Visionary Kibbitzer: TSLA, X, KKR

Summary

Money Stuff: The Podcast

Episode: Visionary Kibbitzer: TSLA, X, KKR
Release Date: May 2, 2025
Hosts: Matt Levine (Bloomberg Opinion) and Katie Greifeld (Bloomberg News)

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Introduction

In this episode of Money Stuff: The Podcast, Matt Levine and Katie Greifeld delve into the intricate dynamics surrounding Elon Musk’s role at Tesla, the financial ramifications of Musk’s acquisition of Twitter (now rebranded as X), and the evolving landscape of private credit markets with insights into recent collaborations between major financial firms like Capital Group and KKR.

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Elon Musk and Tesla's Leadership Dynamics ([01:38] - [11:01])

Discussion Points:

• Elon Musk’s Impact on Tesla: Matt and Katie explore whether Tesla still needs Elon Musk as its CEO. They distinguish between Tesla as a car company and Tesla as a multi-billion dollar stock, noting that Musk's influence significantly affects the company's valuation.

• Board’s Consideration of New CEO: The Wall Street Journal reported that some board members questioned Musk’s focus, leading to speculative discussions about finding a new CEO. While Tesla denies actively searching for a replacement, the conversation highlights the tension between Musk’s diverse engagements and his commitment to Tesla.

• Musk’s Titles at Tesla: A humorous yet revealing discussion about Musk’s unconventional titles—“Techno King” and “Master of Coin”—reflects his desire to focus on technological innovations over traditional executive responsibilities.

Notable Quotes:

• Matt Levine ([02:25]): “Does Tesla, the multi-hundred billion dollar stock, benefit from having Elon Musk as CEO? I think the stock would go down if he wasn’t the CEO.”

• Katie Greifeld ([03:22]): “Tesla obviously is not a normal company. And this is a special situation.”

• Matt Levine ([04:19]): “The board would like him to spend more time with Tesla, and the shareholders would like him to spend more time with Tesla... So as a way to put pressure on him to spend more time with Tesla.”

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The Twitter (X) Debt Saga and Private Credit Implications ([12:52] - [20:30])

Discussion Points:

• Elon Musk’s Acquisition of Twitter: The hosts recap Musk's leveraged buyout of Twitter in early 2023, initially viewed as a problematic deal due to the substantial $13 billion debt incurred to finance the purchase. Over time, Musk managed to sell the debt at near-par values, turning what was once seen as a dubious investment into a profitable venture for the underwriting banks.

• Impact on Private Credit Markets: Matt suggests that Musk’s maneuvering with Twitter’s debt may have inadvertently fueled the rise of private credit. As traditional banks grappled with large, non-performing loans from leveraged buyouts like Twitter, private credit firms stepped in to fill the lending gap, experiencing significant growth.

• Emotional Turmoil in Public Markets vs. Private Investments: The conversation contrasts the perceived emotional stability of private markets with the volatility of public markets. While private assets are often touted for their lower visible volatility, Matt argues that this is partly due to less frequent mark-to-market accounting, which can mask underlying fluctuations.

Notable Quotes:

• Matt Levine ([12:58]): “They’ve made an accounting profit on the deal, made an economic profit on the deal, and they also cozied up with Elon Musk and now probably get financing work for Xai, which is a giant company.”

• Katie Greifeld ([15:35]): “It’s like, did Elon Musk invent private credit? Not really, but kind of feels like perhaps he did.”

• Matt Levine ([16:48]): “One selling point of private assets is that they have lower volatility. And if you think about that for a second, it can't really be true.”

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Capital Group and KKR’s Venture into Public-Private Debt Funds ([22:19] - [30:48])

Discussion Points:

• New Public-Private Debt Funds: Matt highlights a significant development where Capital Group and KKR have teamed up to launch mixed public-private debt funds. These funds blend traditional public bonds and loans with direct lending and other private credit elements, aiming to offer diversified investment opportunities to retail investors.

