Episode: Matt Levine: Money Stuff
Pub date: 2018-02-01
LISTEN HERE: ITUNES | OVERCAST
Today’s guest is Matt Levine, a columnist at Bloomberg covering finance, Wall Street and the broader business world. Before blogging, Matt spent four years as an investment banker at Goldman Sachs, structuring and marketing corporate equity derivatives. Before that, he worked as a mergers & acquisitions lawyer and a high school latin teacher. He’s also a graduate of both Harvard and Yale Law School. Matt’s newsletter, Money Stuff is always fresh and I admire Matt’s ability to discuss complex topics in fresh and engaging ways.
In this episode, we talk about Matt's career shift from banking to blogging — from Goldman Sachs, huge and famous, to DealBreaker, teeny and scrappy. Matt shares the ideas that have shaped his worldview and his process for writing. We talk about the books that have influenced him the most, both inside and outside the financial sphere. I particularly enjoyed learning about the Iliad.
“The tech startups are like the great laboratories for these questions now because what has happened weirdly is that the people with the best tech startup ideas have what seems to be enormous leverage over the people with the money.”
Links:Find Matt online:
Mentioned in the show:
- DealBreaker [2:55]
- Bloomberg [3:17]
- Cravath [6:27]
- Gawker [30:17]
- BlackRock [37:52]
- Vanguard [37:55]
- State Street [37:56]
Books mentioned:
- The Iliad [6:08]
- Barbarians at the Gate [8:06]
- The Bramble Bush [18:38]
People mentioned:
- Carl Llewellyn [18:42]
- Bess Levin [30:36]
- Tyler Cowen [30:50] (episode with Tyler)
- Felix Salmon [32:54]
- Matt Yglesias [33:00]
1:00 - Introduction to the episode and a bit of b