that money to the people involved in the crypto trading.” (12:27)
  • Matt: “Cryptogrifters are recruiting Open Source AI developers. Which is, I think, closer to my view of it...” (13:00)

• Matt’s Own Meme Coin (13:21–15:12):
  Someone made a meme coin for Matt after he wrote about Gastown. He vows not to touch the funds, citing journalistic ethics.

  • Matt: “...I’m not going to name the coin or the platform. I do not want people trading the thing to generate royalties for me.” (13:24)
  • Katie: “That is an okay horse. You could do a lot with that.” (13:52; referencing $10,000 as the price of a mediocre horse)

• Legal Recourse & NFT Parallels (15:12–16:18):
  Katie inquires about lawsuits when meme coins use your brand without consent. Matt points out the practical difficulties due to anonymity and platform decentralization, likening it to NFT copyright gripes.

  • Matt: “I think, practically, it’s often hard to sue them... because these are typically somewhat anonymous, decentralized platforms...” (15:40)

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4. CEO "Moonshot" Compensation Packages (16:36–22:53)

• Wall Street’s ‘Moonshot’ Pay Trend (16:36–19:17):
  Discussion centers on a Wall Street Journal story citing Equilar’s study of CEO compensation packages worth $100 million+ (or “10,000 horses”), requiring aggressive stock price goals.

  • Matt: “It used to be that CEOs got paid millions of dollars and now there’s a new vogue for paying them in a form that sort of looks like $0 plus a bajillion dollars if they hit some very aggressive growth in stock price targets...” (17:05)
  • These are modeled on Elon Musk’s Tesla compensation, sparking imitation across corporate America.
  • Matt: “The idea of these moonshots is, most of them won’t work out, and some of them will work out enormously well.” (18:40)

• Do Companies Expect to Fail? (18:49–19:17):
  Katie wonders if companies approach these knowing most will fail. Matt says, “Everyone thinks they’re going to be the successful moonshot...” (18:55)

• Shareholder View & the Moonshot Portfolio (19:17–20:36):
  The logic: diversified shareholders benefit if just a few CEOs succeed. Katie muses about constructing a “moonshot portfolio.”

  • Katie: “You could construct a moonshot portfolio... of these 21 companies.” (19:19)
  • Matt: “A lot of them underperformed the S&P, but some of them are Tesla.” (19:31)

• Are Moonshots for Startups or Public Companies? (20:44–22:04):
  Matt unpacks how these pay deals mimic startup “big bet” logic, but questions their fit to mature, large-cap firms.

  • Matt: “You’re sort of making these very bold bets. That makes sense when you’re a startup and maybe makes less sense for a large public company...” (21:41)

• Canceling the Moonshot Pay (and Psychologically for CEOs) (22:04–22:53):
  If performance goals look unreachable, CEOs often get new, lower options anyway.

  • Matt: “You’ll get nothing unless you 10x the company, in which case you’ll get a bajillion dollars. Right. And then after two years, you’re like, well, I’m not going to 10x the company, but yeah, I’m working hard. And then they’re like, okay, fine, take some money.” (22:14)

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5. NYSE’s Tokenized 24/7 Stock Trading Plan (23:18–27:48)

• The News (23:18–24:03):
  The NYSE is working on a blockchain platform to allow round-the-clock trading in tokenized stocks and ETFs.

• Why Pair Tokenization with 24/7 Trading? (24:03–26:20):
  Real-time settlement is easier with blockchains, which fits the expectation of retail investors to trade and immediately redeploy capital outside traditional business hours.

  • Matt: “In a world... catering to retail traders who want to trade 24 7, settlement is an obstacle... so you’re combining the 24/7 trading with real time settlement.” (25:05)
  • Katherine references her conversation with NYSE's Michael Blaugrand, who says it's about “getting their products in the digital wallets of the next generation investor.” (25:42)

• Is Tokenization Required? (26:13–26:32):
  Matt notes tokenization is not essential to real-time settlement but is the current method of choice.

  • Matt: “I don’t think that tokenization is an absolute requirement for real time settlement. But it’s how it’s going to happen…” (26:13)

• Inevitability, User Experience, and Shift Trades (26:32–27:48):
  They agree 24/7 trading seems inevitable as apps remake the market experience—waiting for business hours “would kind of be like, what am I doing?” (26:34, Matt). Matt and Katie riff on the idea of “night shift” trading jobs.