• Industry Trend Towards Retail Inclusion: The hosts discuss how major asset managers like State Street, Carlyle, Blackstone, Vanguard, and Wellington are increasingly collaborating to create investment products that bridge public and private markets. This trend is driven by the need to tap into the vast pool of retail investor capital, especially as traditional public market strategies face challenges like passive indexing and fee competition.

• Challenges and Concerns in Private Credit Funds: Addressing listener concerns about adverse selection—where private credit managers might allocate poorer-quality assets to retail funds—Matt and Katie discuss the safeguards in place, such as regulatory measures and internal governance within investment firms to ensure fair asset distribution.

Notable Quotes:

• Matt Levine ([22:25]): “So there's a story this week about Capital Group and KKR teaming up to launch mixed public-private debt funds... that's like the wave of the near future, I think.”

• Katie Greifeld ([26:15]): “What does that mean? It means you see like medium-sized companies, youngish medium-sized companies would go public and now like companies stay private longer and grow bigger in private markets.”

• Matt Levine ([27:28]): “There's a lot of capital in private markets. It's much less, it's much more convenient to be private than to like have to deal with earnings calls and SEC report and shareholder lawsuits...”

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Concluding Insights and Future Outlook ([30:48] - End)

Discussion Points:

• Future of Investment Solutions: Matt offers a somewhat cynical view on the consolidation of investment solutions, suggesting that major firms like BlackRock and Vanguard may ultimately dominate the market by offering comprehensive, low-fee index funds that make active management less appealing.

• Self-Reinforcing Trends in Private Markets: Katie and Matt agree that the growth of private markets is a self-reinforcing cycle driven by both supply (investment firms seeking new avenues) and demand (retail investors eager to access high-growth private companies).

• Regulatory Vigilance: They touch upon the importance of regulatory oversight to prevent potential abuses in the new mixed public-private investment products, though Matt remains cautiously optimistic that existing measures will suffice for the foreseeable future.

Notable Quotes:

• Matt Levine ([24:37]): “The universal answer is private markets.”

• Katie Greifeld ([27:43]): “There is retail demand for this. It's not just like the issuers like it and the intermediaries, the retail customers...”

• Matt Levine ([26:14]): “It's all self-reinforcing. It's not like just one thing started it.”

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Conclusion

In this episode, Matt Levine and Katie Greifeld provide a comprehensive analysis of Elon Musk’s pivotal role at Tesla and the financial intricacies of his ventures, particularly the leveraged buyout of Twitter. They further explore the transformative shifts in the private credit market, driven by both institutional actions and evolving retail investment products. The discussion underscores the interconnectedness of leadership dynamics, financial maneuvers, and market innovations, painting a vivid picture of the current and future state of the financial landscape.

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Listeners interested in these topics can subscribe to Money Stuff: The Podcast and follow Matt Levine’s Money Stuff column on Bloomberg.com for more in-depth financial analyses and discussions.

Transcript

[Kelly Cavagnaro]

Hi, I'm Kelly Cavagnaro, Managing Director, Head of North America Institutional Distribution at Janice Henderson Investors we believe working together is the way to work better. Like combining your portfolio plans and our in depth strategy. Your valued assets and our valuable insights. Your mission and our vision working in harmony to seek the right investment opportunities. Janice Henderson Investors Investing in a brighter.

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Bloomberg Audio Studios Podcasts Radio News hello.

[Matt Levine]

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.

[Katie Greifeld]

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

[Matt Levine]

Elon Musk.

[Katie Greifeld]

When was the last time we talked about this man?

[Matt Levine]

More than a week ago. Yeah, I think I'm probably lying.

[Katie Greifeld]

It's been a minute. It's been a minute. Let's talk about him. We've talked about the Elon Musk premium before that's been built into the stock of Tesla. I've asked the question, I mean, does Tesla still need Elon Musk? It sounds like the board was, according to the Wall Street Journal, was also asking that question.

