New Jersey’s American Dream Mall has a 14-story waterslide, two ski lifts, and seven species of live sharks. Nearly all storefronts are leased and about five million people visited last year. But the mall’s lawyers argue that the complex is not actually in operation.
This assertion amused Matt Levine ’00. As a young lawyer, he had helped facilitate the sale of the company building the mall. As a parent, he recently brought his three children to the mall’s water park (“which honestly rules,” he writes). And, as a financial writer, he explained the laughable legal strategy to the 500,000 readers of his newsletter “Money Stuff.”
Levine begins his March 12 missive with a general finance lesson. Companies often do not have enough money to fund their projects. So, they solicit outside financing, promising to pay their investors once the project is running. But companies, he adds, would rather keep their money than repay their creditors. He pens an imaginary conversation between such a company and its investors.
Investor: “hi your project is making money and we want our cut.”
Company: “aaaaaactually, technically speaking, the project is not operating, so you don’t get your money yet.”
Investor: “but…the project is…I mean…you are selling widgets…and making money.”
Company: “we are making widgets, true, but we are not in full commercial operation, and I think if you check the fine print of your contract you will see that we don’t have to pay you until we are in commercial operation, so nyah nyah nyah nyah nyah.”
This is not the kind of language or style you would expect from one of Wall Street’s premier financial bloggers. But every afternoon, Levine’s smooth, conversational prose breaks down the complex workings of America’s financial system for hundreds of thousands of traders, financiers, and techies. Levine’s “Money Stuff” reads like a hurried bar conversation mixed with a caring high school lecture. He follows a familiar rhythm, plucking five-ish financial news headlines and analyzing them through plenty of hypothetical conversations, neologisms, footnotes, and snarky asides. The prose is bouncy—there are no specific jokes, but the whole text reads humorously. Levine assumes that much of his audience knows more about the topics than he does. “I’m never going to be the guy who knows the most details about litigation or finance,” he says. “What I can do is write something that rings true to the specialists and is accurate but that reframes and conceptualizes it in a way where people who do it can be like, ‘I didn’t think about it that way because I’m in the weeds of it.’”
The daily format of “Money Stuff” allows Levine to approach ideas in a low-stakes manner. He can point to interesting subjects without providing one definitive take. And he likes to return to the same topic over time, building on readers’ knowledge, as though they are learning a new language. In 2020, Levine would write a few times a week about crypto. In 2022, it was Elon Musk’s Twitter acquisition. In 2023, it was the collapse of Silicon Valley Bank. Now, it’s private credit. These recurring themes allow him to explore a concept from several angles, drawing on past coverage.
Sometimes, the newsletter does not offer enough space for Levine’s thoughts. Cryptocurrency, among his favorite “Money Stuff” themes, posed a challenge. He describes crypto as “an incredible writing exercise” because it is new enough that he can quickly get readers up to speed but established enough to mimic ancient financial patterns. But, Levine says, “I cannot, every time I write about crypto, start by explaining what a blockchain is.” So, in October 2022, he penned an entire 40,000-word edition of Bloomberg Businessweek called “The Crypto Story,” a crypto starter guide that begins with the simple and crescendos into the complicated.
Though he enjoyed that exercise, Levine prefers his brief missives. Rather than penning an academic paper, Levine can say, “Here’s a fun thing that someone should look into.” Instead of coordinating an intricate trade, he often writes, “This is not financial advice, but…,” encouraging someone else to take the bait.
One could trace Levine’s punchy yet informative writing style to his time at Goldman Sachs, where he sent comical emails to coworkers to explain their derivative trades with companies (risk-limited stock deals). His voice may have further developed while working at a prestigious corporate law firm, where he spent his precious breaks consuming mid-2000s gossip blogs like Gawker, realizing that words themselves could be funny. Or, perhaps, the roots of his writing approach go deeper, back to Long Island’s Syosset High School, where he competed in debate and occasionally wrote jokes for the newspaper.
Back then, Levine says, he “vaguely imagined himself a writer.” But other professions called. He remembers reading Wall Street classics Liar’s Poker and Barbarians at the Gate “at an impressionable age” and growing interested in finance. During his first semester at Harvard, he enrolled in introductory math and literature courses but found the classes too broad. The following semester, he found his academic home in a daily 9 a.m. intensive Greek class, where, he said, “I was learning something and challenging myself” alongside “weird and quirky people I liked.”