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Notable Quotes & Memorable Moments

• “Assuming... makes you make corrections on podcasts.”
  — Katie Greifeld (03:42)

• “A meme coin was foisted upon me.”
  — Matt Levine (08:50)

• “Allow me to get richer just by telling you about it.”
  — Matt Levine, quoting Steve Yegge (11:55)

• “That is an OK horse. You could do a lot with that.”
  — Katie Greifeld (13:52; tongue-in-cheek reference to what $10,000 would buy)

• “Do not buy it... I’m not going to talk about it more and I’m not going to be helped by any aspect of it.”
  — Matt Levine (14:46)

• “You have 10 CEOs who think they’re going to get to the moon, and eight of them are diluted and two of them are right, and you don’t know which is which. But let them all try.”
  — Matt Levine (18:59)

• “The classic Moonshot pay package is: you’re an early stage startup founder... and your pay is like ramen and 30% of the equity of a company...”
  — Matt Levine (20:45)

• “You’ll get nothing unless you 10x the company... And then after two years you’re like, well, I’m not going to 10x the company, but yeah, I’m working hard. And then they’re okay, fine, take some money.”
  — Matt Levine (22:14)

• “If I was like a huge fan of an app on my phone and then it stopped working at 4pm on Friday and I couldn’t use it all weekend... what am I doing?”
  — Matt Levine (26:34)

• “I picture a cozy, dark room, the warm glow of your computer screen... My flannel pajama bottoms on. Yeah, sounds good.”
  — Katie Greifeld (27:27; imagining the ‘night shift’ for a 24/7 stock market)

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Timestamps for Key Segments

| Segment | Timestamps | |-----------------------------------------------|-------------| | Storm banter, JP Morgan pub | 01:19–06:13 | | Trump debanking lawsuit, bank politics | 06:13–08:13 | | Meme coins, creator royalties, ethics | 08:43–16:18 | | CEO moonshot bonus/compensation trend | 16:36–22:53 | | NYSE tokenized 24/7 trading discussion | 23:18–27:48 |

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Tone and Style

The episode is conversational and humorous, full of “inside baseball” finance references, with Matt’s dry wit and Katie’s upbeat, accessible style. Jokes about horses, drinking Guinness at the office, and speculative meme coins keep even intricate finance topics breezy.

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Useful for Listeners Who Haven’t Tuned In

This episode covers a wide range of trending topics:

• Practical impacts of politics and regulation on Wall Street (debanking)
• The blurry ethics and mechanics behind internet tokenization/meme coins
• How executive pay structures have gotten more audacious
• The technological and cultural inevitability of 24/7, blockchain-fueled trading
  Listeners get both industry insight and irreverent color, learning how financial innovation, regulation, and incentive systems interact in Wall Street’s evolving landscape.

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Transcript

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[Katie Greifeld]

Bloomberg Audio Studios Podcasts Radio News as frequent listeners know, we record this on Thursdays generally, and apparently we're going to get a biblically bad storm this weekend in the New York City area and.

[Matt Levine]

You are like, yes.

[Katie Greifeld]

Yeah, great. I feel like we had a real storm this past weekend and it was like criminally under hyped. I had no idea it was coming.

[Matt Levine]

I was also surprised by this weekend's snow. I used to like snow a lot more before I became a suburban dad, and now it's like shoveling a foot of snow. It's not fun anymore.

[Katie Greifeld]

Burrow into your heart. Try to find that childlike joy.

[Matt Levine]

I try, but I just pretty deeply buried under.

[Katie Greifeld]

I root for chaos.

[Matt Levine]

Yeah, sure, sure, sure. You don't have to shovel the snow. I was telling you before this and you were like, you gave me the impression you had like 15 minutes of a material on the snowstorm this weekend.

[Katie Greifeld]

Mostly I just wanted to talk about like why was no one like there's been a lot of headlines like first big Snowstorm of the Mamdani era and it's like, are we all just trying to forget that last weekend happened? I feel like that was the first big snowstorm.

[Matt Levine]

Our colleague Joe Eisenthal was tweeting about prediction markets for the snow.

[Katie Greifeld]

Oh, they're popping off I'm sure this is the first time I've ever felt inclined to get involved in a prediction market.

[Matt Levine]

Really? You, like, have an inside view about.

[Katie Greifeld]

Oh, yeah, we'll do that for Katie. Speaking of folks writing in, we gotta.

[Matt Levine]

Get this outta the way first.

[Katie Greifeld]

We have some JP Morgan material to get through. The first is a correction. And I mistakenly said in last Week's podcast that J.P. morgan CEO Jamie Dimon did not attend the J.P. morgan Healthcare Conference.

[Matt Levine]

Which you attended.