[Matt Levine]

There's two very distinct questions which are like does Tesla, the car company, benefit from having Elon Musk as CEO? Then there's the question of does Tesla, the multi hundred billion dollar stock, benefit from having Elon Musk as CEO? I think those questions have very different answers. I think that if you were like, hey, here's this company that's selling cars and, and its CEO is in the business of making the people who buy its Cars hate him. And also not paying any attention to the company because he's doing 10 different other things. You might be like, hey, let's get a new CEO. But then if you look at the stock and you think about what would happen to the stock if Elon Musk wasn't the CEO, I think it would go down.

[Katie Greifeld]

Yeah. It's funny because if we were talking about a normal company with a very distracted CEO, of course you would expect that the board would be engaging firms to help look for a new CEO. Tesla obviously is not a normal company. And this is a special situation.

[Matt Levine]

Right. And I should say that Tesla has denied reports that it's looking for a new CEO. Right. The Wall Street Journal reported that some members of the board had reached out to executive search firms. So you can sort of square that circle by saying, yeah, some board members are curious about the possibility of a new CEO, but there's not a formal process by the board to engage a search firm. Right. It's like somewhere in between, but. Right. Even though it's not a normal company, you would think that the board, when faced with this extremely distracted CEO, would look into a new CEO, even if they don't want a new CEO just to be like, hey, buddy, could you spend a little more time with Tesla? I think that it's very clear that the board would like him to spend more time with Tesla, and the shareholders would like him to spend more time with Tesla, and probably the customers and many voters in the United States would all like him to spend more time with Tesla. So as a way to put pressure on him to spend more time with Tesla. Does this work? Maybe.

[Katie Greifeld]

I mean, we know that investors want him to spend more time with Tesla because after the earnings call in which he said, I'm going to spend more time with Tesla, significantly more time starting in May, the stock popped. So the reaction was clear. But I don't know, you think about the timing of this Wall Street Journal report when they were asking this question and potentially talking with firms about initiating a search. It seems like that happened before that earnings call where Elon Musk said that.

[Matt Levine]

Yeah. I mean, there's been conversations with him about spending more time with Tesla.

[Katie Greifeld]

Yeah.

[Matt Levine]

The other thing is this is not an all or nothing decision. Right. The model is kind of Twitter, where Elon Musk bought Twitter, installed himself as the CEO for a minute, and then eventually, after a flurry of activity, appointed Linda Yaccarina as the CEO. Now, everyone kind of assumed that he was calling the shots at X, even though she was the CEO. But you unload some of the responsibilities onto the CEO who runs the thing day to day, and then you're the visionary. Kibbutzer and I wrote this week, Tesla already has that model where Elon Musk's titles at Tesla, embarrassingly are technically Techno King and CEO. He's the Techno King.

[Katie Greifeld]

Didn't realize that?

[Matt Levine]

Oh yeah, this happened a while ago. This happened in like 2021. And he was named the Techno King and the CFO was named the Master of Coin.

[Katie Greifeld]

Now it's coming back to me.

[Matt Levine]

I know everyone blocks it out because it's really embarrassing, but it's still, you know, you still look at the filings, it says Techno King.

[Katie Greifeld]

Wow.

[Matt Levine]

And so you could split those rules.

[Katie Greifeld]

That's true.

[Matt Levine]

He was once the Chairman of the Board as well as the CEO, as many powerful CEOs are. And then he had to being the Chairman of the board because he got in trouble with the sec. But he's now the Techno King and CEO. So you can split those roles too and leave him as the Techno King. Make someone else the CEO. And I think in that split, the CEO runs the car company and the Techno King is the guy who's like, we're going to build humanoid robots.

[Katie Greifeld]

We're doing the AI stuff.

[Matt Levine]

Doing the AI stuff.

[Katie Greifeld]

Yeah. Another suggestion that I've seen in terms of how the structure could work at Tesla. I forget who exactly suggested this, but someone from the sell side suggested that maybe he could become chairman again and just be chairman.

