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Katy, you haven't talked about this, but I watched five minutes, five randomly selected minutes of the Golden Globes last weekend. Oh my god, it happened to be the five minutes during which Snoop dogg It gave an award for Best Podcast. So and we won something to aspire to. We did. We were not even whatever like seven tiers below nominated it is. We weren't that either.
Our faces weren't in a box on the screen. It was Amy Poehler was Amy. Yeah, I'm a huge fan. I thought you were going to talk about Timothy Shalmey and Kylie Jenner, but.
I was not. I didn't see those five minutes or.
Their pda IT award shows. I'm into it.
Okay, okay, Hello, and welcome to The Money Stuff Podcast, your weekly podcast where we talked about stuff related to money. I'm Matt Levine, and I write the Money Stuff column for Bloomberg Opinion.
And I'm Katie Greifeld, a reporter for Bloomberg News and an anchor for Bloomberg Television. We actually have a lot to talk about today, some of it all, right, about first, do you want to talk about mister Beest. I guess yes.
This is a cultural phenomenon that I am cleansically familiar with.
I only read really the headline, and I feel like we're doing great.
We're clearly the best podcast.
Mister Beast nabs two hundred million dollar investment from Tom Lee's Bitmine. Mister Beast, if you don't know, we're talking about Jimmy Donaldson, better known as mister Beasts, who is a YouTube phenomenon. I've also not watched him, but he's a billionaire. Yeah, he's got an empire. Yeah yeah, and now he's got two hundred million dollars from.
Bitmin another content creator who's more successful than were. Yeah, you get two und million dollars from bitmine. To me, the interesting thing is the bitmind more than the mister be But go on, well, I mean, mister Beast is a content creation joy you're not.
Also, I should point out it's for a stake in Beast Industries.
Not the man, not the Beast himself.
No, no, he's a little phenomenous. I do wonder a little right at this moment, I had not thought about it variously, but the Beast industry's succession plan looks like because like he is, you know that is that is largely an investment in.
The beast himself Ken Risk Key.
Beast Risk now. But like to me, the interesting thing is like bid Mind, which is a fabulous company. Its name is Bitmine Immersion.
Technologies like a nice bath.
Yes, the reason it was named that is because one year ago it had been for several years a bitcoin mining operation whose differentiating factor was that it immersed its bitcoin mining rigs and a nice bath to keep them cool.
Amazing.
Yeah, I don't know a lot about the physics of this. I assume it's not just it's not just dunking computers and water. There's some more complicated thing going on. But immersion is in the name because they immersed, they bathed their bitcoin matters and cool cool liquid.
That is a really fascinating backstory because now they're better known as being the largest corporate holder of ether.
Yes, in the last year, they pivoted away from being a minor to being a treasury company, and they pit it away from bitcoin to being an etherorem company.
Didn't pivot, the name didn't pivot.
The name didn't get around to that yet. But so now they're like a treasury company with like kind of fourteen billion dollars of mostly ethereum, although also some like dollar cash and some random stuff. And we've talked a lot about crypto treasury companies. Sure it was a great trade to do six months ago, nine months ago, which is roughly when they did it. You could put fourteen billion dollars with theoreum in a pot and trade to twenty eight billion dollars and you make this is great.
Now if you put fourteen billion dollars with Thereum in a pot you trade to like thirteen billion dollars, it's not as good a trade. And so there are a lot of people who run crypto treasury companies who are kind of looking around and being like, what are you going to do with this? And one answer is your
fourteen billion dollars you can go make investments. Right, So one thing that seems to be happening here is they're like, wow, we have a lot of money, and like just putting the next incremental dollar into ethereum is not going to move the needle for us. But like mister Beast is right there.
Yeah, it's pretty funny.
I saw this read Spike alert on my phone, and I think I described it to you in an email, is like, it's very fun twenty twenty six headline mad libs.
Yeah, and for a crypto treasury.
Company, you know, in the opening weeks of twenty twenty six, maybe not a bad diversification play.
Yeah, crypto treasury companies are going to generate a lot of twenty twenty six mad lives because like, it's not as simple and obvious and good a trade as it was, but all these people are raised billions of dollars to do it. And now look, now, what right? And the answer is mister beast or some other weird answer that we're gonna find in the next couple of months.
I do like like this line from the article, and it's written by my very good friend FORLL Donna Hirich, so I don't want to dunk on her. But the move highlights the growing convert between digital finance and the creator economy, as crypto native firms look to align with brands that dominate gen Z and jen Alpha attention. I didn't know that this convergence was happening.
So my take on this is that they have a pot of money, like the thing they were doing. The money doesn't make sense anymore, so they're doing other things with them. They're like an investing firm. But you can have another view, which is more like wait hold Ona wrote, which is that crypto treasury companies would all say, we're not just an investment company. We're not just a pot of money. We are building a new digital asset infrastructure.
And like one aspect of that in a lot of like the presentations that crypto treasury companies made is investor education. We're going to increase adoption of whatever our preferred token is, right, Yeah, And so a lot of that was just like Michael Saylor, like putting up presentations and like you know, himself being an evangelist for bitcoin. But there are other ways to
do that. In one way is you give mister bast two hundred million dollars and maybe in his vast content juggernaut he says, hey, guys, buy ethereum, and maybe the price of the goes up, and maybe that makes the price of your part of the theoreum go up. I don't know.
You forgot Sailor also posting AI generated images of himself in various inspiring poses.
He's great, I mean say he does it, he's great to say he's either great or he does a lot of this sort of thing. But like the people who run the other not micro not strategy, crypto treasury companies, you know, they maybe need some help from, you know, the greatest content creator for his generation. I think they call them.
Yeah, that's the thing.
I don't want to be too glib about mister Beast because Beast Industries it oversees basically the YouTube business, which is YouTube's most watched series.
Creachy be clear, we can't be glit Like we have a podcast and he has a better podcast.
He certainly does, no Amy Polar but like you know, also.
In October, Beast Industries filed a trademark application for mister beasts Financial, which lists services such as a cryptocurrency exchange or a cryptocurrency exchange platform just everywhere. Also consumer lend it. Yeah, so I mean, we joke now, but he's going to run our lives the Jeff Bezos of his time.
Would you borrow money from a Beast?
Someone would? Maybe these Jen Alpha people that we're talking about.
I've never felt more old. This whole conversation, so much younger than I am, you.
Know, I keep telling myself, I'm going to watch a Mister Beast's YouTube video. And I'm always looking for things to watch on YouTube. I mostly just watch US and L clips, and probably for market research or my job, it'd probably at this point be a good idea to watch a Mister Beast video.
Yes, if you come away from thinking, boy, I better buy some ether, then.
I'll text you.
You know who else is a consumer lender who you wouldn't want to borrow money from?
Tell me every banks.
Credit every credit card company. I don't know. My impression is that the average interest rate on credit.
Cards is super high.
Eight tho.
I know someone I know someone who wants to change that. His name is Donald J. Trump.
He's the President of the United States, and he would like to see those rates capped at ten percent.
Do you have anything to say about I.
Mean, it's pretty amazing. This isn't a new topic, right, and it's not.
Like a traditional Republican party talking. It's like more of a you know, Elizabeth Warren introduced legislation sort of plan, like a Bernie Sanders kind of Well.
It's amazing because Bernie Sanders and AOC I think they were advocating for like fifteen percent originally, like back in twenty nineteen ten. Yeah, so President Trump undercut them at their own game, which is pretty amazing.
Make at five ye why not?
The banks, of course are it seems like trying to one up each other on like doomsday predictions of what this would mean. It seems like the consensus is that they would basically offer less credit.
Right Like I and I think a lot of financial columnists have bad intuitions around the credit component of credit cards because like I pay my balance every month, I get rewards. Credit cards are a way to get points and a convenient payment mechanism and not a credit mechanism. The reason they're not a credit mechanism they charge like twenty percent interest and if you want credit, there are other ways to get credit. For some people, that's less true.
And it's a standard form of consumer debt. And my assumption is that the rates are so high because one the default risk is high and two years short of getting adversely selected, right because the people who carry a balance with the people who are not going to be able to.
Pay at off.
But there is like research, you know, Brian Sheer at Vanderbilt has research on this that is kind of possibly underpinning some of these arguments, saying that the credit card industry is so profitable that it could rain and interest rates save billions for Americans and small businesses and still make profits. Right, so there's there's some fat to be cut. Here is something that some economists think, although you will not hear that from.
Banks, No, No, What you will hear from banks is the CFO of JP Morgan, for example, saying that if it were to happen, it would be very bad for consumers, very bad for the economy, and basically that their card operation would be a business that we would have to significantly change. And I've seen, you know, Bloomberg News basically describe the card's business is like the crown jewel of banks.
Well, I mean the crown jewel of banks are used against JP market. It's so good, then it could be less good and still you know, give credit to people. But my intuition is that they are right. And like in particular, if banks had to cut my credit card interest rate to ten percent, that wouldn't affect anyone because
I don't pay interest on my credit card. But if they had to cut like the lowest credit score bars to ten percent, They would probably do a lot less credit provision to those bars, right, and there would be you know, you'd see just the migration to credit cards being a like less available product and for people with higher credit scores.
Yeah, and those people who would be cut out, seems like again the consensus would be that they would go to like payday lenders more who don't exactly offer better rates necessarily.
Yeah, I mean, I don't like the consumer credit right now is interesting, right because there's been a huge rise and buy now pay later, which is often structured as zero interest, fairly sure repayment periods, and loosely speaking, they make their money on like interchanin on like swipe fees, right, and so there would be some of that, right, but that would probrobably you probably get less credit provision that way, right, Like you probably couldn't run up as much of a
balance on your Binea appay.
Later, yeah product.
The other thing that Trump wants is to he's also talked about swipe fees. Yes, you squeeze credit cards from both ends, right, And like, if you're a credit card company and you can charge a lot of money in swipe fees, then like you can make a lower interest rate work in some form for some time, But if you both have to give up your swipe fees and you have to give out your interest, it's like a much worse product.
Yeah.
I am really interested to see what happens over the next couple of days with this, because we're recording this on January fifteenth.
I'll tell it's gonna happen over the next couple of days. Okay, well, no, I shouldn't say it. My genuine instinct is nothing, but like, the things are crazy now, so maybe.
Maybe well specifically I'm referring to January twentieth.
Oh, yes, that's when if you don't stop charging more than ten percent interest, you'll be in violation of the law.
The law, the law?
What law?
That's what I would like to know, And that's what I was going.
To ask, secret law and Donald Trump's had.
Well, apparently a lot of these banks are going to be in violation of it.
It does seem that way.
You know, who won't built, Built?
I love it.
Built is seizing the moment unveiling three new credit cards with interest rates capped at ten percent.
That's not true, right, It's isn't it? A one year promotional rate. Yes, because that's really interesting about this, Like Trump is not like credit cards can only charge ten percent for the rest of time. He's like for the next year until the midterm elections, you have to charge cha percent or less. And you know credit card companies
do that all the time all the time. They offer like zero percent introductory rates, right, Like you can like have some sort of promotional program that charges ten percent or less to attract customers, right and then you know
eventually jacking up to thirty percent. What a great time to have a promotional But these promotional preyers, like you often see people being like zero percent introductory APR for the first six months it built, is like ten percent, no problem, ten percent directory right for one year.
After new purchases.
It's a great like combination of politics and marketing.
Yeah, I'm trying to find all the different asterisks here, but yeah, it is great promotion. And I mean you haven't really seen anyone else, or at least not in like a big splashy way like this sort of take advantage of this moment. It's mostly been pushed back from the bank.
Yeah, because if you if you were a bank with a long standing portfolio like and you're like tenversent the directory rate on our new card. Like it's a little bit like people notice that you're mostly not charging that right. Built I think has some advantages and the like my impression is like they have fairly high credit quality and like like they're the pay your rent with a credit card thing, Like I think they have probably different economics from a regular bank.
Yeah, we were talking about this earlier in person that we've talked about Built on this podcast before, and I.
Believe you and you told me that I forget.
What the specific We've definitely talked about it on this podcast, but yeah, they have a really interesting model.
But yeah, you how worked and you didn't know. I don't frankly know either. But like my impression is that, like you can't normally put your rent on your credit card because like that'll cost your landlord, you know, three percent interchange pee. But Built has negotiated with landlords to make them like Built so much that they can charge renting their credit card.
And now mortgages and no mortgages, pay for your mortgage with your card.
They have enough like moving pieces that like, you know, the twenty percent interest on balances is not the most important part of their business, and they can go around mean like ten percent.
Yeah, there you go, Donald Trump.
Yeah, the countdown's on. As of right now, we're five days away from all those life.
I still think the answer to happen on there's nothing but.
What if they're all arrested, arrested.
Law law, nobody knows.
We'd have an emergency podcast, emergency podcast hiding. Is there anything else to say about this specific topic.
I'm sure there's a lot of things. My impression is that people on financial television and frankly and financial journalism, I've been talking about it pretty months, not for a week, you know what's amazing.
I would have been one of those people, but I spent the first half of this week at the JP Morgan Healthcare conference, so I was watching these headlines fly by, and no, not this year.
At least, that was my understanding. It's too busy dealing with Yeah.
Because sent that truth Social last Friday night. I remember it was at night.
I was on my couch, run your couch, looking at you. No, I wasn't.
I actually I don't have a truth Social account. But everything that he posts then reed spikes on the terminal, so I get it through my app anyway. So it's it's like having a truth social account, I imagine. I don't know what the other posters are up to. I don't know if it's one man platform or what someone let us know.
Regeneration true beast mode speaking of healthcare, Yeah.
Go on, I read this speek about this lovely well terrible insider trading case. These like three brothers are accused of doing all sorts of insider trading. I think they're like, they're like healthcare people. Like I think they worked in healthcare banking, or at least one of them did, and they do a lot of trading in healthcare stocks and allegedly insider trading and market manipulation and healthcare stocks, and
some of the accusations are wild. Like this is the most interesting to me, is like, you know, I love.
Insider trading and like doing it.
So like the main thing they're accused of doing is like just standard stuff.
Right.
They had a friend who they like. The one guy had worked with him and he was a fairly junior banker at Lizard. He's a healthcare banker, and so he had some information about Lazard's healthcare deal flow and he would just tell his buddy allegedly, hey, you know this deal is coming, and the buddy would allegedly trade options and made like forty million dollars right like the ring
of them made forty millions. And in exchange for this, the brother gave the banker gifts, including a Rolex watch, fine help in drafting slides for a PowerPoint presentation that he was preparing as part of his job at Lizard, which is like, really, he's facing up to twenty five years in prison or whatever. I want a PowerPoint.
I want to see the power point. It's probably it can only be so good. I mean that's what you say.
Now, No, like, if you're doing your power point, if your banking job with Bizard, like the floor is high, it has to be good, but the ceiling is low, it can't be that good. And I also give him advice and assistance in his search for a new investment banking position, which did not work out well because it's hard to keep the investment banking job once you're charged with the.
Most valuable piece of advice probably would have been to stop insider trading.
Yes, the one piece of advice he could not provide in the circumstances. But yes, But so that's most of what they did, most of the money that they're used of making. But they also did like other wild stuff, including insider trading on drug trials, right, so, like you have a biotech company, it's like trialing a cancer drug. If the results are good, a stock will go up. If the results are bad, the stock will go down.
And so they allegedly set up fake email addresses for fake doctors and would email the people doing the trial to be like, I have a cancer patient who would like to be part of the trial, and they'd be like okay, and then they'd be like, can you tell me how it's going so that I know whether I should put my cancer patient into the trial.
