Matt Levine, Columnist

Activist Fights and College Recruiting

Also: private equity fees, Uber, law firms, Charging Bull and unicorns.

April 17, 2017 at 1:11 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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Activism.

A standard move in the activist investor playbook is to buy stock in a struggling company, suggest changes to the company's management and board of directors, and then call up a friendly journalist to try to get her to write articles about how your ideas are good and the company is resisting them for bad reasons of managerial entrenchment and featherbedding. This can be more or less efficient for the activist, and for the rest of the shareholders, but it is never all that efficient for the journalist. If she succeeds in convincing people that the activist is right, the activist gets rich, and if the activist is right, the other shareholders get rich, but there is no likely scenario in which the journalist gets rich.