[Katie Greifeld]

Which I attended. And I'm sorry, I was mistaken. He was in attendance, just not talking to you. Well, the thing is, I was like acutely aware of his presence last year because we were recording in a hallway, which I guess was some storming by to get myself into more correction territory. But he was giving some sort of fireside or keynote address, and the hallway that we were in was somehow on the route, so people were lining up behind us and it was like an enormous scene and everyone was talking about Jamie Diamond. So I, again, I was keenly aware, didn't have that experience this year, so I assumed that he didn't attend, but that was.

[Matt Levine]

I thought that guy existed.

[Katie Greifeld]

You know what assuming does makes you make corrections on podcasts. We have another JP Morgan podcast.

[Matt Levine]

Before we do that, I'm going to say hello and welcome to the Money Stuff podcast.

[Katie Greifeld]

Right, right.

[Matt Levine]

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.

[Katie Greifeld]

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

[Matt Levine]

What else you got on J.P. morgan?

[Katie Greifeld]

Oh, I was just gonna talk about the pub.

[Matt Levine]

Oh, the pub. Oh, yeah, you're going today.

[Katie Greifeld]

This is included in the banter. The banter this week is very long.

[Matt Levine]

It's the whole episode. It's just the weather and the pub. Although they did get sued for debanking Donald Trump on Thursday, which we should.

[Katie Greifeld]

Yeah, we'll get there.

[Matt Levine]

The pub.

[Katie Greifeld]

Yeah, the pub. Yeah, I'm excited. I'm going tonight.

[Matt Levine]

They have a pub at their office.

[Katie Greifeld]

Got a rest City.

[Matt Levine]

It's been 20% of the content of this podcast. They have a pub at their. Their brand new office, which you have given us some facts and figures about.

[Katie Greifeld]

Yeah, I know so much about this office.

[Matt Levine]

At that pub, they serve drinks, although allegedly not before 3 o'. Clock.

[Katie Greifeld]

I think we said I'm on the air until 5, so I'm going after 5, so I can't stress test that.

[Matt Levine]

Yes, you will definitely get served at the J.P. morgan Pub.

[Katie Greifeld]

I hear The Guinness is particularly excellent.

[Matt Levine]

So you do hear that.

[Katie Greifeld]

I have heard that you can get screen printed on the foam, the building itself.

[Matt Levine]

No.

[Katie Greifeld]

Yeah.

[Matt Levine]

Like you can get like latte art on your Guinness.

[Katie Greifeld]

Yeah, I've heard that. I've also. I don't know if this is true. I'm excited to find out that you can get a screen printing of Jamie Dimon's face as well on your Guinness. That's what I've heard. That's what I've heard. I'm gonna. I'm gonna fact check all of this.

[Matt Levine]

Tonight in our Shinets.

[Katie Greifeld]

Yeah.

[Matt Levine]

You will certainly order multiple Guinnesses.

[Katie Greifeld]

Yep.

[Matt Levine]

Get every available image.

[Katie Greifeld]

Yeah.

[Matt Levine]

Printed on them.

[Katie Greifeld]

Yeah. Photograph them if I can. If there's photography allowed.

[Matt Levine]

There's photography.

[Katie Greifeld]

Am I even allowed to say that I'm going to the pub tonight? Well, here by next week.

[Matt Levine]

Issue, another correction. He did not go to the pub last week.

[Katie Greifeld]

I'm pretty excited. I saw it the outside of it when.

[Matt Levine]

Of the pub inside the office. You saw the facade of the pub on the town square in the middle of the J.P. morgan office.

[Katie Greifeld]

Exactly.

[Matt Levine]

Excellent.

[Katie Greifeld]

So now I'm working my way inside.

[Matt Levine]

Working your way past the Velvet Rib.

[Katie Greifeld]

Yeah. So that's what I had in terms of JP Morgan content. But you're right. We should briefly talk about debate.

[Matt Levine]

Yeah. I haven't read this lawsuit, but like I gather from like what I've read on the Bloomberg summary of it, that it's not long on law.

[Katie Greifeld]

Yeah. To recap, perhaps I'm completely wrong. President Donald Trump is suing J.P. morgan and Jamie Dimon himself for at least $5 billion over those allegations that it stopped offering him and his businesses banking services for political reasons. And they did for seven weeks. They closed accounts of Trump and his businesses after January 6, 2021.

[Matt Levine]

Banks shot accounts for various reasons. Banks have gotten in a lot of trouble for banking. Jeffrey Epstein. They weren't like co conspirators in his crimes. They were providing him banking services. And if you provide banking services to people who give off red flags of committing crimes, then you get in a lot of trouble. Right. And after January 6th, it might have been reasonable for JP Morgan to think, we don't want to be involved in banking. People who have been involved in certain sorts of criminal activity.

