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Memestocks are Spreading
00:50:45
Retail investors flood the oil markets, Bill Ackman bids for UMG, and the quest to uncover Satoshi Nakamoto continues.
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- [00:00]
Felix Salmon
Foreign. And welcome to Sleep Money, your guide to the business and finance news of a week in which we happily avoided thermonuclear annihilation. I am Felix Salmon of Bloomberg. I'm here with Emily Peck of Axios Axios Markets. Please subscribe I'm here with Elizabeth Spires of the New York Times. Elizabeth Spires is going to defend the New York Times what pays her. And I feel like this is that is all coming up later in the show when we talk about Satoshi Nakamoto. We are also going to talk about Bill Ackman, who is a crazy billionaire who wants to merge his non entity of a public company with another public company. It's worth talking about. So we do. But first of all, we need to talk about who are these people trading billions of dollars on oil futures on offshore crypto exchanges? It's kind of wild. We have a Slate plus segment on grocery shopping and whether men are worse at it than women are. It's all coming up on Slate.
- [01:22]
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- [01:54]
Emily Peck
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- [02:49]
Felix Salmon
Emily, let's start with you this week because you wrote a fabulous piece on Axios Markets saying that the meme stock trading frenzy, retail Investors trading in and out of anything that seems to be moving has basically broken out of its playground. That used to be the stock market and now it's has gone global and crypto and across asset classes and especially has become a place for people to trade oil futures like normal individuals to trade oil futures. Which blows my mind on some sort of dubious offshore crypto platform called Hyper Liquid.
- [03:34]
Emily Peck
Yeah, you got it, you got it. The lead of my story, because I'm Gen X, starts with say Anything, the movie from 1989, John Cusack. John Cusack holds up a boombox outside of Ioni Sky's character's window and is like launch a thousand memes. Anyway, that was say Anything. Now people trade anything. And what caught my eye was this platform called hyperliquid where you can trade crypto. Hyper Liquid has these offshoot sites like you can build on their platform. I'm not going to say chain, but chain, blockchain, kind of blah, blah. You can build a platform and there's one offshoot platform called Trade xyz. You can go there and then once there you can trade trade oil futures. It's basically like a crypto product that is matches up with the price of a Brent oil future that normal investors trade. And it's cheaper. And it's become really, really popular since the war broke out.
- [04:31]
Felix Salmon
And it's 24 7.
- [04:32]
Emily Peck
And it's 24 7. The Brent futures that you would typically trade institutionally regulated way are not 24 7.
- [04:40]
Felix Salmon
This is fascinating to me because we have had offshore crypto markets in the past, most famously ftx, which imploded, but was very big and successful while it lasted until it wasn't, I guess. And then we had polymarket, which tried to sort of say, well, let's do offshore crypto, but make it about something other than just crypto. The thing about FDX was really it was confined to trading crypto. And Sam Bankman Fried would talk every so often about how what he really wanted to do was tokenize stocks so that people could trade stocks on ftx. But he never came close to doing that. But now we have this thing called Hyper Liquid and Trade XYZ and all the rest of it. And while polymarket is tiny, it's very small volumes, even on sports, but just minuscule volumes on anything that isn't sports. The volumes that we're seeing on Hyperliquid, specifically on this oil contract are up in the like over a billion dollars per day. So this is a. Like when it says that it's Hyper liquid. It's kind of. Right. And I don't understand who is doing this billion dollars a day of trading.
- [05:48]
Emily Peck
They wouldn't really say. Like everyone says, well, it's not. You're not supposed to do it in the U.S. but like, people in the U.S. are obviously trading on this platform. If you go to x.com, they're talking about it. A lot of Asian investors also are trading on the platform. It's completely unclear to me who these people are. It's a thousand dollars if you want to get in there.
- [06:07]
Elizabeth Spires
Do you think part of this is just that with the rise of meme stocks and people getting accustomed to how polymarket and Kalshi work and crypto trading were just normalizing a certain kind of risk profile?
- [06:18]
Felix Salmon
That's the kind of thing that I was considering and then kind of a little bit rejecting. Right. Because like, if that was the case, then you would see the volume sort of move from meme stocks into something like Polymarket and then from Polymarket into something like hyper Liquid, and you would be able to see a trend where the volumes would slowly move from one asset class across asset classes to other asset classes. That's not what we're seeing here. What we're seeing is a brand new massive volume in this, like, crypto oil contract, which dwarfs the kind of volumes that we saw at polymarket and in fact dwarfs the kind of volumes that we saw at ftx. This is much, much bigger. And I mean, I'm not even entirely sure, but I feel like $1 billion a day. We're kind of approaching or even exceeding most of the kind of volume we saw in meme stocks back in 2021. This is real money. If you remember, we had a whole segment on the sort of $580 million oil futures trade that was suspiciously timed just before a Trump tweet, and that was 580 million. That was huge. And one of the things we were saying is that no one in America really has the ability to place that trade unless they're a massive institution. And now obviously no one's saying that there's one individual on trade xyz, who's trading a billion dollars. But in aggregate, this is really, really significant sums of money. So I'm kind of not convinced that this is just like the WallStreetBets crowd, kind of as a movable feast suddenly alighting upon oil contracts.
- [07:55]
Elizabeth Spires
It could be, though, the kind of people who are buying up these contracts are also people who have done well by speculating on crypto so they already have a higher risk tolerance. They could have already made money just speculating on crypto itself and as a result makes them have a higher tolerance for assets that they may not understand.
- [08:16]
Felix Salmon
That's definitely true. Well, we don't know who these people are, we don't know where they made their money. But we do know that the amount of risk in this market is enormous. Right. This is a derivatives market. It's oil futures, oil. All derivatives markets have one thing in common, which is that there's zero sum. So for every winner, there's a loser. It's not like the stock market where you can go in and expect that everyone makes money. Right. This is a pure gambling betting game. And either you're doing genuine hedging, you're an airline or someone like that who uses a lot of gas and so you want to hedge your exposure, or you're just speculating. And I think it's pretty clear that the overwhelming majority of the volume on this particular market is speculation. And that's just. Yeah, that's gambling. It's risk. And for any normal human being, it is fair to assume that your counterparty, the person that you're trading with, who's taking the opposite side of your bet, is probably faster and smarter than you are. And so for most people, it would be insane to play in this pool because you expect to lose on every single trade, and yet there seems to be no shortage of people doing it.