[Matt Levine]

Yeah. But in the traditional division of public company responsibilities, the chairman who is in charge of the board that has a fiduciary responsibility and oversees management is not quite what he wants. And the CEO who runs the company as a full time job is not quite what he wants. I think Techno King is a good description of what he wants to be, which is he wants to have absolute power, be focused on tech stuff and not have the sort of full time, day to day responsibilities of either a CEO or a chairman.

[Katie Greifeld]

That's true. I will say it kind of reminds me of MicroStrategy to an extent because Michael Saylor founded MicroStrategy. He was the CEO for a long, long time. He stepped down from being CEO and now I believe he's just chairman.

[Matt Levine]

That's a common thing. But I do think that MicroStrategy and Tesla are sort of at opposite ends of business complexity. Mega strategy is in the business of buying bitcoin and putting them in a pot, hear me.

[Katie Greifeld]

Actually have thousands of employees because that's not all they do. I understand it's somewhat similar in that, okay, Tesla is a car company that also has this like AI stuff happening with it. MicroStrategy is nominally a software company. Couldn't tell you more than that. But then they have this whole other thing on top of it, which is just buying bitcoin and Bitcoin. I think that MicroStrategy is known for the thing on top of it, whereas Tesla is still known for primarily being a car company.

[Matt Levine]

Yeah, see that's where I'm not sure like, like I think that a lot of people would say that the thing that Tesla does day to day is a car company. It makes cars and sells cars. But the thing that it is known for is being Elon Musk's company. In particular, the thing that drives its stock market valuation is not the current cash flows from cars, but the future projections of we're going to build humanoid robots and be the world's leading robotics and AI company and be pioneers in self driving cars. And all this stuff that Elon Musk promises. And the Journal story about the board, looking elsewhere also mentioned some texts that Musk sent to someone close to him saying that he no longer wanted to be CEO of Tesla, but he was worried that no one could replace him atop the company and sell the vision that Tesla isn't just an automaker, but the future of robotics and automation as well. I think that's right. If you got a car person in to run it as a car company, it's much harder to sell that vision. The problem is not just that Elon Musk is a good salesman for that vision and if you put someone else in charge, you wouldn't have that good salesmanship. There's also the problem that Elon Musk does a lot of stuff and if someone else is running Tesla, then when he wakes up in the morning and has an idea for robotics stuff, he is more likely to do it somewhere else. Right. He owns like six companies. He can always start more companies. If he wants to do the future of robotics somewhere else, he kind of just can. Leaving him as the CEO of Tesla ties him a little bit more closely to Tesla and makes him more likely to do futuristic stuff within Tesla as opposed to at SpaceX or the boring company or in a new company or XAI or xai. And if there were just like a coup, if the board was like, we're sick of you, you're fired, we're getting a new CEO, that would be really bad for Tesla. You know, he has like a Million things that he's doing, he'd do all of them elsewhere as he sort of threatened to do if he didn't get paid enough from Tesla. Right. Like one aspect of this is like, you know, we've talked a lot about Delaware courts clawing back as compensation, which is certainly still kind of being litigated. And you know, he sort of said, you know, if I had an extra $50 billion of Tesla stock, I'd be more motivated to do stuff within Tesla. But if he gets fired, less motivated.

[Katie Greifeld]

You coined a phrase for this. Was it the Elon attention auction?

[Matt Levine]

Yeah. Right. If you are an investor or a director at one of Elon's companies, the more of his attention you get, the more valuable the company is. Right. You see that particularly with Tesla now, where they get less of his attention and the stock goes down a lot. And partly because they want more of his attention and partly because when he directs his attention elsewhere, it's like bad for pr. But how do you get that attention? The normal way is to give him stuff like a big pay package. But some amount of threatening is also a possibility. I don't know that it's threatening exactly, but you gotta, as a board have some amount of independence and maturity where you can say to the CEO, hey, it would be nice if you showed up to work.