[Katie Greifeld]

Right.

[Matt Levine]

But that sort of criminal activity is now associated with a certain sort of politics. So you can say you were banking, me, debanking me because of politics. Politics rather than because of crime.

[Katie Greifeld]

Yeah.

[Matt Levine]

It's all very upsetting.

[Katie Greifeld]

It's a little bit interesting. When paired with what happened to Brian Moynihan at Davos. Brian Moynihan, he didn't get past the Velvet Rep. Brian Moynihan, he was not.

[Matt Levine]

Invited to the pub.

[Katie Greifeld]

Being the CEO of Bank of America, the FT reported, also a notorious debanker.

[Advertisement Voice]

Yeah.

[Katie Greifeld]

Well, the FT reported that the White House excluded Brian Moynihan from a Davos reception that included the leaders of other banks and financial institutions. And one of the reported reasons was potentially debanking. Yeah, the suspicion of debanking. Yeah.

[Matt Levine]

This is why I was not a successful investment banker and why, at some level, I'm not a good financial journalist. No part of me wants to go to Davos, and if I happen to find myself at Davos, no part of me would want to go to the Trump reception. But that's the job, right? That's the job.

[Katie Greifeld]

Jamie Dimon was there. Jane Frazier was there.

[Matt Levine]

Charleston, despite being sued, Jamie Dimon was there.

[Katie Greifeld]

Yeah, I know. I guess they had dinner and then something went wrong. I was like, you know what?

[Matt Levine]

I'm going to tell you about my week.

[Katie Greifeld]

Yeah, please.

[Matt Levine]

I have a meme coin.

[Katie Greifeld]

Yes, you do.

[Matt Levine]

Which it is.

[Katie Greifeld]

But you didn't create it.

[Matt Levine]

I had the opposite of have a meme coin. A meme coin was foisted upon me. Let me take a step back and tell this story. So the guy named Steve Yeag, who's a software developer, launched this thing called Gastown, which is like a AI coding vibe, coding situation. It's like open source software that he announced and people liked and it got a lot of attention. And at some point he did that January 1st, and at some point in the. In the last couple of weeks, someone launched a meme coin called Gas on a crypto platform. And the idea is like, it's a meme coin that is has the same name as Gastown. So if you, like, think that Gastown is a cool project, maybe you'll buy the meme coin, like whatever, right?

[Katie Greifeld]

Yeah.

[Matt Levine]

Classic meme coin logic. There's no connection. The person who launched it wasn't the guy who launched Gastown. It's just like, yeah, they launched it on a platform, but the way this platform works is that when the token trades, it generates what they call royalties, like trading fees, and the royalties, you know, some like, whatever, like 1% of the trade volume or something, and the royalties accrue to someone. When you launch the coin, you can designate who gets the royalties. And the person who launched this coin said the royalties would accrue to the developer who Launched Gastown. So there is a connection between the coin and the open source project. The connection is that the coin generates some money for the developer of the project. Not because he launched the coin, not because he had anything to do with it, but just because they were like, we'll give some of this money to him.

[Katie Greifeld]

It's sort of like a non consensual connection.

[Matt Levine]

I mean, it's not exactly what people used to call an airdrop, but it's related to the idea of an airdrop in crypto where like someone just gives you a coin and they're oh, you have this coin, right? And why do they do that? Well, what happened here is that someone who was involved in, or at least owned some of the crypto token emailed the developer and was like, hey, you have all these royalties waiting for you. All you have to do is like set up an account, connect your Twitter to the crypto platform, and then like you can withdraw.

[Katie Greifeld]

It's only to buy Solana.

[Matt Levine]

He had to like open a Solana wallet to withdraw the money. So, yeah, and he was like, that's weird. And then he did it and he was like, oh, wow, I really got the money.

[Katie Greifeld]

I love the excerpt that you included.

[Matt Levine]

Yeah, yeah, he wrote. He was like, because it sounds like a scam. It sounds like, yeah, just open a Solana wallet and send it to. But in fact, it was real, apparently. And he withdrew something like $70,000 of royalties. And then here's the important thing. Then he blogged about it. He's got a big platform, people like Gastown. And he blogged about it for apparently a couple of reasons. One is that he thought it was good. He calls it an engine that fuels creation, just like the stock market. That is like, because this thing is retroactively financing his open source software project, he thinks it's cool, right? It's like this is a way to fund projects through like crowd meme, something, something. Right? So one, he thought it was cool. And then two, the other reason he lied about it is because that will get attention to it, which will one, make the token go up. And I think he ended up buying some of the token and two, create more royalties for him. So he actually wrote in his blog post, allow me to get richer just by telling you about it.