- [09:23]
Emily Peck
Maybe you can help me understand this even better. So on the trade xyz, where the oil futures trade isn't like it is on the regular futures market, they don't ask you for to put up more margin. If you're on the losing side of the trade and you put up a thousand dollars or something, you just lose all your money. They don't ask you for more money. You get stopped out. Yes. There's no, like borrowing to keep going kind of a situation.
- [09:47]
Felix Salmon
Right. So the way that regulated exchanges work is you're always technically dealing with a central exchange counterparty. And that exchange counterparty cares a lot about your own counterparty risk and will audit you and make sure you have lots of money to be able to cough up if you lose and all of this kind of stuff. But yeah, in crypto it's all anonymous, that you can't kyc anyone or anything
- [10:09]
Emily Peck
that's like part of the appeal. So you don't know your customer.
- [10:12]
Felix Salmon
So you have to set it up in such a way that people can get stopped out at the point at which they lose all of their money and they can't lose more than they originally put in. And Sam Bankman Fried tried to set this up at FTX as well and famously kind of failed. And people did lose more than they put up. But generally, especially if you have a very liquid market, if something is moving against you, you can stop those people out before it just gaps out away from them. I don't know how it works. I haven't looked at this in any detail. It's a really tough problem because especially in a volatile market like oil is right now, the prices can just gap. Right. And so let's say that you sell oil at $100 a barrel and then you would lose all of your money if it reached $110 a barrel. But then suddenly there's a tweet goes out and it's 120 and you don't have time to sell at 110. Then you at that point basically have a negative amount of money. So I don't quite understand how the stop loss mechanisms work. But you know, people seem to be trusting it and people seem to be doing a lot of trading here.
- [11:18]
Emily Peck
So everything on the platform trades at a 20 times leverage. So if you bet a thousand and you're right, you can get $20,000 and the trades roll over every eight hours. The future contracts roll over every eight hours. And every time that happens, you get charged a fee on the 20 times leverage number.
- [11:37]
Felix Salmon
It's. Yeah, I mean, to Elizabeth's point, this is just pure gambling.
- [11:41]
Emily Peck
It's just, it sounds crazy to me that you get charged a fee on the leverage. Like, I don't understand.
- [11:46]
Felix Salmon
That's rational. Right. Like Anyone who's offering 20 times leverage is providing a valuable service that people
- [11:52]
Emily Peck
are going to pay for. Right, right. It's basically lending you money in a way.
- [11:56]
Felix Salmon
Yeah. They're lending you money.
- [11:57]
Emily Peck
You're paying a fee for the leverage.
- [11:59]
Felix Salmon
Right. And maybe that's it. Maybe that fee is so large that it can cover the losses on people who end up losing more than they.
- [12:07]
Emily Peck
I think so. Because if you keep rolling over your bet, that's so much money percent every eight hours.
- [12:14]
Felix Salmon
It's wild. And this is. And the point we have to say here is that there is investment where you buy something and hold it for years or decades and it goes up over time and you make money. And that is, that does exist in the crypto world. Right. The original bitcoin hodlers are just like, I'm going to hold bitcoin forever and I'm never going to sell. And you see that in crypto there are trades where you're like, this is trading here and then over the next few days or weeks or months, I think it's going to go there. And then when it gets to that target price, I'm going to sell and I'm going to make money. And then there's intraday noise trading, right, which is like high frequency trading. And if you look at what happens to prices of any kind of financial security or derivative on the sort of second to second basis, it's almost purely random. It's indistinguishable from a random number generator, like what happens on a super, super short time. And so you're basically betting on a random number. If you're doing something within that kind of eight hour period on something that is incredibly volatile, you are betting on a random number going up or down. And the fact that people are doing so much betting on this particular random number just is wild to me. Because there are people who can make money from this, right? The people who make money from this are market makers like Citadel or Jane street or whatever who are constantly making a two way market. They'll buy at this price and sell at that price and they have a bit off a spread and they actually wind up taking very little risk because they are always basically net flat in terms of their position. They're not taking a positional risk, they're just selling for $0.01 more than they were buying for a million times a second. And that's a liquidity provision service that they do. And you can make a lot of money by doing that. But the dumb schmucks who are on the other side of those trades who are like, I'm going to bet that it goes up or I'm going to bet that it goes down. Those people always lose money.
- [14:14]
Elizabeth Spires
Well, I think there's a better example of the dumb schmucks who are doing this right now. There's a tanker shipping ETF called Breakwave that's up 1300% over the last year and it's a very small. They're doing 25 million in volume. So that sounds like more than it is, but it's such a niche thing to kind of trade on. Like you really have to understand the market and the industry because there are so many different factors that play into how tanker shipping works. And I think a lot of the people who are rushing into that are really just using it as a proxy for oil without understanding anything that they're betting on.
- [14:49]
Felix Salmon
Although I think if you read that Bloomberg piece, we covered it in kind of interesting detail. The one of the interesting things about that piece is there isn't a lot of volume in that ETF. There is a lot of volume in various oil ETFs. That tanker shipping ETF has gone up a lot in price because the cost of sending a tanker through the. It's based on like the cost of sending a tanker from through the Strait of Hormuz to China. That cost has gone through the roof. And so the price of the ETF has gone up 10x or 100x or something crazy. But it's interesting to me that that which is a very low capitalization ETF is low cap, low volume, high price is exactly like how markets should work. Something goes up in price because that's the, that's how much it's worth now. But you don't see a lot of speculation on it precisely because there isn't any liquidity and it is dumb to bet on it. And so people don't.
- [15:44]
Emily Peck
Well yeah, the time has passed to buy the ETF. Like the time to do that was like February 27th or whatever.
- [15:50]
Felix Salmon
It's weird but like some dumb little ETF ETF on the stock market is that is exhibiting rational behavior of people avoiding it because you can't make money on it right now. Whereas it's the hyper liquid oil futures that are displaying this relatively irrational behavior of people making bets on where oil is going to be trading in the next eight hours, which is like no one can know that.
