Matt Levine

EO

When you started Money Stuff—back in the DealBreaker, early-blog moment—what did you think you were building? Does it resemble that now, or did something else happen?

ML

I didn’t think about it as building anything. I was a lawyer, then an investment banker, then I left to blog at DealBreaker, which still exists, and when I joined Bloomberg in 2013 I was supposed to write posts and do a morning link roundup. Bloomberg View was trying to feel bloggier at the time—this was when “blog” was still a category—and part of my job was writing short paragraphs about links I was reading. Those paragraphs kept getting longer and more opinionated, and eventually it felt obvious they should just be an email. I was reading Rusty Foster’s Today in Tabs and thinking, this is fun, this feels like a direct connection with the audience, I should do something like this. It was not very strategic and I didn’t have a theory about newsletters or creator economies. I just started sending it out every day and kept doing it. Only later did I realize that when something arrives “from Matt Levine” in your inbox at the same time every afternoon, that creates a powerful connection.

EO

If the email turned you from a byline into a sender—from writer into presence—what changed?

ML

What changed wasn’t the subject matter so much as the orientation. Early on I was writing posts; now I’m sustaining a continuous project that people expect to show up every day at roughly the same time. Bloomberg has reporters who investigate fraud and break news; that’s not me. My role is narrower. I try to understand something complicated and explain it clearly from first principles. Because the email arrives “from me,” I feel more directly answerable for the thinking and the voice. It’s not hidden behind a masthead.

EO

You say “lawyer and investment banker” like it’s incidental. What did those jobs actually give you as a writer—not résumé language, but craft?

ML

Inside the bank I worked on fairly complicated derivatives with quants and tax and accounting people where everything was layered and technical. Then we would fly somewhere like Nebraska and sit across from a CFO and explain the trade in three sentences. You learn very quickly how to translate between the bank’s thinking and what smart but non-technical listeners need to know. If you can’t isolate the economic intuition cleanly, the deal doesn’t happen. Inside the office you can speak in jargon; outside you need to tell a more intuitive story. I learned a lot from that experience about how to move between density and clarity. It’s not about simplifying for effect—it’s about telling the simplest true story. Writing the newsletter every day feels like a natural extension of the same habit.

EO

When you write about OpenAI or Elon Musk, those are governance stories, but they’re also cultural events. Do you ever feel tension treating them as structure when everyone else treats them as personality?

ML

I tend to experience the structure first. OpenAI’s governance setup—a nonprofit parent controlling a for-profit subsidiary—almost guarantees internal friction. When the board tried to remove Altman, that friction surfaced very publicly, but I was more interested in how the structure generated problems than in the particular personality clashes. Elon buying Twitter and firing most of the staff was culturally dramatic, but I was more interested in what he was legally allowed to get away with in first forcing the deal through and then trying to get out of it. That doesn’t mean the human stakes aren’t real. I just feel like my skill set is better suited to the structural explanations, and that’s what my readers want from me. Tech executives are much more online than finance executives, which makes everything feel ideological and theatrical, but I tend to take a more dispassionate approach.

EO

Finance receded culturally after 2008, while tech became the dominant language of ambition. How do you understand the difference between Wall Street and Silicon Valley—not just economically, but culturally?

ML

Wall Street has historically been more comfortable with the profit motive. In finance, saying you’re trying to make money is normal and even respectable. In Silicon Valley, saying that can feel insufficient; there’s more language around changing the world or building the future. That difference shapes how companies talk about themselves and how sensitive they are to coverage. Tech founders are often online, reacting in real time, very aware of narrative. Wall Street executives are, broadly speaking, less interested in performing a persona. There’s also a cultural distinction in ambition. A friend of mine once wrote about Bill Gross asking employees, “Do you want money, power, or fame?” I am sort of fond of the people who answer “money”; I think of Samuel Johnson’s line that “There are few ways in which a man can be more innocently employed than in getting money.” A lot of people in finance are mostly after money; in tech, the answer is more often fame or power, and that worries me.