Through classics, Levine found what he had sought in math and literature. Beginners’ language courses are almost mathematical, he says, with students memorizing declension tables and verb parsings. Later, command of language allows students to study ancient art. Obliquely, Levine’s classics concentration strengthened his future writing. “One cannot do this job without being interested in language,” he says, “and paying more attention to language than the average financial columnist.”
At Harvard, Levine straddled the worlds of the serious and the silly. He embraced the aesthetic of classics, reading Greek poetry for fun. But he was social, too, informally organizing pickup wiffle ball games and very formally organizing blowout parties dubbed “Tequila Tuesday.”
With a concentration that, he jokes, made him “very unworldly,” he did not fully consider his postgraduate employment. After a year teaching Latin at Wellesley High School, he headed to Yale Law School, which provided a way to experience higher education in a more employable field. (He applied for classics doctoral programs during law school but ultimately declined the offers.)
At first, Levine thought he would become a law professor—perhaps a backdoor way to teach classics. But then he fell in love with contract law: “There’s an intellectual basis to contract law. Contracts are fun,” he explains. Curious about corporations, he applied for mergers and acquisitions jobs, ultimately choosing to spend a summer at Wachtell, Lipton, Rosen and Katz (WLRK) because the firm worked its interns hard. After graduating from Yale in 2004, Levine spent a year clerking for a federal judge in Philadelphia (where he met his future wife, Sarah J. Baumgartel, J.D. ’04, a clerk for another judge in the building). He then returned, as an employee, to WLRK for about two years. But the hours drained him, and, in July 2007, he took a job at Goldman Sachs. (He jokes he is “one of the few people who went to Goldman for the hours.”)
Levine hoped the new job would launch him into a financial career, but his desk was hyper-specific, focused on selling corporate equity derivatives. His team served as a bridge between Goldman’s banking, sales, and trading functions, helping companies issue convertible bonds or buy back stock using structured trades, often in ways that saved on taxes or got favorable accounting treatment. “It was a weird niche that touched on sales and trading and banking and regulatory capital and accounting and tax and all the things that I think about now,” he says.
After four years at Goldman, Levine again felt the strain of long hours. When a colleague pointed out a job listing at the amusing Wall Street blog Dealbreaker, Levine applied, landing an editorial role in May 2011. The hire was low stakes for Dealbreaker but risky for Levine. Bad writers, he notes, were quickly bullied out of the gig by relentless internet commenters. And even if he succeeded, he would be paid far less than before. (Levine saved enough money from his corporate jobs to make the move feasible, at least for a trial run.) His then-girlfriend Baumgartel was skeptical of his jump into journalism, encouraging him to write in the evenings before quitting his day job. But Levine felt he had to go all in.
Dealbreaker, Levine says, turned out to be an “art project” shared by him and then-editor Bess Levin that was geared to financial insiders. His average reader did not need “EBITDA spelled out,” he says (short for earnings before interest, taxes, depreciation, and amortization—a phrase that is “used 200 times a day at a bank”). At Dealbreaker, Levine began to unleash his smooth, comical prose on wonky topics. He highlighted existing news stories, explained the context in plain language, and offered interpretations that both insiders and outsiders found meaningful. He slapped on an amusing title (“Deutsche Bank Did Some Accounting Stuff” or “All Stock Trading Should Be On Exchanges, Say Exchanges”) and included several footnotes, riffing on details too marginal to include in the main text but too interesting to ignore. His writing was not just funny—it was insightful. His explainer on JPMorgan losing $8 billion on a 2012 trade was featured in the Columbia Journalism Review’s annual anthology of the best business writing.
Bloomberg hired Levine two years later. During his first year there, his job was fairly similar to what he did at Dealbreaker. But around February 2015, he decided to send out his blog as a newsletter dubbed (in his classic dry and forthright style) “Money Stuff,” without realizing, he says, how “much that makes the audience yours, as opposed to just being a byline on a column.”
Until launching “Money Stuff,” Levin had changed his professional focus every few years. Through the newsletter, however, he has finally balanced his divergent interests. As a thinker still vested in classics, he distills complex phenomena into simpler explanations—and has developed a strong following. As an inquisitive legal administrator, he hunts down minute details, posing questions few other people would consider. Now, hundreds of thousands of readers open their inbox each afternoon, eager to see what Matt Levine finds interesting today.