- [16:13]
Emily Peck
Well, we discussed it last week. But you could guess based on what, you know, the President's about to post or something, right?
- [16:21]
Felix Salmon
Maybe. I mean, yeah, maybe that entire billion dollars a day is people who work in the White House. I feel like Polymarket walked so that hyperliquid could run. Like Polymarket and FTX kind of showed this sort of proof of concept of we are going to nod, wink wink, have an offshore thing that Americans aren't allowed to use and then a bunch of Americans use them and no one gets dinged for it. And so now if you're an American going well I didn't get dinged for using FTX by law enforcement and I didn't get dinged for using Polymarket by law enforcement when it was technically illegal to do both. Now I'm just going to play around, oh, I didn't get dinged using Binance or Tether, all of which is technically illegal in the United States then. Now I'm going to try doing this other thing called Hyper Liquid, which that's now real money for the first time. And it's not just real money. It's like it's real assets. It's not just crypto bollocks. But yeah, to Elizabeth's point, if you're used to trading Sam coins and random bits of crypto that make no sense and they're here today and gone tomorrow, oil seems almost normal and safe in comparison.
- [17:32]
Emily Peck
We should say. Hyperliquid was founded by a guy who graduated from Harvard and he's talked about in an interview with Fortune about how he can do better than FTX and his company only has 11 employees, which is kind of crazy. They make so much money with so few people. Oh, and they also have a coin called Hype that is popular.
- [17:49]
Felix Salmon
Is there a poly market bet on whether he winds up going to jail at some point?
- [17:55]
Emily Peck
Oh, I don't know. Interesting question.
- [17:57]
Elizabeth Spires
Was he on the Forbe 30 under 30 list?
- [17:59]
Felix Salmon
Exactly.
- [18:00]
Emily Peck
I hope not, bro. Would be cursed then yeah.
- [18:15]
Felix Salmon
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- [21:35]
Felix Salmon
but Talking about wunderkind billionaires, can we talk about Bill Ackman?
- [21:40]
Elizabeth Spires
If we must.
- [21:41]
Felix Salmon
He's not really a wunderkind anymore. I think he still likes to think of himself as like some wild young bugs. But he has one of the weirdest things I have seen in financial markets in a very long time, and I just wanted to talk about it, which is he has this spac. We should just rewind a little bit and remind ourselves what a SPAC is. Right? A SPAC is a way of taking a company public. So what you do is you raise a bunch of cash from investors. You then list yourself on the stock market as a SPAC called like Felix Corp. Or something that Felix Corp. Is just a box that holds a bunch of cash in it. And then you find a private company and you buy the private company using your cash and you issue a whole bunch of stock to that private company and then you change your ticker symbol. But like you have that listed company and now that private company is a public company because it has publicly traded shares of what used to be Felix Corp. It's like a sort of backdoor way of doing an ipo. If you're a private company, you don't want to go through all of the whole laborious IPO process. You can just be bought by a SPAC and that takes you public. And SPACs had their moment as well in 2021. And some of them did well and most of them did badly. And we talked about a lot at the time. But then Bill ackman came along and he said, I don't want to do a spac. I want to do a spark. Do not really concern yourself about the difference between a spac and a spark. Except for the spark is just something that doesn't have a lot of money on it. Instead of having, like, large pool of cash that people are allowed to take their money out of if they don't like the deal. It has no cash, but people are allowed to put their money into it if they do like the deal. Whatever. Same difference. In both the case of the spac and the spark, you have this listed vehicle which is looking for something to buy. In the case of the spac, it goes around looking for something to buy. It then identifies the target and it goes, I want to buy that target. And then the investors in the spac have two choices. They can keep their money in the spac and go that, yay. Now we get to buy this great company at this great price. Or they can pull their money out and say, I don't like that target. I want my $10 back. In a spark, you don't really put your money in to begin with. You get some warrants and stuff like that. The spark goes around, looks to identify a target. And then when Bill ackman says, this is the target I want to do, then you can put your money in because you like that target, or you can not put your money in because you don't like that target. So it's just a question of like. Instead of the spac mechanism where people pull their money out if they don't like it. The spark mechanism is people put their money in if they do like it. But the spac or the spark has been around for quite some time before they identify the target.
- [24:31]
Emily Peck
In either case, it's a special purpose acquisition company.
- [24:35]
Felix Salmon
Right.
- [24:35]
Emily Peck
What a spac stands for. What's the r and spark stand for?
- [24:38]
Elizabeth Spires
Rights.
- [24:39]
Felix Salmon
Rights.
- [24:39]
Elizabeth Spires
Acquisition rights.
- [24:40]
Felix Salmon
Because there's like warrants and. Yeah. Anyway, because Bill ackman loves cleverness, they
- [24:45]
Elizabeth Spires
only ask for money from the investors once they've closed a deal to buy a company.
- [24:49]
Felix Salmon
Yeah, exactly. So they identify the target and then they're like, please pay us. And then if you like it, you put your money in. And if you don't like it, you don't put your money in. So all of this makes perfect conceptual sense. It's basically a spac It's a spac with a twist. Whatever. The thing that makes no sense whatsoever is that Bill Ackman's target, after he has gone searching the world high and low to find a private company that he wants to take public, he has managed to find a public company that he wants to take public, which makes no fucking sense at all.
- [25:29]
Elizabeth Spires
Okay, I think it makes sense.
- [25:30]
Emily Peck
Wait, say what the company is.
- [25:32]
Elizabeth Spires
He wants to buy a Universal Music Group, which is one of the big three, aside from Warner and Sony.
- [25:38]
Emily Peck
It's Taylor Swift, Billie Eilish, Bad Bunny.