And they'd allegedly.
Get information that was useful for a hypothetical doctor, but also useful for an investor, right because if it's like a trial is going very well, then you can buy call options on the stock. And so they allegedly did that.
They got some information. Apparently it wasn't like market moving enough, is my impression, because instead of using that information to reaptions, also like made up fake information saying the trial was going really well, and then instead of like putting out a fake press release or just like talking about it on Twitter, they like very subtly created like fake profiles on cancer support sites and like leaked it in a way that didn't seem like they were hyping a stock,
but that made it seem like it was like legitimate medical information. And then they took that and leaked it on Twitter, and like the stock pannel, they didn't make a lot of money on this. This is very convoluted. Yes, like forty million dollars on just straightforwardly being told about mergers, right, so so like that's a better deal. But this was the very sophisticated and interesting form of insider trading that it didn't work as well as the regular form of insider showing.
It seems more evil.
Oh yeah, yeah, Kevin, that we're talking about like breast cancer drug trials.
Right, it's gross, but also like you could imagine the upshot of this being people who run biotech companies and doctors who run drug trials thinking, ohn, know, we have to worry about insider trading by the doctors and patients in this trial and sort of having more safeguards to prevent that in a way that is bad for cancer patients, but that like you know, prevents this sort of insider trading.
Right.
It's like, if you're a cancer patient and you go to a drug trial, like nobody's like, oh, you better sign this piece of paper saying that you want insider trade on and we're going to monitor your training because it's not that important.
Like that is so far.
Right, exactly, it's not far from these guys. Yeah ideas, and so now it's like you've sort of made the whole drug trial process a little bit worse for everyone.
I was going to say that, Unfortunately, it feels like drug trials, especially for small publicly listed biotech stocks, or like sort of the perfect place for this sort of thing.
Yeah, and there's.
Tons of insider trading on them or like cases, but they're never patients. They're like a consulting doctor is leaking to a hedge finanale.
You know.
There's a long history of people worrying about insider trading and drug trials, but for the patients, that's kind of a new though.
Yeah, the fake patients, fake patients, the patients themselves.
They wrote about this, and I was like, hypothetically, if you were a patient and you took the drug and it worked really well in your case, and then you bought call options on that. Would that be insider trading? And the answer sort of depends on what you've signed. I think legal advice, but also like no one's going to come after you, like come on, but yeah, these guys kind of run it for a well.
In the setup, you did ask the popular question that you know, say you were on a Boeing plane that.
Was going down and it's like a big Reddit. What was the answer?
Yeah, so this is like a class. This is like a Reddit thing that people send me a lot when it was first posted and then periodically send me every month since. But there was a Boeing plane where like the door popped off in midair and it was pretty hairing for the people on the plane, and someone posted on Reddit if I were on that plane, could I have bought put options on Boeing? Would that be insider trading?
And my answer is not legal advice is no, that's fine, Like that's you know, it's like you're using your product right, Like it's like if you have an iPhone and like, yeah, you don't think it works very well. You can sell Apple stock and if you think it works great, you can buy Apple stock like this normal people interact with the stock market is like you experience the company's products or services and then you trade on it.
I guess if like you're on that plane and you've called all your loved ones everyone you would want to talk to, and you have some extra time, that it's not unreasonable that you would think to buy puts.
I feel like the framing of the question and Reddit suggests that, like you don't have that many loved ones, like kind of a DJA. But yeah, sure, sure, sure, sure.
Yeah, I just I like to make everything personal, right, I would.
Not I think have the presence of mind to buy puts on Boeing is the planet is like the plane lands maybe, but anyway, plant is I think it's fine. I think it's fine, but it's something like this. And that was the Money Stuff Podcast.
I'm Matt Levine and I'm Katie Greifeld.
You can find my work by subscribing to the Money Stuff Letter.
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The Money Stuff Podcast is produced by Anamazarakis, Moses Onam and Alexis HoTT Our.
Theme music was composed by Blake Maples.
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