[Katie Greifeld]

Ye.

[Matt Levine]

Which is like a good line. And so he did that and I wrote about it because I thought that was funny in various ways.

[Katie Greifeld]

Yeah, for sure.

[Matt Levine]

He's not wrong that it's a, it's a way to finance something. Something I don't know that it's a sustainable way to like, fund. Yeah, a lot of projects, but it is like in certain sort of crowdsourcey memey areas of the world, it's a way for people to get money.

[Katie Greifeld]

It almost reminds me of a Patreon.

[Matt Levine]

It has some Patreon like elements, but let me tell you, like, one reason that is not like a Patreon, which is that you got tens of thousands of dollars out of this. But the market cap of the coin at some point went from like kind ish to like $40 million and back down. You know, the people who I think I have no proof of this, just like, just looking at the market dynamics, the people I think made a lot of money on this. They were people who bought the coin cheap, emailed him, were like, hey, blog about this, he blogs about it, the coin goes up and they make a lot of money selling it. Right. So it is not just a way to funnel money to creators, it's a way to funnel money to creators while also giving a lot of that money to the people involved in the crypto trading. Sean Guedecker wrote a blog post about this with the title Cryptogrifters are recruiting Open Source AI developers. Which is, I think, closer to my view of it than like, this is a way to fuel creation.

[Katie Greifeld]

Right.

[Matt Levine]

But in any case, it's interesting. Yeah, they called it Meme Coin Venture Capital. And like, you know, as in regular venture capital, you know, the entrepreneurs get some of the money and the financiers get some of the money. You can quibble over the split of that.

[Katie Greifeld]

And so how do you factor in that leading?

[Matt Levine]

Well, I wrote about it.

[Katie Greifeld]

Yes.

[Matt Levine]

And then someone launched one for me, of course. So I wrote about that in my column the next day. But I'm not going to name the coin or the platform. I do not want people trading the thing to generate royalties for me for.

[Katie Greifeld]

A number of reasons on the record.

[Matt Levine]

One of them is a matter of journalistic ethics and Bloomberg standards and everything like that. And another is like, I'm not going to log into the thing. Like, I'm not taking the money. But, you know, there's like supposedly $10,000 on an account for me.

[Katie Greifeld]

That is an okay horse. You could do a lot with that.

[Matt Levine]

I love that your conception of money.

[Katie Greifeld]

Is just thinking horses. I mean, what else? How do you think about what you can do with $10,000?

[Matt Levine]

I don't, because, like, there's no part of you that is tempted to get and spend this $10,000.

[Katie Greifeld]

I mean, you'd have to put some work into it, but I don't know.

[Matt Levine]

That'S that much work. But it's like putting passwords into some.

[Katie Greifeld]

Into the horse, I mean.

[Matt Levine]

Oh, into the horse.

[Katie Greifeld]

Yeah.

[Matt Levine]

I'm not going to buy a horse. No, that's not my. Well, you're not going to use of $10,000.

[Katie Greifeld]

You're not going to take the money?

[Matt Levine]

I'm not going to take the money.

[Katie Greifeld]

I'm surprised there hasn't been some sort of Matt Levine meme coin.

[Matt Levine]

There probably has been.

[Katie Greifeld]

Yeah.

[Matt Levine]

This is like the first one that I know of that like, attempts to generate profits for me personally.

[Katie Greifeld]

So.

[Matt Levine]

Yeah.

[Katie Greifeld]

Something that I was wondering about as I was reading your initial.

[Matt Levine]

I just want to be really clear. Don't buy it.

[Katie Greifeld]

Don't buy it.

[Matt Levine]

I don't want you to sue me. If you like, don't buy it and then it goes up. But to the extent you were buying it for reasons relating to wanting to help me or thinking that I will talk about it more, like don't buy it for those reasons, I'm not going to talk about it more and I'm not going to be helped by any aspect of it.

[Katie Greifeld]

Well, speaking.

[Matt Levine]

I don't own it.

[Katie Greifeld]

You don't own it.

[Matt Levine]

I'm not getting the royalties.

[Katie Greifeld]

No.

[Matt Levine]

I didn't launch it. I had no involvement in it. All I've done is talk about it. But I have not talked about it in an encouraging way.

[Katie Greifeld]

No, no. A negative way, if you will. Speaking of suing, something that I was wondering about reading your initial entry. When it comes to Gastown and let's say that he was receiving no economic benefit from this meme coin and it has no actual connection to Gastown. If that happened. If you started a thing and then someone launched a meme coin that is connected only in name, do you have any sort of recourse? Like, can you sue them for trying to ride the popularity of your thing?