- [25:42]
Felix Salmon
He wants to buy it for basically a bunch of shares in his Spark, which are worth whatever the stock market thinks they're going to be worth. And he's basically going along to the shareholders of UMG saying, why don't you swap your shares in UMG for shares in my Spark, which will then own umg. And the shareholders of UMG are going, but isn't that the same thing? What's the difference between owning a share of UMG and then owning a share of the Spark that then owns umg? And Bill Ackman says, you don't understand. It's completely different because instead of your shares being listed in Amsterdam, they'll be listed in New York. And they're like, I still don't see the difference. I have a share in the company. Why would the share be worth more if it was listed in New York than if it was listed in Amsterdam? And Bill Ackman basically says, well, because we will have fewer assets. And they're like, what? He's like, yeah, I'm going to sell the stake in Spotify. And they're like, how is that going to make my shares more valuable? He's like, well, you know what it really is, I'll put Mike Ovitz on the board.
- [26:37]
Emily Peck
And they're like, how old is Mike Ovitz?
- [26:39]
Felix Salmon
Exactly. How old is Mike Ovitz? And they're like, you are still not answering the question. But Likeman, why is this going to help us? And he's like, well, look, the shares will just be worth a lot more. They will be worth $60 billion. And they're like, no, they won't.
- [26:54]
Elizabeth Spires
Well, also, if the shareholders can elect to take part of the money in cash, and if a lot of them decide to do that, then the deal is worth far less than Ackman saying it is. But I think that a lot of this just boils down to Bill Ackman's general psychology as an individual. He wanted to take over Universal in 2021. He didn't succeed. And notoriously, he holds grudges. He kind of gets a bee in his bonnet about something and then just doesn't let go of it. And so I think with this, he was just obsessed with the company. But the logic of it just doesn't. If the company already thought or understood that simply moving the listing to the New York stock exchange would return money to shareholders, they could do that themselves. They don't need Bill Ackman to do it.
- [27:41]
Felix Salmon
Yeah, relisting in New York and selling the stake in Spotify. This is just the old corporate activist playbook, which Bill Ackman knows very well. And he's like, I, you know, I have a 4.5% stake in your company, and I want you to do this and do that, and I'll create shareholder value. Except for he's now adding this extra twist of, you need to sell to my Spark. At the same time, that just. It's. It's incomprehensible to me that anyone would take this seriously, yet everyone took it seriously. I think everyone took it seriously for about five minutes. And then everyone looked at the details and said, wait, what? And then they realized that, like, the whole point of a spac or a spark or whatever the fuck you're calling it is to take a private company public. You can't take a public company public. Taking a public company public is the dumbest thing in the world because it's already public.
- [28:34]
Emily Peck
Well, you could buy a public company if you're a public company or merge with a public company if you're a public company. Stuff like that. That's the stuff we. That's the stuff we like.
- [28:45]
Felix Salmon
Fine. If you're a public company with assets and then you merge with another public company with assets, then people can value the combined assets of the two companies. But Bill Ackman's public company, the spark, doesn't have any assets. Like, the assets of the combined company is just the assets of the company that he's buying. There are no other assets.
- [29:04]
Emily Peck
I mean, this. When people use the term financial engineering, I'm often like, what does that mean? And it seems like that's what this. This is. This is. It's just. It's just like a numbers salad word salad of like, we're going to do this or that. And then I read some quote from Pershing Square. That's Ackman's company. Their chief investment officer told some media outlet, we think we can add a lot of value by helping capital allocation and shareholder communications. So that that's. In other words, that's like we can do better marketing.
- [29:35]
Felix Salmon
We're going to do very long posts on X Person.
- [29:38]
Emily Peck
Yeah, I don't think that is a winning argument. And it's like a storied. I mean, this is the third one of the top three music companies in the world, right? Taylor Swift, Bad Bunny, like Billie Eilish, the Beatles. Don't do this. Bill Ackman, like spacs are for, isn't the Donald Trump crypto company started out as a spac. That's what you do with a spac. You do some like, you know, more innovative company, let's say just. You don't just do like the most storied music publisher out there.
- [30:07]
Felix Salmon
And to be clear, the financial engineering, like music companies have historically, like music labels have historically traded often at relatively depressed multiples and valuations, which is always catnip to financiers. And there was this very famous financier named Guy Hands in the UK who decided he was going to buy EMI and did. And that one ended in tears. Like, basically a lot of financiers think they can run music labels, record labels, like, better than the record label people because they look at the record label people and they're like, you just think it's about music. It's not about music. It's about cash flows, God damn it. And I know cash flows. And then they go in there and then they realize it's actually much harder than it looks. I do love the story about Guy Hands trying to get a handle on expenses at emi. And he kept on looking at this massive line item called fruit and flowers. And he's like, why are we spending so much money on fruit and flowers? And it took him like two years before he realized it was code for cocaine.
- [31:19]
Elizabeth Spires
You know, Ackman is quoted somewhere saying he thinks music is as necessary as sleep and food or something. Like, I think he just romanticizes the business and it's kind of like a prestige business for him too.
- [31:31]
Emily Peck
Interesting.
- [31:32]
Elizabeth Spires
You might get to meet all the celebrities and go to all the Taylor Swift concerts.
- [31:35]
Emily Peck
Can he do that now?
- [31:36]
Felix Salmon
I think he probably. He's a billionaire. This is one of the things about being a billionaire. You want to go backstage at the Taylor Swift concert. You probably can. You're Bill.
- [31:44]
Emily Peck
I just.
- [31:45]
Elizabeth Spires
I love the idea that Ackman is saying that he will improve shareholder communications. Given his history of just posting through it every time something bad.
- [31:55]
Emily Peck
I feel like that's what they meant by that. They're going to post through it. Like UMG just isn't on stock enough in any case.
- [32:02]
Felix Salmon
Like the French billionaire guy who owns Vivendi is the biggest shareholder in UMG and he would need to get on board with this. And Bill Ackman was like, yeah, I gave him a heads up like 24 hours before I announced this and obviously I need him to be on board. And I and it's just like, no, this guy did not become a billionaire by just taking a phone call from Bill Ackman and going, oh yeah Bill, that makes perfect sense.
- [32:34]
Emily Peck
So we don't think this is going to wind up happening.