[Katie Greifeld]

Yeah, maybe swipe your badge now and then.

[Kelly Cavagnaro]

Hi, I'm Kelly Cavagnaro, Managing Director, head of North America Institutional Distribution at Janice Henderson Investors. We believe working together is the way to work better. Like combining your portfolio plans and our in depth strategy. Your valued assets and our valuable insights. Your mission and our vision working in harmony to seek the right investment opportunities. Janice Henderson Investors. Investing in a brighter future together.

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[Matt Levine]

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[Katie Greifeld]

See full [e-mail] shall we talk about some debt?

[Matt Levine]

Yeah, let's talk about X.

[Katie Greifeld]

The ex debt X AI finally sold.

[Matt Levine]

Yeah. A lot of people, probably including me in 2023 were like, this is one of the worst leveraged buyouts ever. In early 2023, you look at this and you're like, okay, Elon Musk overpaid for a company. Twitter was not a traditional leveraged buyout company because it didn't have great cash flow. It wasn't like a money spinner. It was a social media company that didn't make a lot of money. And so Elon Musk decided to buy it and they leveraged buyout and he got $13 billion worth of debt, which is a lot of debt for Twitter. And then after he agreed to buy it, everyone agreed, including him, that he was overpaying for it. And he tried to get out of it by saying Twitter was a big fraud. And by the time the deal closed, it looked like a very unpleasant deal to finance. And the banks that financed that couldn't sell or didn't sell the debt, presumably because there's not much market for it. And I don't think they ever marked it down formally, but the equity investors marked down their equity a lot. And there were news stories saying that the banks were getting offers at 50 cents on the dollar. So it looks like they'd lost billions of dollars underwriting the Twitter deal. And three years later, two years later, they've sold all the debt at like, you know, around par. The most recent slog was like 98 cents on the dollar. They got paid big interest payments over that time period because there was expensive debt. So they've made an accounting profit on the deal, made an economic profit on the deal. And they also cozied up with Elon Musk and now probably get financing work for xai, which is a giant company.

[Katie Greifeld]

I love it because if you just held onto this debt and kind of ignored it for three years, you made out fine. But it came with a lot of emotional turmoil.

[Matt Levine]

It's something I think about a lot. The pitch for private markets is you don't have so much emotional turmoil. The individuals who underwrote the X debt, they did a great decision for their banks. They made a lot of money, but some of them got fired in the interim because it looked like a terrible decision The Journal story about them selling the last slug of the X debt says the legacy of the hung debt might have longer term implications. X and other hung loans prompted pay cuts and an exodus of bankers. They also forced some banks to pull back on lending, which gave room for competitors and the booming private credit space to muscle in. So it's like, did Elon Musk invent private credit?

[Katie Greifeld]

Not really, but kind of feels like perhaps he did.

[Matt Levine]

Will the story of private credit be like, yeah, and then Elon Musk hung a debt deal and so everyone had to, you know, all the banks had to stop lending. And so private credit got to get into the game because it's true, like there was a big uptick in private credit because banks did pull back because there's a string of hung loans, and this is the big one.

[Katie Greifeld]

I kind of traced a lot of the boom that we saw in private credit to the collapse of Silicon Valley bank, but maybe the whole time it was just ex debt.

[Matt Levine]

The LBO space, the banks that did LBO lending, you have a small balance sheet for LBO lending and you have to turn it over a lot by selling all your loans. And if you stick $13 billion of loans on your LBO balance sheet, you can't do any more loans. And so you have to let private credit do it all.

[Katie Greifeld]

Yeah, you wrote that perhaps Elon Musk created private credit, and perhaps he did. But when I read that, my initial thought was to think about the psyche, what we're talking about, the private markets, investing in private markets. It's supposed to take out the emotional turmoil. Because I was thinking about the past month in the equity markets and The S&P 500 in April, actually, amazingly, was only down about 7, 8, 10 of a percent, which is nothing. That's the smallest move on a monthly basis that we've seen in a long time. But that came with so much hand wringing. It came with so much volatility that you could watch second to second that you ask someone how they felt at the end of April, they would probably say that was crazy. But that mentality of if you just close your eyes for three years, you made out great on this ex debt. You didn't have to think about it, but obviously it wasn't actually private credit. So those banks probably thought about it a lot.

