Matt Levine, Columnist

Unicorns, Sphinxes and Bitcoin for Stocks

Other corns: Quinquagintacorns, sesquicorns, ubercorns.

May 11, 2015 at 12:05 PM UTC

Matt Levine is a Bloomberg Opinion columnist. A former investment banker at Goldman Sachs, he was a mergers and acquisitions lawyer at Wachtell, Lipton, Rosen & Katz; a clerk for the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 3rd Circuit; and an editor of Dealbreaker.

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I don't know if we're in a tech bubble, but I have to say that if we are and it pops, we're all going to be pretty embarrassed that we were walking around talking about "unicorns." I gather that once upon a time the idea of calling a super awesome private company a "unicorn" was that such a company was a rare and beautiful thing that needed to be delicately coaxed out of hiding. Now they're everywhere, and there's been some weird etymological transference where now "uni" means "one" and "corn" means "billion dollar valuation," which is why people talk about "decacorns," just a hideous coinage really, what would you want with a ten-horned horse?