- [32:37]
Felix Salmon
I feel like he tried it once in the past, it failed and now it's going to fail again. And the future resembles the past and the lessons of the past is it's going to fail. Slate Money is sponsored this week by Samsara. If a driver in your fleet got in an accident tomorrow, could you prove what actually happened? Without footage it's much harder. So your insurance rates spike and you're stuck paying for it. That's why so many fleets choose Samsara's AI powered dash cams, clear video evidence, real time alerts and coaching tools that help prevent accidents before they happen. Samsara is more than just a dashcam. It's a complete connected operations platform with GPS tracking, asset visibility, maintenance insights, safety analytics, compliance tools all in one place. So protect your drivers, cut costs and operate smarter with Samsara. Samsara AI helps reduce crash rates by nearly 75%. If you look at what happened in the city and county of Denver, they saw a 50% reduction in false claims against them and a 94% reduction in safety events overall. 94% reduction? Or look at what happened with DHL. With their focus on safety and more effective coaching, they lowered driver turnover by 50%. Samsara is rated number one by G2 for fleet management, asset tracking, fleet maintenance and more. And I just like the idea that when very large and dangerous heavy vehicles are being driven around the roads of my neighborhood and my country, that these are being driven in the safest possible way. That helps me sleep at night and makes me more comfortable that when people drive to me they won't get into an accident. In any case, you don't wait for the next accident to take action. Head to samsara.com sleep money to request a free demo and see how Samsara brings visibility and safety to your operations. That's samsara.com slatemoney samsara operate smarter
- [34:52]
HomeServe Advertiser
this
- [34:53]
Felix Salmon
episode of Slate Money is sponsored by Drive with Jim Farley, which is a podcast with the CEO of Ford. It has a brand new season, so season four, which is coming out later this month. And for anyone who'd like to get behind the scenes with the CEO of Ford, Jim Farley, this is the best possible podcast for you. Every season he talks to some of his favorite people about what they drive and what drives them, like Sir Chris Hoy, who's not only a British racing driver, but he's also one of the most successful Olympic cyclists of all time. He talked to Jim about his career as an athlete, being knighted and his cancer diagnosis. I checked out a couple of episodes of Drive with Jim Farley, including a very fun one with Matthew McConaughey from a couple of seasons ago. Holds up incredibly well. He's one of life's great raconteurs. You'll almost certainly find something you love across the seasons, that he has a very broad range of guests and you'll find a few that you recognize and probably some that you don't and you would want to hear from anyway. So to listen to Drive with Jim Farley, just search for Drive with Jim Farley in your podcast app. That's Drive with Jim Farley. That is the perfect segue to talk about another thing that we have seen a million times, which is some random media outlet deciding that is going. Deciding that it has worked out who Satoshi Nakamoto is and running an 8 million word piece about like, let me tell you the story of how I deduced the identity of Satoshi Nakamoto. And then they unveil it all in a blaze of publicity. And the guy goes, yeah, no, it's not me. And everyone goes, oh, well, never mind. And goes away. Except for in this case, it's not a random media outlet. It's the New York fucking Times. And it's not a random journalist. It's John fucking Carreyrou, who, you know, brought down Theranos. And these are the two biggest names in financial journalism pretty much. Well, Bloomberg notwithstanding. But yeah, they're big names. And the fact that, like, they even went there is kind of astonishing to me.
- [37:12]
Elizabeth Spires
I found the case convincing and the guy's denial was very kind of odd. He was like, well, you're not really going to know until Satoshi cryptographically proves that it's him. That's a sort of misunderstanding of what the standard is for reporting. He's sort of arguing that the Times has nothing unless they have not literal video evidence, but an equivalent of it. And that's not necessarily the case. And I found Kerryu's case pretty convincing.
- [37:39]
Emily Peck
You did?
- [37:40]
Felix Salmon
I found it completely.
- [37:41]
Emily Peck
What about the part where he. He gets someone to do the equivalent of handwriting analysis where he uses an AI metric.
- [37:48]
Felix Salmon
AI. And then he was like. And then there was one thing that made me work and it didn't work.
- [37:54]
Emily Peck
Stylometric guy was like, inconclusive. And Caryrou was like, well, that's disappointing. Let's do it a different way.
- [38:00]
Elizabeth Spires
Well, but also right there pointed out that Best the cryptographer. And just to back up his case for the idea that this British cryptographer is probably Satoshi is really built around the idea of this body of communication that's public, where he's interacting with satoshi. They have some commonalities. There are commonalities in the ideas that they talk about, the way that they write the specific case that you're talking about. He also, during part of those communications, brought up the idea of stylometric analysis and suggested that if you wanted to cover your tracks with handwriting analysis. And this is way, way back, but Kerry found that in his communications too. So it seems like he might have anticipated that that would be a way to.
- [38:46]
Felix Salmon
Okay, so let's not get in too far into the weeds here. There's a very big picture here, which is, number one, Carrey Roo uncovered absolutely nothing new. Right. Or everything that he's looking at has been public for years. And he tries to make the case that there was some, like, new cache of satoshi emails, but really it's all old news.
- [39:06]
Elizabeth Spires
I think that's true. First of all, he combed through a lot more stuff than at least the previous things that I've read beyond just a cache of emails. It's, you know, a lot of communication with third parties outside of the mailing list that I think has been the crux of what other journalists have looked at. He interviewed people who were part of that crypto punk collective, the cyber cypherpunks,
- [39:29]
Emily Peck
cyber cipher of punks.
- [39:30]
Elizabeth Spires
So it's true that, you know, he's building on the work of other people, but I do think that he had some little scoops in there.
