Matt Levine
Article
Matt Levine is a recurring person in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 6 times across 6 issues between March 03, 2021 and October 18, 2022. The archive places it in contexts such as “CTRL+F “Blackrock” in this Matt Levine column”; “if you’ve read enough Matt Levine, you know where I’m going with this”; “Matt Levine wrote some good stuff… arguing that although lots of crypto projects are Ponzi schemes”. It most often appears alongside Bloomberg, Twitter, Amazon.
Metadata
- Category: People
- Mention count: 6
- Issue count: 6
- First seen: March 03, 2021
- Last seen: October 18, 2022
Appears In
- Links For March
- Prospectus On Próspera
- Links For December
- 22
- Highlights From The Comments On Billionaire Replaceability
- 22
Related Pages
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- Bloomberg (3 shared issues)
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- Twitter (3 shared issues)
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- Amazon (2 shared issues)
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- COVID (2 shared issues)
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- Elon Musk (2 shared issues)
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- facebook (2 shared issues)
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- FDA (2 shared issues)
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- France (2 shared issues)
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- Garrett Jones (2 shared issues)
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- Haiti (2 shared issues)
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- Honduras (2 shared issues)
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- Israel (2 shared issues)
External Links
Source Context
Recovered passages from the original issue text. When the raw archive preserved outbound links inside the source passage, they are listed directly under the quote.
13: CTRL+F “Blackrock” in this Matt Levine column for a discussion of how we accidentally stumbled into true communism for the good of all. The short version: an investing company called Blackrock owns so much of the economy that it’s in their self-interest to have all companies cooperate for the good of the economy as a whole. While they don’t usually push this too hard, the coronavirus pandemic was a big enough threat that “BlackRock is actually calling drug companies and telling them to cooperate to find a cure without worrying about credit or patents or profits”.
Inline links: in this Matt Levine column
So if you've read enough Matt Levine, you know where I'm going with this: if anything bad ever happens in Próspera, you can probably sue them for securities fraud.
29: Matt Levine wrote some good stuff (which I can’t link directly) arguing that although lots of crypto projects are Ponzi schemes, that might be good for certain applications. The usual problem with social media is that nobody wants to join new things: it’s pointless to be the fifth user of a new social media site that doesn’t have anyone else you want to talk to, and much easier to just stay on Facebook where your friends are. Ponzi schemes have the exact opposite property: you always want to be one of the first few users, and it’s useless getting in on the same one everyone else is. So social media sites that are also sort of Ponzi schemes might align incentives better than either of those things alone, and that’s what a lot of new crypto apps are. More at Dror Poleg: In Praise Of Ponzis.
Inline links: Dror Poleg: In Praise Of Ponzis
Last week, Elon Musk announced he was withdrawing his offer to buy Twitter. His excuse was too many spambots, but nobody takes this seriously and it isn’t legally valid (see Matt Levine for more). Twitter has promised to sue to make the deal go through. What are their chances?
Inline links: Matt Levine
Other times it’s more boringly false. For example, if you get VCs to fund your startup, they pay most of the costs, you either pay yourself a small salary as CEO or don’t, and if your startup fails, they lose their investment, you keep your salary, and you probably go and found another startup or get a good management position somewhere else. Matt Levine has a saying about how losing a billion dollars looks good on your resume, because it means someone trusted you with a billion dollars and you probably learned an important lesson.
3: Avraham Eisenberg is a frequent prediction market player whose insights and stories been featured here several times. He recently achieved every trader’s dream - perpetrating a financial scheme convoluted enough to make it into Matt Levine’s newsletter (he also made $114 million). Unclear at this point whether it was a crime, Karlstack gives more details, including some detective work connecting it to Eisenberg, here’s Eisenberg’s own statement where he says he’ll return some of the money. I’m mentioning this because I’ve talked about using prediction-market-winning as a proxy for other kinds of skill and intelligence, and I guess executing a $114 million crypto heist is a kind of skill/intelligence.