Matt Levine, Columnist

Investors Gave Snap a Gift

Also insider trading, private wealth and credit portfolio trades.

July 11, 2018 at 3:07 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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Gifts.

What do you get if you buy a share of Snap Inc. stock? A conventional simple answer is that you own a small fraction—roughly 1/1,258,171,112—of the company, but that is obviously imprecise. You can’t walk into their offices and take 1/1,258,171,112 of their pens. You can’t walk into their offices at all, unless they invite you. You don’t seem to “own” the company in any normal sense of that term.