- [39:36]
Felix Salmon
In general, when I've talked to people who've read this story, the closer you are to Bitcoin, the more you've been following this entire saga of who is or who isn't Satoshi Nakamoto, the less convinced you are and conversely, the more convinced you are by, like narratives, the more convinced you are. Carry Roux is a storyteller, and he's written this story, and he's written it in a way to try and make his case as convincing as possible. But there are, as Emily says, a bunch of giveaways here. One of them is that he starts off the story already convinced that this bat guy is his man, right? He's like. He squirmed in a weird way when he was on video. You're like, off a fuck's sake. But one, he starts off already convinced that he knows what the answer is, and then he just goes off on this hunt looking for anything he can find that might reinforce his priors. And this is known in the industry as P hacking, right? You just. All you do is you look for things that support your argument, and then you're the writer of the article, so you get to put in the article all of the random bullshit that may or may not support your argument, and you get to make it as compelling as you can while leaving out all of the stuff that does not support your argument. Although, as Emily noted, like, even then, he did kind of manage to squeeze in a bunch of stuff. Was like, wait, hang on a sec. My favorite bit was when he was like. And then I discovered something that made me sit up in my chair. That, like, Satoshi had said, like, I'm better at coding than I am at writing. And then this other guy, Andy Bakkett, also said, I'm better at coding than I am at alpha. None of this is remotely convincing. This is what Nassim Taleb calls fooled by randomness, right? That when we're faced with a bunch of noise, we as humans just want to put a story to it. And we wind up telling ourselves stories to understand the world. And he's obviously told himself the story to understand the world. And. Yeah, but this has happened so many times with so many other people.
- [41:43]
Elizabeth Spires
There are specific technical issues that came up earlier where there was a period where Satoshi disappears and back becomes much more prominent in this community and in the discussion. And some of the stuff that he was talking about way before Satoshi writes the white paper come up in conversations later. And the timing, it's either he was so close to Satoshi that he is mimicking some of the same ideas and using the same language, or he is the guy. And I disagree with your premise that Kerry, you probably left out all the contradictory evidence. I don't think that most investigative journalists I know would do that, because you don't want to be wrong. If story comes out later that it's somebody else, then Kerry has an egg on his face like I don't think that he's in bad faith trying to make sure.
- [42:34]
Felix Salmon
I'm not saying he's in bad faith, but I am saying that investigative journalists, once they get their jaws on a Kong, they do not let go. And one of the things about investigative journalists is they all of them, without exception, need an incredibly skeptical editor to be like, are you sure about this? Show me the actual evidence.
- [42:55]
Elizabeth Spires
Not my experience at all.
- [42:56]
Felix Salmon
But, Emily, you're with me on this one, right?
- [42:59]
Emily Peck
Yeah. I do think he started with a conclusion in mind, and then he did his best to cherry pick evidence and make things that are random or really just coincidences seem like bigger than they were.
- [43:11]
Elizabeth Spires
I think that's about his storytelling style, though.
- [43:14]
Emily Peck
But he doesn't prove that in any way that the guy is the inventor of bitcoin.
- [43:18]
Elizabeth Spires
He does exactly what a lawyer would do in the absence of video evidence or direct proof, which is that he builds pieces of evidence that point to that conclusion. And I also think I didn't read too much into his notion that he was watching the guy on camera and felt a little twitchy about the way he was behaving.
- [43:36]
Felix Salmon
But that was also what he claims convinced him in the end was when, at the very end, when he confronts the guy in the hotel room and the guy, like, squirms in a different way, he's, oh, he squirmed again. I could tell from his squirm.
- [43:47]
Elizabeth Spires
Well, coincidentally, I just interviewed on Tuesday a woman who specializes. She's a psychologist whose specialty is. She studies psychopaths. And she wrote a book where she talks a little bit about her PhD thesis, which was about hedge fund managers and whether people who have dark traits have higher returns. And turns out they don't, which is reassuring. But she talked about how she spots a liar, and she did criminal work before she started doing stuff in finance. And one of her first examples was she said she was watching a news broadcast about this woman whose daughter had disappeared. And the woman was seemingly upset, and she was giving a public press conference. And then she. But the psychologist said, you know, I knew kind of instantly that she was lying. And I was already working with law enforcement on a similar case. And then she described why. And she said, sometimes she said there are subtleties. She said, part of it is when people are lying, they can control the bottom half of their face, but not the top at the same time. Especially if they're, oh, my God, the
- [44:47]
Felix Salmon
Emily Peck eye roll is just like journalism.
- [44:50]
Elizabeth Spires
Like, you can't that as evidence. He's explaining the Origin of his interest in it.
- [44:56]
Emily Peck
Sure. Okay, that's fine. That's fair enough. But I'm just saying at the end of all these thousand words, he doesn't prove it.
- [45:02]
Elizabeth Spires
If it turns out this guy is satoshi, both of you owe me a hundred dollars. If is that, I'll pay you. Okay, $100.
- [45:09]
Felix Salmon
Brilliant.
- [45:09]
Elizabeth Spires
I have never initiated a bet on this show, so this is exciting.
- [45:12]
Felix Salmon
So wait, when's the expiry of this bet? When do I get my $100?
- [45:16]
Elizabeth Spires
Whenever there's definitive satoshi does the like cryptographic thing or somebody like this guy
- [45:22]
Emily Peck
dies and he writes in his will, he's like, hahaha.
- [45:26]
Felix Salmon
But the slightly bigger, more interesting question that Carrie didn't go into is like, does it matter? And if so, why? And the answer to this question is that there is this general consensus in the bitcoin world that if any, and especially if all of satoshi's bitcoins were to be sold, that would crash the price of bitcoin. To which I'm like, yawn. Anything and nothing can crash the price of bitcoin. Like, you know, wake me up when something interesting happens. Nick Carter, who is another person who some people believe is satoshi, has a long post saying, the really important thing is that in a couple of years, AI and quantum computing technology is going to allow the keys that have locked up that stash of bitcoins to be unlocked, basically. And so you need the owner of those bitcoins to be able to do clever things to them to prevent them from being unlocked by a bad actor with a quantum computer. And I'm again, I'm just like, what? You know, this goes all the way back to when Newsweek claimed that some poor fuck in California named Dorian, Satoshi Nakamoto was Satoshi Nakamoto. Half of the people were like, this is really crazy and important. And the other half of the people were like, but why? The guy disappeared? Because he's like, it's not about me. It doesn't matter who it is. And ever since then, a certain sort of breed of journalist or investigator has been like, oh, it does matter. But they've never really done a good job of explaining why it matters or why it should matter.