[Matt Levine]

One selling point of private assets is that they have lower volatility. And if you think about that for a second, it can't really be true. But what is true is that you don't mark them to market as frequently and so you can't know how volatile they are on a sort of theoretical value. And so it is true that because you don't mark them to market as frequently, you don't have to be as emotionally upset about them. And so friend of the Podcliffe Hasnas has written about this that there is an actual value from having private assets because if you're a human who might be prone to panic and sell when things are low, or if you're like an institutional allocator who has some rule where if you have a big drawdown you have to sell or something like that, some of the institutional structures of investing can replicate irrational panic. A reader emailed me about this to the extent that the public markets are dominated by multi strategy hedge funds whose one of their salient features is that if you have a 10% drawdown you're fired. That creates potential bad incentives. Where you have months like this, where you have a 5% drawdown every other day, but nothing happens. You could have selling at the worst times because you are exposed to volatility that you can see, whereas if you own assets that you can't see the volatility of, you can just say it's great. And if the volatility is mostly washed out, then that works out better for you in the long run.

[Katie Greifeld]

I wonder how you quantify human emotion, though.

[Matt Levine]

Intuitively, one way you quantify it is that you think, well, in the long run private assets and public assets should have the same returns arguably. And if 90% of the volatility in public markets washes out, then that was all emotional volatility rather than real volatility.

[Katie Greifeld]

That's true.

[Matt Levine]

That's really not quite right. But yeah, this is the first cut.

[Katie Greifeld]

You could design a factor around that and then somehow launch an ETF.

[Matt Levine]

Let's see, there's also a Bloomberg report that Xai is in talks to raise $20 billion of equity, which would be like the second biggest startup fundraise ever.

[Katie Greifeld]

Second only to OpenAI.

[Matt Levine]

Yeah, one of the uses of proceeds might be to pay down the debt. It's a little unclear how much money Twitter is making. X like the X portion of Xai, the social media company. But it's not like a great business. AI businesses are still pretty speculative, hugely capital intensive businesses. So you don't really want to spend a billion dollars a year on debt service if you're a company like that. And so it looks like they can get rid of the debt by raising $20 billion of equity. Not only did this debt all get sold, but also it might get paid back at par early. And I think that the message is that it's fairly expensive to raise debt for a social media company and incredibly cheap to raise equity for a AI company. Right? Like you can raise billions of dollars of equity at $100 billion valuations if you're a cool AI company. And so like you know, they're correcting the capital structure.

[Kelly Cavagnaro]

Hi, I'm Kelly Cavanaro, Managing Director, Head of North America Institutional Distribution at Janice Henderson Investors we believe working together is the way to work better. Like combining your portfolio plans and our in depth strategy, your valued assets and our valuable insights, your mission and our vision working in harmony to seek the right investment opportunities. Janice Henderson Investors Investing in a brighter.

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[Matt Levine]

Speaking of the appeal of private markets.

[Katie Greifeld]

Go on Capital Group and kkr.

[Matt Levine]

Well, everyone, I mean, right? So there's a story this week about Capital Group and KK are teaming up to launch mixed public private debt funds, which is like a fund that's like 60% public bonds and loans and 40% direct lending and other private credit stuff. So it's a public private credit fund. And Capital is a big mutual fund manager that I believe sells through financial advisors. And so if you have a financial advisor, they might be like, oh, you should put your money in this capital mutual fund. And now the financial advisor can say, oh, you should put your money in this capital KKR public private fund. And yeah, that's like the wave of the near future, I think. Bloomberg reported yesterday that State street and Carlyle are in similar talks, which is.

[Katie Greifeld]

Interesting because State street has this partnership with Apollo as well.

[Matt Levine]

Yeah. But the private managers are kind of, they're providing paper and then these big asset managers are like, yeah, we'll sell lots of that paper. I think I agree that it's a little weird because they are partnerships rather than pure issuers. But yeah, Capital and kkr, State street.

[Katie Greifeld]

And everybody that's just this week you also had Blackstone, Vanguard and Wellington team up in some JV to launch these sort of products.

[Matt Levine]

And the other thing that there is is Morgan Stanley this week and Goldman a couple of weeks ago launched private wealth thingies where it's like their own alts businesses, their own private credit businesses or private equity businesses. I'm going to sell some paper to like they're not like pure retail but like they're you know, high net worth retail ish private wealth clients. And so there's a lot of emphasis everywhere in private credit and private equity managers to sell to individuals. Right. Because like historically this has been a business where they raise money from institutional allocators. And now they're like so big that they need to tap trillions of dollars of individual wealth. And so there's just a lot of talk about putting private credit and private equity into 401 s and target date funds and ETFs and retail financial advisors. And so this is like the big push.

[Katie Greifeld]

So when you and I were discussing what to talk about today, I call this sort of like the evergreen story because we're talking about Capital Group and kkr, this tie up, but it just feels like we're going to see more of these and you talk about that push because they want to open up raised trillions of dollars from retail investors. I mean it just seems that this is like the inevitable march forward. We could talk about this story every single week.

[Matt Levine]

We will. And it's interesting you say march forward. My cynical take on this is that people solve the problem of investing. It's a dispiriting solution, but it's like you buy all the companies and BlackRock or Vanguard will do that for you because so useful service for them to provide. And they will charge you three basis points. Right? You buy all the companies and then you own the market and no one's going to beat the market for you. And getting the market return with low fees is the right way to do it. And there's lots of reasons to object to that. But that's like, it kind of is a first cut, like the solution. And a lot of people believe that for plausible reasons. And so like a lot of people, you know, put their money in index ETFs and if you are Wellington or capital and you're in the business of long only public equity management, you've had a good 50 or 100 year run. But that business is really hard right now. It's really hard to sell an actively managed mutual fund through financial advisors because people are, yeah, just self directed account and buy AN S&P 500 ETF and pay 3 basis points instead of several dozens. You used to pay like 2% for your mutual fund, but those days are longer. And so how do you address that? The universal answer is private markets.

[Katie Greifeld]

Yeah.

[Matt Levine]

And like what does that mean? What it means is like you see like kind of medium sized companies, youngish medium sized companies would go public and now like companies stay private longer and grow bigger in private markets. And, and like why is that? Like there are a lot of good reasons for it.

[Katie Greifeld]

Right?

[Matt Levine]

There's a lot of capital in private markets. It's much less, it's much more convenient to be private than to like have to deal with earnings calls and SEC report and shareholder lawsuits and all that, all the boring stuff like short sell. There's a lot of stuff that companies don't like about being public. But I also do think that like if you're like, yeah, if you're like a big private company and you go talk to like investors or banks and you're like hey, should I go public? They'll be like, no, stay private. And like why? Why? This is like the financial intermediaries make so much more money in private markets than in public markets. In some ways it feels like a step backward in progress. Right? Like in some ways it feels like what's happening here is that public markets are so cheap and efficient for some definition of efficient that it is kind of no fun to be an investor in the public markets. And so all these investment firms are like, how do we get more stuff that isn't just ruthlessly indexed and charges three Basis points. And the answer is more private stuff.

[Katie Greifeld]

Yeah. I'm trying to decide what is the chicken and what is the egg. Because there's two things happening.

[Matt Levine]

It's all self reinforcing. It's not like just one thing started it. But yeah.

[Katie Greifeld]

What do you call it when the snake is eating itself?

[Matt Levine]

Uroboros.

[Katie Greifeld]

Uraro.

[Matt Levine]

Uroboros.

