Matt Levine, Columnist

Enough Freaking Out About the Snap Memo

Leaking to a stock trader could land you in jail. Leaking to a journalist might just get you fired.

January 25, 2018 at 7:00 AM UTC

Corrected

January 25, 2018 at 10:26 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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Recently Snap Inc. sent a somewhat ill-tempered memo to employees telling them not to leak Snap's secrets:

A lot of tech and business reporters -- whose job, after all, is to get corporate employees to leak their companies' secrets -- found this objectionable, and objected. "Snap Threatens Jail Time for Leakers," was Cheddar's headline reporting the memo. "Leaked Snap Memo Says Employees Could Go to Jail If They ... Leak Memos," pointed out Yahoo Finance.