- [47:07]
Emily Peck
I've been thinking about this. Why does it matter? I mean, obviously everyone wants to solve the mystery and figure out who the guy is. Just because we're humans and we like a good stuff story and wow, someone invented something out of nothing and now is worth whatever it's worth billions of dollars or more, has Sparked all different kinds of new industries and trading. I mean, it's pretty amazing. You want to know who did it, right? That's one. And two is maybe like someone invented a whole commodity or currency or whatever you want to call it a market. We don't know who it is. It's like really like. It's like God level weird, don't you think?
- [47:37]
Elizabeth Spires
Well, also, this person would be one of the wealthiest people in the world. And I think we do want to keep an eye on people who have that much concentrated wealth.
- [47:46]
Emily Peck
True, too.
- [47:46]
Felix Salmon
It's kind of weird wealth, right? Because as we've sort of discussed, it's wealth that stops being worth nearly as much the minute that you try to actually spend it. It's generally understood in the bitcoin world that a lot of the value of bitcoin is sort of built upon the idea that core satoshi million bitcoins is just sitting there and will never be touched. And if it ever was touched, that would, like, send the entire edifice or a large chunk of the edifice crumbling. And most wealthy people, you know, at least will borrow against their wealth to spend money on stuff. I think actually the number one piece of evidence that this guy is not satoshi is that he is the CEO of a bitcoin treasury company.
- [48:39]
Elizabeth Spires
I don't think that's evidence, which is
- [48:41]
Felix Salmon
like, what does a bitcoin treasury company do is it runs around trying to find a pile of bitcoins, put them in a box, and then list the box on the stock exchange, which is what Michael Saylor has done at strategy and with more or less success, depending on how much bitcoin is worth this week. And it's just the dumbest possible use of bitcoin is to put them in a box and list them on the stock exchange. This just violates every conception of what satoshi. What satoshi was trying to do was create this currency that would be an alternative to classical finance. And what the bitcoin treasury company people do is like, well, let's not do that. Let's just turn it into a stock that trades on the stock market. It so violates the whole sort of gestalt behind that original 2010 paper. Yeah, that just makes no sense to me at all.
- [49:37]
Emily Peck
It is really creepy that we don't know who came up with bitcoin. I think it does absolutely matter. Honestly, I do think about it a lot. Do you not? You don't think it matters? Felix.
- [49:48]
Felix Salmon
I'll just go back to where I started, which is that I have Seen so many different people claim that they have worked out who Satoshi is, and every single time it's a different fucking person. And I'm like, oh, for fuck's sake. Can't we. Like, when are we gonna get bored of this game?
- [50:04]
Emily Peck
Oh, this is what I wanted to say to Felix Salmon is last week we talked, or the week before, who can remember time we talked about Banksy and Felix was like, so jaded, like, ugh, we know who he is, whatever. And this week he's like, we don't know who he is, whatever. So the conclusion I draw is like,
- [50:22]
Elizabeth Spires
no curiosity at all.
- [50:23]
Emily Peck
You don't care about anonymous people. You're like, just be anonymous. I'm fine. Yeah, I don't care.
- [50:29]
Felix Salmon
Yeah, exactly.
- [50:30]
Emily Peck
That's your take.
- [50:31]
Felix Salmon
A name is just like, it's not an identity. Like, you put a name to an anonymous identity and it's just a name. Like, it doesn't. We should have a numbers round. Elizabeth, do you have a number?
- [50:54]
Elizabeth Spires
I do. My number is 500 million. And that's dollars. And that's the annual revenue of a company called Buzzballs. That is the number two prepared cocktail brand in terms of dollar growth in January. And have you seen these? They're like prepared cocktails that are in ball shaped containers. They're about the size of a tennis ball. And you can buy them at grocery stores and liquor stores because the grocery store versions have some form of like agave or orange wine. But anyway, the thing about this is that they look kind of like toys and they're very candy colored. You know, like they're bright blue ones or bright green ones. And so there's been a little bit of a concern that this is sort of overtly marketing to teens and tweens. There's a flavor called Grapes Gone Wild.
- [51:36]
Emily Peck
How do you drink them? This is the dumbest question ever.
- [51:39]
Elizabeth Spires
It's a little tab straw on the top tab. Okay, got it. And of course, this has been the focus of a bunch of TikTok challenges because they're. They're very easily. They're photogenic drinks.
- [51:49]
Emily Peck
Is it like the Tide Pods but not less lethal kind of a thing?
- [51:53]
Elizabeth Spires
Yes. They also have a bigger version that's called a. Well, two bigger versions. The biggest one is called a boulder. So instead of a buzz ball, you have a buzz boulder and it's three liters. And they did a special for a while where they had a basketball you could buy. They called it the big blue B ball. This is definitely not targeting sophisticated drinkers. I feel like this is targeting tiktokers.
- [52:13]
Felix Salmon
I'm in favor of. I'm in favor of anything that can get young people to start drinking alcohol.
- [52:18]
Elizabeth Spires
Man.
- [52:19]
Felix Salmon
I'm very worried about the future of the alcohol industry, and I want. I want it to live. And if this is an entry drug into proper drinking, let's do it. How are we ever going to get them drinking martinis?
- [52:28]
Elizabeth Spires
The youth are not corrupted enough.
- [52:30]
Felix Salmon
Exactly.
- [52:30]
Elizabeth Spires
Felix is on the case.
- [52:31]
Felix Salmon
Emily, what's your number?
- [52:33]
Emily Peck
My number is two dozen. That is the number of Waffle House workers and regulars interviewed by the New York Times as part of the paper's quest to verify whether or not a FEMA official named Greg Phillips did indeed teleport to a Waffle House, as he claimed in Rome, Georgia. The New York Times came to the conclusion that likely he did not. They also interviewed a physics professor to just ask about the practicalities of teleportation. I want to clarify that. I love the New York Times. I'm glad they have the resources to write thousand word investigations that are inconclusive about who invented Bitcoin and that they investigate thoroughly the claims that some guy from the White House, from the Trump administration teleported to a Waffle House. I'm glad, and I'm here for it. And just to clarify, Todd Phillips did say he never used the word teleportation.
- [53:30]
Felix Salmon
Oh, okay.
- [53:31]
Emily Peck
He said the more accurate term would be biblical and that he translated or transported. Okay.
