Matt Levine, Columnist

Memecoin Pumps Are Just for Fun

CBS procedurals, Josh Allen MVP coin, SEC Crypto Task Force, RIP CFPB, volatility and some Treasuries don’t count.

February 10, 2025 at 7:00 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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Programming note? Several readers alerted me to the fact that last Thursday night’s episode of Elsbeth, on CBS, was about (spoiler) a hedge fund manager who kills his identical twin brother out of sibling jealousy and also possibly to manipulate the price of cobalt. It featured this dialogue:

As a fan of The Mentalist (that guy was in Margin Call!), it has long been my dream to be immortalized in a quirky CBS police procedural, so this was very cool. I must say, though, that obviously murdering your twin brother to manipulate the price of cobalt is not securities fraud? Cobalt is not a security! It’s a commodity. Maybe it’s commodities fraud. Not legal advice; also, it is murder.