[Matt Levine]

I think, like, practically, it's often hard to sue them. This came up a lot in NFTs. Like people do NFTs, like, linked to other people's art.

[Katie Greifeld]

Yeah.

[Matt Levine]

You know, because you're like an NFT is like an online pointer to an image. Right. And you just take someone else's image and then you sell an NFT of it. People, I think, have tried lawsuits, but I think it's hard because these are typically somewhat anonymous, decentralized platforms and like, they're not.

[Katie Greifeld]

Yeah.

[Matt Levine]

There's not an obvious person to sue. And, you know, I don't know, I mean, seems like it could in some circumstances be a copyright violation, but like.

[Katie Greifeld]

Yeah, what are you going to wade into?

[Matt Levine]

Like some weird corners of the Internet.

[Katie Greifeld]

What are you going to do?

[Matt Levine]

What are you going to do?

[Katie Greifeld]

I just love the phrase moonshot.

[Matt Levine]

Do you?

[Katie Greifeld]

I think it's so romantic. Moonshot. Anyway, pay packages though, is what we're talking about specifically.

[Matt Levine]

Also romantic.

[Katie Greifeld]

Yeah. So romantic.

[Matt Levine]

There's a Wall Street Journal story about an Ecuilar study of. Wait, let me try to do the math. There's some CEOs who got moonshot compensation packages which they defined as compensation packages that had like a notional value of at least 10,000 horses.

[Katie Greifeld]

This is really funny.

[Matt Levine]

10,000 horses or $100 million. I hope I did the math right. It used to be that CEOs got paid millions of dollars and now there's a new vogue for paying them in a form that sort of looks like 0ish dollars plus a bajillion dollars if they hit some very aggressive growth in stock price targets, like some long period of time. The idea is like one, it's like a long term alignment of incentives and two, it is incentives to like do a lot. Right. So it's not just like steadily grow profits, it's like transform the company or make it huge. And this is like, probably wasn't invented at Tesla, but it's very Tesla. Right. Like Tesla and 2018 gave Elon Musk like a people throw in the number 56 billion, I think, like, you know, gave him some tens of billions of dollar package if he grew the company 10x and then he did, and then they gave him the money and then talked about a lot and now they've given him another one that's like a trillion dollars of extra equity if he goes to 8.5 trillion. And other people were like, ooh, Elon Musk did it, it must be cool. And so a lot of companies have done these packages and, and what the Eclair study found is that most of them, most of those companies have underperformed the S and P. Yeah. Which as I wrote, makes total sense because these are supposed to be like all moonshots. Right. And like most of the time they shouldn't work out and they're getting no reward for matching the S and P performance. Right. Like that's not what they're there for. They're there to like 10x the company. And if they can't do that, then like they'll fall short and there'll be a bad payoff. Right. And the idea of these moonshots is like, most of them won't work out, and some of them will work out enormously well. And so if you're a diversified shareholder, you'll get the benefit of a few companies going forward.

[Katie Greifeld]

Do you think the companies went into it with that attitude, though? This probably won't work out.

[Matt Levine]

No, but that's fine. Everyone thinks they're going to be the successful moonshot, Right?

[Katie Greifeld]

Of course.

[Matt Levine]

But if you're a shareholder, if you're a diversified shareholder, that's fine. You have 10 CEOs who think they're going to get to the moon, and eight of them are diluted and two of them are right, and you don't know which is which. But let them all try. The CEOs all thinking, oh, of course I'll do this right. If some of them are wrong, that's good for shareholders, as long as some of them are right.

[Katie Greifeld]

I really liked that framing, thinking about it through the perspective of a shareholder. And obviously my brain went to. You could construct a moonshot portfolio of these 21 companies or something that Equilar found did this.

[Matt Levine]

A lot of them have underperformed the S and P, but some of them are Tesla.

[Katie Greifeld]

Yeah, that's true. It seems like kkr, this is working out for them. Who else is it working out for? Airbnb also, which is interesting. It's specifically not working out for a lot of people, including Trade Desk. But it was interesting to see that Equilar was specifically looking at 2020 and 2021 packages.

[Matt Levine]

So excluding Tesla.

[Katie Greifeld]

Excluding Tesla. But it does feel like a moment in time. I mean, maybe there have been more in the year since, but it feels like 2020, 2021. You did see a lot of these.

[Matt Levine]

Yeah, that was. That was. Apparently there were more than. Than before or since y. It was. The Tesla package was in 2018, but I think he hit the targets in like, 2021 or 20. And so there was a lot of like, oh, wow, it works. From the perspective of a CEO, it's like, oh, wow, I could make $60 billion. And from the perspective of a board, it's like, oh, this incentivization works and gets CEOs to transform companies. Yeah, it's a little weird to be a board and be like, well, our guy could be Elon Musk, too, but it's. Someone's got to. Yeah, Elon Musk 2.0.