[Katie Greifeld]

Ouroboros.

[Matt Levine]

Ouroboros. Yeah, that sounds good.

[Katie Greifeld]

Well, what I'm trying to say is the snake, the tail, you have, the capital groups and the Wellingtons of the world, they want to tap into retail investors because we've solved the problem of investing and here's a new thing you can do. And then here's the other force is that you have all these cool, interesting companies that are small, that are staying private for longer partly because the funding is there. You mentioned all the annoying things. But there's also, there's ways to access funding. You don't need to go public anymore. And I guess that's the snake.

[Matt Levine]

Oh yeah, absolutely. And also the other thing is there is retail demand for this. It's not just like the issuers like it and the intermediaries, the retail customers. Yeah, I get to own cool private companies. Right. There is this perception based in fact that the highest growing companies are in the private markets.

[Katie Greifeld]

Stripe, SpaceX.

[Matt Levine]

Yeah. And then also on the credit side, as a company, what you're getting in private credit is like a certain amount of flexibility and structuring and a certain amount of certainty and you're paying for that with higher interest rates. And so if you're a retail client and you're like, I can have a bond fund or I can have a private credit fund that pays an extra 150 basis points, why not do the private credit? So there's some reality to the idea that private markets have higher returns and so you should invest in private markets.

[Katie Greifeld]

God. I had something to say and it just floated away. It went private. Yeah, I can't access it.

[Matt Levine]

Did I tell you that at Disney World? I saw.

[Katie Greifeld]

We haven't talked at all about your trip to Disney World. How was it? Oh, I remembered what I wanted to say. Should I say it?

[Matt Levine]

Yeah.

[Katie Greifeld]

A mailbag question we got about adverse selection. This was in relation to private credit ETFs. But the cynical suspicion that the private manager was just going to dump all their not so great stuff into these retail funds.

[Matt Levine]

Yeah. There's always some hierarchy of if you are a private investment manager running a bunch of different things, you'll have a natural inclination to allocate the very best things to your personal account and the next best things to the accounts of the important clients who pay you the highest fees and the worst things to the retail clients who pay you 80 basis points. But there are a lot of things to counteract that tendency, like regulation and the conflicts committees of these firms. And a lot of this stuff is sort of vertical slices of everything. So it's like, I wouldn't. You can't really have this business where you take the best loans and you put them in your private credit fund and you take the worst loans and you stuff them into the public private fund for retail. And also the partnerships guard against that a little bit. Where the straight streets and capitals of the world have incentives to negotiate to get the good loans rather than just the bad loans.

[Katie Greifeld]

Yeah, they're doing due diligence and the.

[Matt Levine]

Like, but I don't know. I mean, if you're like a private credit manager, your job is to make good loans and then you fund them with a sort of undifferentiated pool of like the money that you get from wherever you get it from.

[Katie Greifeld]

Cool. So maybe we shouldn't worry.

[Matt Levine]

It's the highest on my list of worries. Are we going to talk about an SEC enforcement against someone who like, you know, adversely selected their retail fund?

[Katie Greifeld]

Maybe one day, six to 12 months perhaps?

[Matt Levine]

Sort of. We're not going to be talking about it. Not in six to 12. Three and a half years.

[Katie Greifeld]

Three and a half years. You know, when we're on episode, whatever.

[Matt Levine]

Yeah, we're sorry. We're not gonna be talking about it.

[Katie Greifeld]

Sorry.

[Matt Levine]

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 Open Interest between 9 to 11am Eastern.

[Matt Levine]

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

[Katie Greifeld]

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.

[Matt Levine]

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

[Katie Greifeld]

Our theme music was composed by Blake Maples.

[Matt Levine]

Brendan Francis Newnham is our executive producer.

[Katie Greifeld]

And Sage Bauman is Bloomberg's head of podcasts.

[Matt Levine]

Special thanks this week to Dash Bennett. Thanks for listening to the Money Stuff podcast. We'll be back next week with more stuff.

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