Matt Levine, Columnist

Distressed Divas and Family AIs

Also tax reform, floor traders, AI religion and angels.

September 28, 2017 at 1:30 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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Lynn Tilton.

Lynn Tilton -- the "Diva of Distressed," as her TV show called her -- ran collateralized debt obligations named "Zohar," essentially investment funds that would buy the debt of distressed companies and profit if Tilton could turn those companies around. Tilton's firm, Patriarch Partners LLC, was paid based on how many assets it managed, that is, on the value of the loans in each Zohar CDO. The value of those loans was determined by Tilton, an obvious but often unavoidable conflict of interest.