[Katie Greifeld]

Well, it'll be interesting to see, like, what the lag effect of his most recent pay package is, like, whether in.

[Matt Levine]

You know, I don't think anyone else is going to get a trillion dollar pay package for a while.

[Katie Greifeld]

No, you don't think so?

[Matt Levine]

Who knows, man? And the other thing I'll say is like I've written this about, you know, his earlier pay package and his trillion dollar pay package is like the classic Moonshot pay package is you're a early stage startup founder, right? And your pay is like ramen and 30% of the equity of a company that is now worth nothing. Ish. And could be worth a trillion dollars. That's the Moonshot pay package. That's the package where in theory, every startup CEO is trying to create something out of nothing. And if they fail, they get roughly nothing. And if they succeed, they get Mark Zuckerberg level wealth. And that's like a normal pay package. And what this is doing is translating that to giant public companies. And it shouldn't work that well. Tesla's a car company and it makes theoretically, and it can sell cars. And like now Elon Musk's incentives are to transform it utterly to make it an $8.5 trillion company. The theory there has to be like, either he will succeed and it will have a humanoid robot in every home and It'll be worth $8.5 trillion and he'll get paid or he'll fail and he won't get paid and won't like, sell cars anymore. Yeah, I don't. Like, you're sort of making these like very bold bets. And that makes sense when you're a startup and maybe makes less sense for a large public company, but maybe it makes more sense. I don't know, maybe it's what the share.

[Katie Greifeld]

Can you walk me through the psychology of the CEOs who canceled their moonshot? Oh, sure.

[Matt Levine]

I mean, like the psychology, like you're.

[Katie Greifeld]

Just like, I'm not going to do this.

[Matt Levine]

This is all stock options, right? Like the way it works is like you're optimistic. The board is like, we're going to pay you a lot of stock options that will be worth a lot if the stock goes up and be worth nothing if the stock goes down. And you're like, great, the stock will go up. And then the stock goes down. And you're like, well, but I'm a nice guy. Like, I come in every day, I work hard, like, why am I not getting paid? And the board is like, you're right. And they cancel your stock options and give you new stock opt options so you still get paid. And the moonshot stuff is like that too, right? It's like at the beginning of the moonshot package, it's like you'll get Nothing unless you 10x the company, in which case you'll get a bajillion dollars. Right. And then after two years you're like, well, I'm not going to 10x the company, but yeah, I'm working hard. And then they're okay, fine, take some money. That's the psychology. It's pretty reasonable.

[Katie Greifeld]

Yeah.

[Matt Levine]

No, it makes sense at some theoretical level. This sort of all or nothing bet creates the right incentives, but they're working hard, they're fine.

[Katie Greifeld]

What an interesting article that landed on Monday. So I didn't fully appreciate it until Tuesday because Monday was a holiday.

[Matt Levine]

The New York Stock Exchange and or related entities are building a 24ish hour, 7ish day trading idea based on blockchain.

[Katie Greifeld]

Yeah. You know, tokenized stocks and ETFs. You can trade them, you can trade them around the clock.

[Matt Levine]

ETFs.

[Katie Greifeld]

They're building it, that is, they're thinking about it.

[Matt Levine]

It's in the works.

[Katie Greifeld]

Yeah. I feel like we've been talking about the concept of 247 trading for a while.

[Matt Levine]

Yeah. And it has the usual problems. Lighter liquidity, fewer market makers at 2am What I thought was interesting about this story was that it's, and I'd never really closely thought about this, but it's combined with blockchain, blockchain, blockchain, tokenizing stocks. And there is kind of a reason for that, which is that traditionally trade and settlement are separated. And in a world of business hours and sort of serious institutional traders like you do a trade between 9:30 and 4 on a Monday and then a, you know, you get the cash and you deliver the shares sometime on Tuesday. And like, it's all sort of like civilized, but in a world of like catering to retail traders who want to trade 24 7, like settlement is an obstacle there. Like, yeah, it would be weird to do a trade at midnight on Friday and then have three days of like the money hasn't landed in your account yet. Right. It's not like the experience that you're expecting when you're trading 24 7. And so the Bloomberg survey, Katherine Doherty quotes Michael Blaugrand at NYSE saying, we think it aligns with the retail investors emerging desire to be able to trade something at 5:04pm on a Saturday and then use that money to buy something else at 5:05pm on a Saturday. Right. You can't use the money if you just do a trade and then it doesn't settle. You're combining the 247 trading with real time settlement. And the way to do that these days is by tokenizing and talking about the blockchain. It's not the only way to do real time settlement, but it's the way everyone talks about it now.

