Matt Levine, Columnist

Making Crypto Hacking Less Lucrative

Also Elon Musk is overpaying for Twitter, the SEC is busy, and YOLOing options.

October 20, 2022 at 5:50 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.

Provide news feedback or report an error

Site feedback:

Take our Survey

Programming note: Money Stuff will be off tomorrow, back on Monday.

Finance rewards cleverness. Sometimes this is true in a pleasingly positive-sum way; if you can cleverly think up a new way to slice cash flows or allocate risk then you can get rich by increasing economic activity. Often, though, it is true in some straightforwardly zero-sum way: If you have a contract with a counterparty, and you cleverly ferret out a hidden provision in the contract that says that your counterparty has to give you $10 million, then you get $10 million and they lose $10 million.