EO

You’ve said socialists read you “to know the enemy.” That’s political whether you intend it to be or not.

ML

If you want to criticize a system, you should understand how it actually works. I’ve heard from people who say, “I’m a socialist and I read your newsletter to understand finance,” and that seems reasonable to me. I tend not to advocate for any particular system; I just like to explain things as clearly as I can. Once something is legible, you can decide what you think about it. I’m also allergic to “here’s why you should care” framing. I only write about things I genuinely find interesting, and after a decade of doing it I am reasonably confident that a lot of readers will find them interesting too. There’s an assumption in media that finance is boring and needs dramatizing, and I think that assumption is wrong. The people who care about it care intensely already, and the people who don’t sometimes get pulled in because they like seeing something complicated made clear.

EO

Your sentences move like early internet writing, but they don’t rely on memes or trend language. There’s rhythm there, but it’s not chasing the moment. Where did that cadence come from?

ML

The first writer of DealBreaker was Elizabeth Spiers, who also started Gawker, so there’s some literal shared DNA there. I read early Gawker obsessively when I was still at Goldman, refreshing it at my desk. That tone—smart, irreverent, mixing analysis with voice—was formative. At first I was absolutely imitating that tone, particularly as practiced by the great DealBreaker writer Bess Levin. I tried to make jokes constantly. I leaned hard into what I thought was “internet style.” Over time a lot of that fell away, and what remained felt more like my own thinking rhythm. People sometimes think I am influenced by David Foster Wallace (mostly the footnotes); if that’s true, it filtered in indirectly through that internet idiom rather than through some conscious literary ambition.

Also, when I think about my literary influences, I love math textbooks—not because I’m good at math, but because they start from extremely simple premises and build inexorably toward terrifying abstractions. That structural ambition—start simple, move carefully, don’t drop the thread—is increasingly what I care about, more than sounding cool on the internet.

EO

Over ten years of writing daily, you’ve moved from explaining transactions to explaining architecture. When did that shift happen?

ML

It just sort of accrued gradually. When you write about transactions every day, you realize you’re repeating the same logic in different costumes. Eventually it becomes more interesting to explain the pattern than the specific deal. I used to start with a news item and then move on to generalize from it; now I tend to start with some general principle and then write “Anyway …” and block-quote a news story.. That shift takes confidence: You have to trust that readers will follow you into first principles without a breaking-news hook. Repetition deepens understanding—you don’t really understand a bank or a derivative until you’ve described it incorrectly a few times and corrected yourself publicly. Someone on the internet once described what I do as “spaced repetition,” and I think that’s basically right. The same themes recur—private markets, incentives, accounting—but each time with a slightly sharper lens.

EO

You’ve stayed inside Bloomberg rather than pivoting to Substack or podcasting. Why?

ML

I like having a job. A lot of media people want to leverage what they’re doing into something else. I don’t feel that pull very strongly. I like the structure of showing up every day and doing the thing I’m good at. I was early to the newsletter format, but I don’t feel a need to reinvent myself just because the market cycles. I don’t particularly want to be a podcaster or a TV host, though I’m enjoying doing a podcast on the side. I like writing. I like sitting down with something confusing and trying to make it clear.

EO

You’ve said you miss Twitter. What did that platform give you that doesn’t exist now?

ML

Twitter used to function as a distributed coments section. I would post a column and see objections and criticisms on Twitter, which often gave me ideas for follow-up and points to address. Now there are multiple platforms and none function as a central arena, so the feedback loop is less visible. I don’t read them as much. But the core process hasn’t changed. I wake up, I read the news, I look for something that feels interesting or slightly strange, and I try to explain it clearly. Sometimes I think something is too nerdy, and those are often the pieces people respond to most. Over time I’ve learned that clarity sustains the work. And tomorrow, at around 2 p.m., I’ll send another one.