- [53:38]
Felix Salmon
To the Waffle House, like Moses or whatever, or the burning Bush.
- [53:44]
Elizabeth Spires
I think we do need to know if a Trump administration official thinks they teleported to a Waffle House.
- [53:49]
Emily Peck
Yes, we need to know that. Yes.
- [53:51]
Elizabeth Spires
You know, maybe we don't need to ask a physicist whether that's possible. I liked it. I was happy.
- [53:55]
Emily Peck
I'm saying I approve of this. Like, in my ideal world, I would want to report that story, like, and call the physicist up and be like, can you teleport? Is that a thing? And the. He says, no. You have too many atoms in your body and the energy required to move all the atoms. It just can't work. Like, I enjoy that.
- [54:12]
Elizabeth Spires
The headline really made the Internet crazy because it was written this very flat style. It said something like, white House official says that he was teleported to a Waffle House. Experts think this isn't possible.
- [54:23]
Emily Peck
Yeah, but there was a kicker quote. I really liked a regular at the Waffle House. He says, I can say I've been drunk and ended up in a Waffle House. I don't know how I got there. But I was there. Yeah, that's how it works.
- [54:35]
Felix Salmon
That's how it works, people. My number is 5, which is the number of CEOs of G SIBs who found themselves summoned to a meeting with the Fed and the treasury this week. This is Jane Fraser of Citigroup, Ted Pick of Morgan Stanley, Ryan Moynihan of Bank of America, Charlie Schaff of Wells Fargo, and David Solomon of Goldman Sachs. You'll note that Jamie Dimon, JP Morgan was not on the list. He was unable to attend this meeting. He's like, I can't stand that Besant guy.
- [55:09]
Emily Peck
I'm not turning up.
- [55:10]
Elizabeth Spires
But he was teleporting to a Waffle House.
- [55:12]
Felix Salmon
All of the Banky G SIB CEOs were summoned to an emergency meeting by Scott Besant. And the subject of this emergency meeting was. Anthropic has this thing called Mythos, and we should be worried about it. Basically, Anthropic has this tool which it is not releasing publicly for very good reasons, that when you're looking for vulnerabilities on the Internet, there are lots of vulnerabilities on the Internet, but you have to kind of spend a lot of time and mental effort trying to find them. And Anthropic has now built this tool that can just spin up all of these agents and find security vulnerabilities without nearly so much human effort. And so now everyone's worried that there's surely a whole bunch of security vulnerabilities that if this Mythos thing gets out, is going to be exploited and we're all going to get all of our money lost and that kind of stuff. So I think Scott Besson basically just went up to these people and said, the Trump administration doesn't like Anthropic for reasons that we know, but you should probably get yourself Mythos and look for security vulnerabilities in your bank, because it's going to leak, and then otherwise someone else will do it.
- [56:19]
Elizabeth Spires
Anthropic also, they're only releasing the code to 20 companies, and they're all in part of a working group, because I think Anthropic gave them the heads up
- [56:27]
Felix Salmon
about, oh, yeah, yeah, Anthropic is doing this the right way for sure. But that doesn't stop the Trump administration from, like, not inviting Anthropic to this meeting and just inviting the bank CEOs and saying, you should worry.
- [56:38]
Emily Peck
It's great PR for anthropic. Like, what is better than, like, my company invented something that you absolutely have to need because it is so Dangerous, you must protect against it. I'm not saying that they did it for pr, but it's definitely good pr.
- [56:52]
Elizabeth Spires
I feel like Sam Altman would have just said, we made this thing, let's try it out everywhere. And then
- [56:59]
Emily Peck
what could go wrong? Let's find out.
- [57:00]
Felix Salmon
Yeah, Talking about unconvincing 8 million word articles, the Ronan Farrow thing on Sam Altman was exactly the same as the John Carrey thing. It was a bunch of stuff we already knew in service of something which was not in any way groundbreaking.
- [57:15]
Emily Peck
I'll just say for the record, again, I've already defended the New York Times, which probably needs no defending, but I defend also articles that quote, unquote, tell us what we already knew. Because sometimes what we already knew was dispersed through many, many different articles written and never seen by anyone except whoever is the expert in the thing. And they're like, oh, the New York Times discovers thing I knew. And it's like, yeah, but no one read the thing. You knew that you. You know what I mean? Like, you need the big piece.
- [57:41]
Felix Salmon
No, no, it's true that journalists reluctance to report stuff that has been reported by someone else is a problem. Like we should be okay with reporting stuff that's already been reported. But like, you don't need to do that. 10,000 word length.
- [57:54]
Elizabeth Spires
Probably not in the details though. I think part of what happens too is that people think they already understand the story. So it's like, well, I already understand this vibe. So the news story comes out and you don't even notice the new findings because they reinforce what you already thought the vibe was.
- [58:08]
Felix Salmon
Exactly. And insofar as there are new findings, they're buried like 8,000 words in. And at that point you stop reading all the problems with journalism. No wonder we're just tuning it out and watching TikTok instead.
- [58:19]
Emily Peck
Why they hate us.
- [58:20]
Felix Salmon
I think that's it for us this week. Thank you for listening to Slate Money. Thank you for emailing us on slatemoneylate.com thank you to Jasmin Molly for producing. If you were intrigued by Elizabeth's tease of her interview with the author of the book about psychopaths that's coming out on Tuesday on Money Talks. So stay tuned for that and all of the other wonderful content will have next week.
- [58:53]
Emily Peck
Slate Money is brought to you by Charles Schwab. Decisions made in Washington can affect your portfolio every day. But what policy changes should investors be watching? Listen to Washington Wise, an original podcast for investors from Charles Schwab to hear the stories making news in Washington. Right now, Host Mike Townsend, Charles Schwab's managing director for legislative and regulatory affairs, takes a nonpartisan look at the stories that matter most to investors, including policy initiatives for retirement savings, taxes and trade, inflation concerns, the Federal Reserve and how regulatory developments can affect companies, sectors and even the entire market. Mike and his guests offer their perspective on how policy changes could affect what you do with your portfolio. Download the latest episode and follow@schwab.com WashingtonWise or wherever you listen.
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