[Katie Greifeld]

Yeah. And also it's a language that I feel like the people who care about this know the idea. Yeah. Blockchain tokenization.

[Matt Levine]

That's right.

[Katie Greifeld]

We actually spoke to Michael Blagrand on ETF iq, which is a television show in addition to being my newsletter heard of it. And he was talking about like, you know, they're in conversations with a lot of crypto native firms who are really excited about this, but also the largest, some of the largest ETF issuers out there. And it's all about like getting their products in the digital wallets of the next generation investor. So that's who they're going after. And that's a language that they know.

[Matt Levine]

Digital wallets.

[Katie Greifeld]

Yeah.

[Matt Levine]

Language I don't know. As we've already established.

[Katie Greifeld]

So we'll see. I mean they're in talks with the sec. It's not a done deal.

[Matt Levine]

It's a pretty good time to be in talks about blockchaining a tokenized something something.

[Katie Greifeld]

Yeah. So were you saying that you don't think like tokenization is inevitable or 247 trading?

[Matt Levine]

Oh, I don't think that tokenization is an absolute requirement for real time settlement. But it's how it's going to happen, right? Yeah, if it's going to happen.

[Katie Greifeld]

Because I was going to say like 247 trading feels inevitable. Yes, it's coming.

[Matt Levine]

Yeah. Although it's always like 23 and a half, you know.

[Katie Greifeld]

Yeah.

[Matt Levine]

You need like time to reset the computers. Maybe you're done with tokenization.

[Katie Greifeld]

I did like how you framed in your column that I'm trying to imagine another app. Like if I was like a huge fan of an app on my phone and then it stopped working at 4pm on Friday and I couldn't use it all weekend and it would kind of be like, what am I doing?

[Matt Levine]

Like I come from a world where like yes, like you go home at 4 o' clock on Friday, you don't trade stocks for a while. But like that's not like an app native living on your phone.

[Katie Greifeld]

Yeah. You grew up on the Internet and with these apps then that doesn't really make sense.

[Matt Levine]

So trade stocks all the time.

[Katie Greifeld]

It's happening.

[Matt Levine]

The one possibility is you'll have very limited liquidity. And lots of craziness overnight. But another possibility is like, yeah, I feel like everyone just. Just put their traders on two shifts and, you know, like, it's mostly computers anyway. You just need someone on the night shift to supervise the computer and, like, maybe it's all fine. Maybe it's fine.

[Katie Greifeld]

I think it would be really fun to be on the night shift just.

[Matt Levine]

Like the one person with a bank of computers that are, like, trading against retail degens all night long.

[Katie Greifeld]

I picture a cozy, dark room, the warm glow of your computer screen.

[Matt Levine]

Right. You're just like, sipping your tea. Got my flannel lines aren't going down too much.

[Katie Greifeld]

My flannel pajama bottoms on. Yeah, sounds good.

[Matt Levine]

I don't think. You know, I think that job will be like, you're wearing a suit and you're in Tokyo, but, like, it's possible.

[Katie Greifeld]

Yeah, but that's not very romantic.

[Matt Levine]

Well, it depends.

[Katie Greifeld]

Yeah. All right, all right. I feel like we covered a lot of ground.

[Matt Levine]

A lot of ground.

[Katie Greifeld]

Good luck. Good luck in the snow, everyone.

[Matt Levine]

Good luck at the pub.

[Katie Greifeld]

Oh, yeah. Thank you.

[Matt Levine]

Let us know how it goes. And that was the Money Stuff podcast. I'm Matt Levine.

[Katie Greifeld]

And I'm Katie Greifeld.

[Matt Levine]

You can find my work by subscribing to the Money stuff newsletter on bloomberg.com.

[Katie Greifeld]

And you can find me on Bloomberg TV every day on the close between 3 and 5pm Eastern.

[Matt Levine]

We'd love to hear from you. You can send an email to moneypodlumberg.net Ask us a question and we might answer it on the air.

[Katie Greifeld]

You can also subscribe to our show wherever you're listening right now and leave us a review. It helps helps more people find the show.

[Matt Levine]

The Money Stuff podcast is produced by Anna Mazarakis, Moses Andam and Alexis Haut.

[Katie Greifeld]

Our theme music was composed by Blake Maples.

[Matt Levine]

Amy Keen is our executive producer. Thanks for listening to the Money Stuff podcast. We'll be back next week with more stuff.

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