Matt Levine, Columnist

Spotify May Replace Its Shareholders Quickly

Also jokes, pre-Revolutionary Chinese bonds, mortgage settlements, salad blockchain, Bitcoin inflation and dog bedrooms.

April 2, 2018 at 2:23 PM UTC

By Matt Levine

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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Happy Spotify Week!

My weird worry about Spotify Technology SA's not-exactly-an-initial-public-offering, which is scheduled to occur tomorrow, was that no one would sell. In a normal IPO, the pre-IPO shareholders -- founders, employees, venture capitalists -- typically agree to sell a pre-set, pre-disclosed number of shares in the IPO itself. But any shares that they don't sell right then are normally locked up for three to six months; they can only sell them after the company has been trading for a while and issued a quarterly report and generally settled into being a public company. Given that restriction, it makes sense for investors to take some risk off the table by selling at least a portion of their stock in the IPO.