Matt Levine, Columnist

Don’t Tip Your Private Pilot

Also PacWest, Apple Card and Nauru.

July 26, 2023 at 5:30 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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US insider-trading law is kind of weird. The approximate rules (not legal advice!) are:

One more case, maybe. If you are an insider and you tell an outsider the inside information without any personal benefit to you, then, in some very abstract sense, you are not guilty of insider trading. It is possible, however, that there are no examples of this. It is possible that any time you tell anyone anything, you are angling to get some personal benefit for yourself. Why else would you tell them? So: