Theories on Trump’s Trading Frenzy

0:05Hello! Welcome to Slate Money, your guide to the business and finance news of the week. I'm Felix Salmon of Bloomberg. I'm here with Emily Peck of Axios.

0:17Felix Salmon: Hello, hello. I'm here with Elizabeth Spiers of New York Times. Hello. We have one important professional piece of news to make this week, which is that Emily Peck has a new co-author on her newsletter. Yeah, that's true. On Axios Markets, please subscribe. I have a new but kind of old co-author called Matt Phillips. He rejoins Axios Markets. He was at Robin Hood's Sherwood website for the past couple of years. And before that, he was at Axios with me and Felix. And now he has returned. So if you subscribe to Axios Markets, you will get stories from both of us. He's going to be like concentrating more on the marketcy marketcy side of things because that's what he does and he does it very well.

1:01So we're going to see whether we're going to get him on the show maybe sometimes.

1:05Felix Salmon: Yeah, that would be amazing. Anything is possible. But this week, we're going to talk about the thing that all those Robin Hood people do, which is trading a lot. I wonder how many Robin Hood people trade 3 ,600 times a quarter. We're going to talk about a very famous person who's traded 3 ,600 times a quarter and what that could possibly mean. We are also going to talk about the whole idea that shopping can be political in a way that you express your political views, pegged to this rumored acquisition of Everlane by Sheehan. We are going to talk about clipping, which is the new advertising. It's the new way that you get people to think that they are developing their tastes organically, you when in fact it's all controlled by shadowy figures we have a slate plus segment on elon musk and the spacex it's all coming up on slate money if you felt stuck trying to lose weight you're not alone enter weight loss by hers it's designed to support you in reaching your goals and hers Now offers access to an affordable range of FDA approved GLP one medications, including the we go V pill and the we go V pen.

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3:03Felix Salmon: Slate Money is brought to you by Charles Schwab. Decisions made in Washington can affect your portfolio every day. But what policy changes should investors be watching? Listen to Washington Wise, an original podcast for investors from Charles Schwab, to hear the stories making news in Washington right now. Host Mike Townsend, Charles Schwab's Managing Director for Legislative and Regulatory Affairs, takes a nonpartisan look at the stories that matter most to investors, including policy initiatives for retirement savings, taxes and trade, inflation concerns, the Federal Reserve, and how regulatory developments can affect companies, sectors, and even the entire market.

3:45Felix Salmon: Mike and his guests offer their perspective on how policy changes could affect what you do with your portfolio. Download the latest episode and follow at schwab.com slash Washington Wise or wherever you listen. I'm going to start off this week with a number, or rather, Emily, you're going to start off this week. with a number because instead of just putting the numbers at the end of the show, this is slate money, God, I mean, we can have numbers at the beginning of the show. How many stock trades did President Trump do in the first quarter of 2026?

4:16Elizabeth Spiers: Me, me, me, me. Oh, Elizabeth. 3 ,600. 3 ,600 trades in one quarter. And there are only five days a week. And there aren't that many weeks in a quarter. That comes to what, 60 trades per day, something like that?

4:31Felix Salmon: Something like that. Okay. Okay, I'm going to ask a very sort of nerdy and technical question here, which is, what the actual fuck? Well, this is what the Trump organization says. They say they have someone doing this. It's not the president. I'm sure it's not the president because the president has never traded stocks in his life. He's not capable. He's not a stock trader. Like, that's not what he does. Even if he was a stock trader, we know he's a little bit busy every day and just doesn't have the time. Like he couldn't do it. It's not obvious that he's going to be able to make his own son's wedding this weekend.

5:09Like if you can't make someone's wedding. Someone who's known to golf.

5:13Elizabeth Spiers: But, you know, Donnie Jr.'s wedding, like schedule's a little busy.

5:17Felix Salmon: He described his son as someone he's known a long time. Which, I mean, say what you want, but that's funny.

5:23Elizabeth Spiers: I'm sure if Donnie Jr. ever went to prison he would take that back he'd be like, I barely know him

5:31Felix Salmon: they can never know someone for real never really know someone so I 100 % believe that it's not Don himself on his Robin Hood account on his phone like in the Lincoln bedroom buying stocks of NVIDIA and then selling them five minutes later because he saw a post on Wall Street Bets like it's not that No, no.

5:53Elizabeth Spiers: But it's something. One group of the trades was 17 companies, 15 of which he had taken the CEOs to China with them. So I'm going to just come out and say, if you are the president and you're meeting with CEOs on a regular basis like Trump is, then statistically speaking, if you trade, if you make 3 ,600 trades in a quarter, then 17 of those trades are going to be people, companies where you've hung out with the CEOs. 3 ,600 trades is, remember the S &P 500 is basically the stock market, and that's 495 stocks. Like, you are trading everything at that point. And so it is very easy to sort of cherry pick an individual trade here or there from the 3 ,600 and say, ooh, that's suspicious timing.

6:39Elizabeth Spiers: Well, I mean— That's not how I think it works, though. Here's my theory. Trump does not know how to keep his mouth shut, And he has repeatedly demonstrated that he will tell a buddy at Mar-a-Lago some state secret that he's supposed to keep Spouse Judd about. So I do find it plausible that whoever's managing his investments he has regular conversations with, and maybe they trade off of that information. I don't think that he's calling them up and saying, these 15 stocks right now.

7:05Felix Salmon: I think maybe, like, there's this one example, you know, the writer Judd Legum? He was sort of the first to be like, this is interesting. And he pointed out some trade timing. For example, I'm looking at Judd's post now. March 25th, Trump buys between$50 ,000 and$100 ,000 of Micron stock. The next day, he calls into Fox News, The Five. And in the interview, he says, I just left the head of Micron. It's one of the hottest companies. And then I believe the stock goes up.

7:35Elizabeth Spiers: President pumping and dumping.

7:36Felix Salmon: Perhaps his trader, I'm just totally speculating. Like if I was writing the novel about this or whatever, Perhaps he talks to the trader, like Elizabeth says, the trader's like, oh, this is what we did today. Or like, this is what the algorithm that trades your account did today or whatever. And he said, we bought some Micron stock today. And Trump's like, Micron stock, got it. And then he can't help himself. He calls in and says, isn't Micron a great company? What do you think of my theory? I am highly skeptical of both of these theories because both of these theories are contingent on the idea that one of the top things that Donald Trump does on a quasi daily basis is talk to some wealth manager, stock trader person.

8:20Felix Salmon: And he talks to people on the phone. I mean, our reporter at Axios, Barack, sometimes will be like, I don't understand this thing that Trump posted. Barack will say, let me call him. Let me just call him. So, okay, go on. Yeah, I mean, look, is it true that people, is it true that reporters, no, a lot of people have Trump's phone number and he does pick up his phone and he does talk to people. He calls people.

8:47Elizabeth Spiers: It's not even just inbound. He calls people and just talks. There are people who have complained that they can't get him off the phone. No, this is true. That's what he does.

8:55Felix Salmon: He's not reading policy papers. Yeah, it's true. It's true. I, without any evidence that one of the people that he's calling is his stock trader, I am not going to believe or assume that one of the people that he's calling is his stock trader. But it is possible. Okay. I'm not saying that what you're saying is impossible. Right. I do think that in terms of the sort of scale of corruption that we've seen in the Trump family, they care about billions. Right. They go off and do like crypto things for billions of dollars. Do they care about buying$50 ,000 of micron stock? And then what? Selling it three days later?

9:34It's such a picayune form of corruption.

9:38Elizabeth Spiers: Trump is not a normal person. This is a normal billionaire. Yes, yes. This would be ridiculous. But we're talking about Donald Trump, whose range of priorities are all out of whack anyway. And he cannot focus on the big picture ever. So, okay. What about this one?

9:55Felix Salmon: One more from Judd. And then I do want to talk about like bigger picture. But February 10th, Trump buys between 1 million and 5 million of Dell Technologies stock. Nine days later, Trump goes to Georgia in a speech says, go out and buy a Dell computer. Company makes phenomenal product. What do you say to that? Just a coincidence again? I'm saying that with 3 ,600 trades, it is not impossible to expect to be able to find examples like that. I guess. Yeah, okay. I mean, sure. Like, if he'd done seven trades and that was one of the trades, then that would be a screaming red flag.

10:33Elizabeth Spiers: I think it can still be a red flag because it means that the wealth manager could be – we're not suggesting that every single trade is based on something that Trump told them. Okay, so, Elizabeth, what is your theory of the case? Let's even assume that like 1 % of these trades, that there are 36 different trades, including Dell and Micron and 34 others that are coming from inside information that Trump has, right? What is your theory of the case for the other 3 ,584 trades? Why is he doing all of those? Well, I think that's part of normal wealth management. I mean, no, it is not. I mean, like, let's be clear about this.

11:13That is absolutely not part of normal wealth management. Emily, you've looked into this, right? There is no wealth manager I have ever come across who would trade that frequently.

11:22Elizabeth Spiers: But it's pretty uncommon. You're assuming this is all in like one master account. It's probably not. It's like spread across different accounts. And all they would have to do is make the same trade in multiple accounts. And it adds up. I don't think that there's a scenario where Trump has one account and it's all he trades out of. Even if he has 10 accounts, which would be insane, but even if he has 10 accounts, that's still 360 trades per account per quarter, which is batshit. There is no way you get to 3 ,600 trades in a single quarter, and it seems remotely normal. Find me a billionaire that trades that often who isn't running fucking Citadel or Jane Street or some high-frequency trading company.

12:04Felix Salmon: Yeah, so that's, I heard on background, I guess, that they have, it's multiple accounts. It's not just one account because the organization is saying there are several. They say there's fully discretionary accounts, plural, so there must be more than one account. The second thing is I've heard a lot of wealthy people prefer to just buy and hold stocks, and they're not trading a lot, partly because you buy and sell in a short timeline. You have to pay taxes, capital gains tax, and rich people try to avoid that by holding. Well, income tax is the point. If you take short-term gains, short-term gains are taxable as income.

12:41Well, if you hold the stock for more than two years and it's taxable as capital gains, And income tax is like 35 % and capital gains tax is 20%.

12:49Felix Salmon: Exactly. So, and we talked, we had a whole slate money talks about the tax thing and like no one sells the stock. They just keep passing the stock along and they borrow against it. And even within that universe of rich people, there are some rich people that will trade like with more, have more sophisticated like venture funds or family offices doing trading for them. So it's not impossible that a rich person would be trading and stuff and not just the doing the buying and holding and borrowing. So that's kind of that's kind of like the context. But the bigger picture is even if it's not Trump doing something shady like insidery trading shady, it's completely unprecedented for the president of the United States to be actively trading in stocks while he's president.

13:41Felix Salmon: Like every other president in modern history has tried very hard to avoid any kind of appearance of a conflict of interest or self-dealing or anything. Like the point is to avoid a conversation like the one we're having where we're like, well, look at this and look at that. And like you can find he said this about Apple and the next day he bought Apple. And like the whole idea is like you avoid all of that by doing what like Obama did. I do like the idea that he's trading 3 ,600 times a quarter just as a troll, just to make us all lose our minds.

14:16Elizabeth Spiers: Well, you know, we're talking about this because of this, you know, I don't even want to call it a settlement because that's not really what it is. But it's the deal that he has cut with DOJ, who is in his corner, that says that he would be immune from investigation or audit from the IRS seemingly indefinitely. and everybody in his family is immune to, which is wild. But it means that if he doesn't want to pay taxes on whatever he's sold and bought, then I guess he just doesn't have to. I mean, this is a really interesting question, right? I mean, obviously, it kind of goes without saying that passing some decree saying that the president and his family never need to pay any taxes ever again because if they pay no taxes, then it doesn't matter because they'll never get investigated or what they did or signed, is just wildly crazy.

15:10So let's just like put that to one side, obviously stipulated. Next question, which I think is a kind of more interesting question. To your point, Emily, if we lived in a world where investment gains were untaxed, which they now seem to be like all of Trump's gains now seem to be like untaxed because it doesn't have to be taxes on anything. Do you think, as I propose what you were just saying, that we would see a lot more trading by rich people? That there is this feeling that rich people have that they have some kind of an edge and the trading in and out on a short-term time horizon is some way that they can make more money than if they just buy and hold?

15:56That's a really good question because you speak to a lot of investment experts and they say trading is like a losing game, basically.

16:04Felix Salmon: It's better to buy and hold. So I don't know. It does seem, though, if you change the tax rules, you would see more trading. And people like Donald Trump, other very rich people, they do kind of have inside information that they could be trading off of all the time, right? I mean, but the inside information thing is different. In my hypothetical world where people don't need to pay tax on investment gains, they still aren't allowed to do illegal inside the dealing, right? Well, yeah, but sure. Yes, of course. So I'm trying to get my brain around this because we're living in a world like we just saw first quarter profits for Jane Street, which is a high frequency trader of some astonishing.

16:44I think it was$40 billion or something insane or maybe$40 billion of revenue and$9 billion of profits. Whatever it was, it was enormous. And the fact is that the way they make that money, short-term stock market noise, the buying and selling, it's called noise trading. And there are a very small number of very large firms that make money off it every single day. And everyone else in aggregate loses money off it every single day. If you are going into the stock market and buying a stock today or selling a stock today, you are on some level giving money and giving revenues and giving profits to Knight or Citadel or Jane Street or Virtue or one of those companies, right?

17:25And you don't want to pay that. Obviously, everything you do if you're consuming a financial service is you're paying for that financial service. And the financial service of being able to buy a stock or sell a stock is a service that you're availing yourself of. and you're paying for. And you kind of want to minimize your expenditure on that financial services because it doesn't do you any good. The way you do good in this world of investing in stocks is by holding a stock as it goes up. And if you do that over a long enough time horizon, then over the long term, stocks go up and you make money.

18:00Over the short term, stocks don't go up. They go, they're noise, they're random walks. And so there's no, there's no like theory of the case that short-term trading, if you're not one of these high-frequency, like, ultra-low latency shops, is going to, it makes any sense at all. Now, that said, there are lots of people who think they're smarter and who think that they might be able to do it. And, you know, there's lots of trading on Robinhood and platforms like that by people who think they can make money by trading in the market. And, you know, you can turn on CNBC and look at Jim Cramer saying, buy this, sell that.

18:36So it's definitely a thing that exists. And there are definitely people who like to do it if it's like a fun hobby. It's something you can talk about on the golf course. It's like, oh, yeah, I bought this. I sold that. I made money. I lost money. So people do do it. I just feel like even the people who do it don't do it at this kind of level. And the numbers that we're seeing here, this 3 ,600 number is so enormous. And by the way, I'm pretty sure it's unprecedented even by Trump

19:01Felix Salmon: standards yeah the previous quarter he had something like 300 ish trades like so something changed some strategy maybe he is using automated trading in some way there is a non-zero chance that the thing that changed was that he knew that he wouldn't have to pay income tax on the gains anymore and he's like now let's just like turn off the shackles and let them have at it but yeah maybe maybe he just i have no idea i don't have another theory but i'm sure there's another theory Do you guys have a theory, SlateMoneyAtSlate.com, any like credible theory of why you would like 10x your trades in the space of one quarter?

19:37Felix Salmon: I did hear other people say it was the tax thing. It was like he doesn't have to pay taxes anymore, so why not? It's fun to trade, I would imagine. And, you know, you can see how you influence a stock if you go out and you can say things and move. Our president is out there jawboning markets every day. There's a chart I think an oil analyst puts out on Twitter often where there's a Trump comment, like, we're getting close to a deal. And then the price of oil futures falls. And then something else happens and goes back up. And then he comes out again. He's really close now. And the price of oil futures falls again.

20:12Felix Salmon: He's very influential. The end of the war is two weeks away, Emily. The end of the war has been two weeks away for the past two months. It's just right around the corner. We should say there's no law that says that the president is prohibited from trading stocks. Members of Congress are allowed to trade stocks. Insider trading is illegal, but just buying and selling stocks for the president, vice president, and everyone in the House and the Senate is totally fine. Although the amount of money he traded in the quarter was more than all the trading by Congress all put together. Since we started with a number, I'm going to end with a number, which is eight.

20:45We are recording this on Friday before the close of market, so I don't know for sure that this is true. It looks very much as though this past week was the eighth successive week that the stock market went up, which is kind of wild. You know, if the stock market is just going to go up for eight weeks in a row, yeah, don't be trading every day. Just sit there and watch it. Enjoy the upward vectors.

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26:11Okay, so Emily, do you think that shopping is politics? Do you think that expressing your political views and your environmental and social views in the way that where you shop is a thing that can and should exist and helps to shape the economy?

26:27Felix Salmon: That's a really big question with many layers. So I'm going to start with the news, which is Everlane, which is this millennial clothing company that is blah, blah, blah, conscious capitalism, tells you exactly why you're paying what you're paying, all of this, is being bought by Xi 'an, the Chinese mega fast fashion brand that has been accused of things like forced labor and, you know, copying designs and all the things that presumably a company like Everlane. Everlane used to stand in opposition to. Shein has been criticized and more for all of it. So they're combining. So the question is like, is this the end for sustainable fashion?

27:11Felix Salmon: Companies say they care about this or that. They're moral, ethical, conscious businesses, but was it all a lie? And are the millennials sad now because of it? So I just need to jump in very quickly and say, again as of when we're recording this podcast this has been reported but not announced so we don't know for sure that this is happening everlane is not some mom and pop shop that is now selling out everlane already sold out that already happened they sold to a big faceless private equity company called l catatin and so now it's up to l catatin when and whether and to whom they sell this thing so the question then becomes twofold like one is she in a worse owner for everlane in terms of these green and happy vibes than l catatan because like presumably the people who are upset about this weren't upset about the l catatan sale and have been perfectly fine with everlane until now and then the second thing is the idea here and this is the thing that i think gets to the kind of nub of it, that Elcaterton, when they bought Everlane, were buying this narrative.

28:23They were buying a company that was like, we are green and transparent and sustainable. And that Shein, when they're buying Everlane, are buying on a different thesis, which is basically we're buying a logistics company that is very good at getting clothes into consumers' hands. We need those internal US logistics because all of our stuff is made in China. And they don't care so much about the sustainability side of things. And so they are more likely to let that lapse.

28:52Elizabeth Spiers: So I don't think it's entirely an either or. A lot of companies that are still using sustainability strategies are now sort of positioning them. And I don't know if this is just positioning, but as a risk mitigation in certain ways, they're using sustainable materials. But in some cases, you might do that because you're worried about climate change and sourcing and things like that. One thing that I think is interesting, though, is that Shein is sort of well-known as the biggest polluter in fast fashion, which is why this is a story. If it were, you know, H &M by Everlane, I think this narrative wouldn't be out there necessarily.

29:26Elizabeth Spiers: But this is another example of kind of the case-shaped economy. People are not going to stop buying Shein or anything cheap if they can't afford to really make buying purchases based on sustainability. It's going to be a secondary consideration. But at the top of the food chain with luxury brands, I think people who can afford to will maybe at the margins decide to buy a sustainable product over one that isn't. Are you saying that Everlane is luxury? No, I'm saying it's at the bottom of the K-shaped. I don't think Everlane is at the bottom of the K. I don't think that Everlane is like fast fashion competing on price so much.

30:02I feel like the reason why, one of the reasons why Evelaine is struggling is precisely because it's kind of in the middle of the K and it's neither one thing nor the other.

30:11Felix Salmon: Yeah, that's a good point. I guess to go back to the original question, though, which did intrigue us. And we should mention the scoop is from Lauren Sherman at Puck, who was a guest on Money Talks. You should go back and listen to her episode. We talked about Victoria's Secret. But to the original question, which is can you express your politics through shopping? My answer is no, you cannot express your politics through shopping. It's just marketing for yourself. You're just buying into marketing and expressing yourself as a brand. You're creating a brand for yourself, just as an Everlane creates a brand or Elle Catterton bought into their, perhaps, their brand when they bought Everlane.

30:53Felix Salmon: And now Sheehan, according to the reporting anyway, is trying to do something similar because it has a terrible reputation. So maybe by buying Everlane, somehow it can do a little greenwash or something on its reputation.

31:06Elizabeth Spiers: I think that can be true. I don't think it's always true. Tesla saw Tesla sales drop after Elon started being all crazy and right-wing on Twitter. And the analysts who were looking at this said that it was a direct effect of, first of all, Democrats and liberals not wanting to own Teslas anymore. Yeah, Tesla cars did this weird switch from being left-coded to being right-coded. And then the right-wingers were all like EVs, and then the left-wingers were like Elon, and then no one was buying Teslas anymore. And I do think certain brands have certain valences, and people have affinity for those valences on the sort of like a negative affinity for them.

31:45and therefore brands that can tap into how people are feeling and how they want to express themselves, apropos what Emily was saying, can do quite well. And I do think on some level that something like Blank Street Coffee has an obstacle to overcome, right, which is the people think of it as being sort of very faceless and corporate and be backed and all the rest of it. And they're like, I would prefer to support my own local baristas and small businesses and stuff.

32:15Felix Salmon: Then it figured out that if it just makes super crazy matcha drinks marketed to 12 and 13-year-olds, it has an identity. And refreshers. It's all about marketing. It's all about marketing. What story do you want to tell with your commodity brand, which is like beige sweaters? You know what I mean? My point is that in the Tesla example, Tesla's a really good example, you didn't need the SEIU coming out and saying boycott Tesla, right? The people were just doing the not buying Tesla because they didn't want to buy Tesla. And they were taking, I bought this car before Elon went crazy stickers and putting them on the back of a Tesla.

32:54The sort of concept of an organized boycott that works is basically never happens. And the only possible example I can really think of in recent history is Bud Light. somehow. I don't know quite how that one was, you know, caught the imagination of the red.

33:12Elizabeth Spiers: Well, part of it is that it didn't last, you know, forever. Like, the rednecks are all buying Bud Light again. Yeah, none of these things last forever, but it definitely had, like, an effect on the company.

33:22Felix Salmon: And was it the piece you shared, Felix, from Cory Doctorow, where he talks about the Montgomery bus boycott and how actually it super wasn't just simply a bus boycott? Like, the civil rights movement wasn't just, like, Like, the black people won't take buses. There was like a whole big push around that. There was protests. There was people thrown in jail. It wasn't just, exactly, it wasn't just shopping. It wasn't just expressing your identity through shopping. Anyone who's spent enough time in downtown New York will have come across a character around these parts named Reverend Billy. And Reverend Billy has this thing called the Church of Stop Shopping.

34:00And he has a choir. And he's awesome. I actually came very close to being married by Reverend Billy, but I will not go into that story. But Reverend Billy is kind of on the same page as this. He's like, no, there is no ethical consumption under capitalism, basically, right? Like, if you're going out and you're buying things, then you are engaging in precisely this capitalist thing that may or may not be problematic. If you think it's problematic, then, yeah, you're doing something bad. So why don't you just stop shopping? You don't really need all of this stuff that you're going out and buying.

34:35And if you're kidding yourself that you're buying at your local independent bookstore rather than Amazon, and that is going to make all the difference, then yeah, that is kind of delusional.

34:49Felix Salmon: That's what you do. But that's me. Yeah.

34:56Exactly. Exactly. I'm like, do what I say, kids, not what I do.

35:01Felix Salmon: No, but I mean, but that's not necessary. The personal is not always the political maybe then, like just because you've made that choice, it doesn't really have any political valence or power. Right. I live in a neighborhood where there are very few chain stores, or basically zero. And there are lots of reasons for this. One of the reasons is just very logistically that the chain stores are all based around sending trucks of goods into places and they don't have they can't find a store with a truck loading port in chinatown and this kind of stuff but it's also that in the neighborhood where i live most of the people on some level share my mildly irrational predilections and prejudices and we prefer shopping at locally owned small businessy type places and so those places do relatively well and the chains that come in don't do so well and so capitalism selects the small places and then what that does is it attracts the kind of people into the neighborhood who like living in neighborhoods that are full of small businesses and so that becomes this kind of virtuous cycle and you get these little pockets urban pockets of places that don't have chains they do exist some of that just class snobbery though yeah

36:21Elizabeth Spiers: Yeah, absolutely. Chains.

36:22Felix Salmon: Yeah, I live near a town that prohibits the chains from coming in. So they prohibited Starbucks from coming in. And then there's this other local chain that they let have a store. And it's worse, you guys. So some of it, Elizabeth, is class snobbery. But I will say that in my neighborhood, there's a lot of very not rich people at all, mostly Chinese, who are wanting to support their local Chinese neighbors, you know, who speak the language and all the rest of it, rather than some big chain. And so that's part of it. I think you find it often in sort of ethnic enclaves as well. So do we all agree then that shopping is not political in companies?

36:58Felix Salmon: It's not inherently political. Do we agree that companies who say they are ethical are full of...

37:06Elizabeth Spiers: Depends on the company, I think. I think you can have ethical companies. And I think you can even have ethical companies that are owned by unethical companies. I think that Everlane, when it's owned by Elk Atherton, can be ethical, even if Elk Atherton is a terrible PE company, right? I think that one of the other examples that I like is Athleta, right, which is a very ethical B Corp clothing chain owned by Gap Inc., which, eh, it's, you know, trying to maximize shareholder value and yada yada, right? So I wouldn't go to Old Navy and say this is ethical clothing, but I would go to Athleta and say this is ethical clothing, even though they are owned by the same company.

37:47I don't think ownership matters that much.

37:49Elizabeth Spiers: I think even Ben and Jerry's is a good example of a big owner and they're just constantly at war with their ownership. Well, they split off, I think. Yeah, they've been spun off now. It didn't work, ultimately.

38:01Felix Salmon: I mean, I guess it's like, well, it lasted for 20 years, so it was fine. That didn't work at the end. I think if you're in the business of making money, that's really your top priority. And you can try to be ethical about the way you go about it. But I feel like 85 % of the time when you hear a company saying that they're so great or so ethical or so sustainable, it's like a lot of marketing. You know, I had David Gellis on the show to talk about Yvon Chouinard and Patagonia. And what he would say and what Yvon Chouinard would definitely say was like, actually, I'm not in the business of making money.

38:36Right. And he was the basically the 100 percent shareholder of Patagonia. And so it was up to him whether he wanted to make money or not. And on some level he did and on some level he didn't. And he's very conflicted and he's a very sort of he's not an easy person to understand. But one of the things about setting up a B Corp like Athleta, for example, is that you are very explicitly in the founding documents of your company saying that you have multiple priorities and your number one priority is not necessarily making money. That you do want to care about your suppliers and your employees and the planet and all of this kind of stuff as well.

39:11And you're willing and, in fact, obliged to make those tradeoffs. And you're not always just going to do whatever is the most profitable.

39:18Felix Salmon: I think that's nice, but I mean, this will surprise no listener of this podcast. I think that that's what the government's for. They regulate the businesses to make sure they're not harming the environment or they're not exploiting labor or whatever. You just simply cannot leave it to these companies to do that because over time, stuff happens. And Everlane gets bought by private equity that gets bought by a giant Chinese fast fashion retailer. Markets and business is dynamic. And really the first priority is to make money. Patagonia is the one exception. Like when you think of ethical companies, you're like, well, it's mostly marketing.

39:55Felix Salmon: But of course there's Patagonia. Like, you know what I mean? It's like, yeah. One of the things I think about quite a lot is Instagram. When the guys who founded Instagram sold it to Facebook and they were like, yeah, we want to make sure that it remains very cool and we're not going to just turn it into this evil social media ad filled slop feed. And then eventually, inevitably, it got taken over by Zuckerberg and they left. You can't control a thing once you sell it. Companies are always trying. I remember when Rupert Murdoch bought the Wall Street Journal and they were like, we're going to make a board and it's going to be, we're going to have oversight.

40:29Felix Salmon: And it's like, OK. Yeah, exactly. Etsy is a good example of that, right? Like they became a B Corp and they're like, we're going to be super ethical and yada, yada, yada. And then they realized they weren't making any money. and they actually, they just kind of tore up that charter and said, we'll lose our B-Lab certification. We're fine with that because we need to make more money. Yeah, it's like the boomers, the baby boomers. But the point is, Emily, that you can do that even without, you can do that even without being taken over. Like you don't need to be bought by Shein in order to lose your soul.

41:01You can just do it that, you can do that internally as well.

41:03Felix Salmon: And I will explain about the baby boomers. According to what I learned through movies and TV shows as a child, they were hippies in the 60s and 70s and successfully protested the vietnam war and other things that created a more progressive and liberal society only to run into michael douglas in the 1980s gordon gecko and become very greedy and they discovered junk bonds and everything changed i thought you were talking about they ran into michael douglas in falling down where he became like that's later okay all right those are the ones that weren't successful anyway what i'm saying is that was during the recession they sold out they sold out just like all companies do and eventually all people most people not felix who doesn't shop at amazon it's true it's true i don't shop at amazon final question which is half from me and half from jessamine molly who was very clever.

41:57Emily, do you believe in revealed preferences? Do you believe this idea that if a whole bunch of people are shopping at Amazon or eating McDonald's burgers or something and seem to be perfectly happy doing it and do it on a repeat basis and spend lots of money doing it, then that is they are voting with their wallets and that is what they want to do. And that is therefore what society wants to incentivize. Yes, definitely.

42:25Elizabeth Spiers: So I think they sometimes are, but I think there are also companies that are good at demand creation. Last week I interviewed a woman who wrote a book about the plastics industry, Beth Gardner. And she had some great reporting around the way that the plastic industry sort of created demand for single use products. So I think sometimes our preferences are shaped by corporations, whether we realize it or not. but sometimes it's the other way around.

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46:17Elizabeth, this is the perfect segue of the hidden tricks that corporations use to get us to think that what we like is organic when in fact it's not. We're all being manipulated by hidden strings. That's the biggest scam of all. So there used to be one. right there used to be a kind of almost respectable one called advertising and it was on like madison avenue and then the corporations would like put lovely billboards of palm trees and things and you'd be like oh and then you'd be like i like that brand and then you'd spend money on the brand and then the advertising industry is kind of waning and we're going to talk a little bit about the effect of that on various media company valuations and there's a really kind of interesting Lane Brown piece in New York Magazine talking about what is replacing it, which is this thing called clipping.

47:09And clipping is the new way that companies are reaching people and pulling on our strings and making us like things. And the message of the Lane Brown piece is like clipping is uniquely and particularly bad. It's like fake in a way that other things were not fake. And so we should be worried about clipping.

47:29Elizabeth Spiers: I think it's of a piece of, you know, things that are already happening on the internet that basically result in an internet that's full of bots and inauthentic activity. So if you're listening to us via the internet right now, we may be the only actual humans left. Everything else is just clippers and bots. But if you see like a little clip of this show of me and Elizabeth talking for 30 seconds on a YouTube clip in like vertical video format, then that is someone trying to manipulate you into watching Slate Money.

48:01Felix Salmon: Yeah, so the piece sort of outlines this clipping economy where the advertising agencies representing the companies that are making movies or TV shows or Netflix streaming whatever. They like chop up content into little bits and bobs and then they send it out to like an army of social media posters and they offer to pay them. I think it's like a dollar for every thousand shares you get on something, something like that. And you can make a CPM. It's like a$1 CPM, which is, as anyone who's grown up in digital media knows, a$1 CPM is super low. Super low. And sometimes things really do take off and go viral.

48:41Felix Salmon: And then regular mainstream media, which is like glued to social media still looking for story ideas, will pick it up. He gives the example of the halftime show this year. There was a big controversy, supposed big controversy over Bad Bunny. On the right, they were mad. On the left, they were, you know, supporting him. And there was a big fight. But he suggests in the piece that it was all manufactured by just clips and posts. It wasn't a real fight. And maybe to answer Felix's question, why is this night different from all the other nights or whatever? You know, we've always had like astroturfing or fake ads or whatever.

49:15Felix Salmon: The difference is that like it seeps out into the real world and it gets taken up in our minds as sort of a real controversy and forcing everyone to sort of organize around it maybe. I think Ryan Broderick does a really good job on the Garbage Day newsletter of kind of looking at all of these online fights and basically saying, no, this is all manufactured. Don't pay any attention to any of it. But people do think that the controversy is real and that they need to take a side. And the minute you take a side in a controversy, then you're bought in and then you're more likely to be consuming on one side or the other.

49:48And so it is all marketing.

49:49Elizabeth Spiers: So a lot of the clipping stuff really started in the esports industry because people were clipping specific gamers and things like that. But in the last few years, it's sort of driven the way that lifestyle influencers build their audiences. And so it's kind of hard to tell whether somebody is kind of trending on TikTok or they're suddenly big on Instagram because they're paying people on the back end to clip their stuff or whether it's organic growth because it's actually interesting. It's such a big part of the influencer ecosystem. Also, like this whole concept of a pure and honest organic growth, I think, is like there was never some glorious prelapsarian era where organic growth was truly organic.

50:32Elizabeth Spiers: And also, this was when websites had like 10 ,000 users a day, and that was enormous. And you weren't getting search traffic and social referrals. One of the researchers who Jonah Peretti worked very closely with when he was founding BuzzFeed, basically he took a bunch of pop songs and played them to sort of representative chunks of the public who hadn't heard them before and was like, which are the good songs and which are the bad songs? So like, where's the organic enthusiasm for these songs? And people chose more or less randomly. They were like, yeah, I like this one. I like that one. And what would happen is that in each group, there would be some songs that people liked more than others and or played more than others.

51:19And then the more they got played, the more you got into them and the more you liked them. And there was this kind of self-fulfilling prophecy thing. And certain songs would do really well and wind up accounting for most of the listening and others wouldn't. And you'd be like, that's organic. There was no marketing. No one was pushing one song or another. The point was that in each group, the songs that did well were different. And what he was saying is like, you know, we like Madonna and Michael Jackson. Like this is around that kind of era. And we think that that's because they make particularly good songs.

51:51But maybe it's just randomness. You know, maybe like and all you need is a little bit of random. You need that little bit of dirt in the oyster shell. And pretty soon it starts turning into this like glorious pearl and a massive like global megastar. But it's all there's there is a deep randomness there. and you can call that organic if you want or you can just call it like happenstance and i don't know whether like if you have an army of clippers placing their thumb on the scale somewhere that

52:20Elizabeth Spiers: that's obviously much worse well i think that's another scenario of demand creation the fact that we do all sort of circle in and madonna or michael jackson whoever the current pop star is during that period it was because they would get a lot of radio play and the labels were paying for that so if you were an indie band it was very difficult to get your stuff on the air and then people wouldn't know about it and you would linger in obscurity forever and now there's still mechanisms like that where the marketing that you put behind these things is part of what makes them popular exactly there's there never was a time where our tastes were purely organic and pure and like the fact that our tastes are now being shaped by an army of clippers rather than by a bunch of faceless executives at a record label somewhere is like do i care about this

53:05Felix Salmon: I mean, at the end of the day, even when things are being pushed out, whether it's by an army of clippers or by record executives doing payola to radio DJs, how fun was that? I think you still in the end, the differentiator still is the human making a choice about what is interesting and what's not. You could have like 20 manufactured controversies from Clippers, but only one or two of the manufactured controversies becomes the one that everyone pays attention to. Like, I'm just speaking as someone who's like been watching web traffic now for a really long time, like the behind the scenes little trackers.

53:38Felix Salmon: And you can kind of see the little which stories get read and which stories don't get read and why. and while it's true that like when you work at a website whatever story they put at the top of the home page gets more traffic than the other stories an hour later if it's a really good or it has that extra thing that people like it'll keep getting read but if it doesn't it will not keep getting read this is also to the human aspect of it also why i am not going to lose any sleep over the rise of clippers because as lane explains in his piece the army of clippers out there there are a lot of them and they are all human and they are they are faced with a constant stream of rfps basically saying here push this and get a dollar per thousand or push that and get a dollar per thousand and push the other and get a dollar per thousand and it's the human clippers who decide which campaigns they pick up and they start pushing.

54:39And obviously, the ones they pick are the ones that they think are going to resonate the most with the public, because that is the way that you get to 1000 views most quickly.

54:48Elizabeth Spiers: There was a sort of ominous quote from one of the guys who ran one of these clipper farms, which he says is now he's having trouble making money. And he sort of said, well, in two or three years, this scam will be over and we'll be on to a new scam. And his sort of prediction about what was going to happen is that instead of using human clippers, they would send clips to AI agents that will, quote, teach humans what they want. I, for one, welcome my new robot overlords. I can use that. What do I want? Yeah, I mean, like, trying to develop your own taste is hard work. If I can have an AI agent that just tells me what to like, wouldn't that be easier?

55:38And so because I think that segment was long enough already, I'm going to move straight into the numbers round. And my number is going to be a little mini rant. My number is$120 million. And$120 million, if you read Axios, or if you read Bloomberg, or if you read the New York Times, or if you read any number of different reports, is how much Byron Allen paid for 52 % of BuzzFeed. And everyone's like, oh, right. So he wound up buying at like$310 million valuation or whatever. No, false. He did not pay$120 million for 52 % of BuzzFeed. Does he own 52 % of BuzzFeed? Yeah, kind of, sort of, yes. really what he did was he paid 20 million dollars to rent 52 percent of buzzfeed for five years he paid 20 million dollars and then he has to pay another five million dollars a year for five years so another five million dollars next year and onwards for five years and he has temporary control of buzzfeed for five years at which point he basically needs to give his shares back unless he's managed to increase the share price so much that his shares are worth more than$100 million.

56:58And if at that point his shares are worth more than$100 million, then he will pay another$100 million on top of the$20 million he's already paid. And then he will own 52 % of BuzzFeed. But the actual amount of money that he paid was$20 million, not$120 million. So do not say that it was$120 million because it wasn't.

57:20Elizabeth Spiers: That is so confusing. We had a long discussion about this in the prep, and I'm glad you got it out of your system because I thought you were going to just spontaneously combust. I still don't understand, actually.

57:30Felix Salmon: So is BuzzFeed still public? Are there still public shares that you can buy? Not that you'd want to because they're worth 80 cents or something. Yes, yes. You can still buy them. The other 48 % of the shares are still being traded, yes. And then after five years, do his shares, if he doesn't meet his goals, his shares, like, what, revert back to being? He basically has to give them back to BuzzFeed. What does that mean? So then BuzzFeed would issue them as stock or they would absorb them? They would just cancel them as worthless. Basically what he did was he borrowed. Sorry, Elizabeth. He borrowed$100 million against his own$20 million worth of shares.

58:06He bought a whole bunch of shares for$20 million. And then he's like, I will put these$20 million of shares up as collateral against a promised$100 million that I'm going to pay you in five years. But if the shares aren't worth$100 million in five years, then I'm not going to pay you the$100 million, and you can't come to me for it. This is a non-recourse loan. So he isn't on the hook for$100 million. It's just the shares that are on the hook for$100 million. And if their shares are worth less than$100 million in five years' time, he's not going to pay the$100 million himself. He's just going to give the shares back.

58:41Elizabeth, what's your number?

58:42Elizabeth Spiers: My number is$250, and that's dollars. And so for$250, you can own a piece of the sports bra, which is a women's only sports bar that's looking to franchise. And in order to do this, they're sort of crowdsourcing an equity raise for$1.2 million. So they're doing it through a company platform called Republic. So if you would like to own a little bit of the sports bra, their minimum number is$250. And then what do you get in return? Do you get like dividends or something? No, I think it's just buy and hold equity. And then if they do end up franchising and they sell to some giant company, then maybe you have an exit.

59:22Elizabeth Spiers: Do you get like three drinks? No. Imagine how many drinks you could buy for$250. I feel like the best use of$250 at the sports bra is going in and like buying around the drinks and watching a game rather than buying a piece of paper that is kind of useless. I don't know, because I feel like this idea is really, And then the growth of women's sports has really propelled the idea that it is like a lucrative space. And so they franchised five bars already in different parts of the country. So you're not necessarily just buying a piece of that one bar in Portland. I have been writing about crowdsourced equity for many, many years, probably 20.

59:59I have never seen a successful exit from someone who crowdsourced equity.

1:00:03Elizabeth Spiers: A bad idea, but I do think that the sports bra has a big, people know what it is. It has enough of a following that maybe they could do it.

1:00:12Felix Salmon: There's got to be a joke there about support and a bra, supporting a bra. I've been like sitting here just trying to think of something. We're going to workshop this one with you, Emily. We'll get there. Thank you. Oh, producer Jessamine just told us that she has been to the sports bra and that it is amazing and awesome. Emily, what's your number? Okay, my number is 466. That is the number of ETFs or exchange-traded funds that have been launched year-to-date through mid-May. What is interesting about this, Jason Zweig wrote about this in the Wall Street Journal, only 16 % of these ETFs, exchange-traded funds, are index funds.

1:00:50Felix Salmon: The rest are, they're a lot of weird stuff. This is what Jason Zweig is writing about. ETFs used to be kind of boring. Now they're getting really weird. He points to one that is a fund that is called the Capital UFO Disclosure ETF. It's basically a fund where you buy it and you buy stocks that could benefit from any kind of government disclosure of alien life form or whatever. this is another ETF that launched this year that buys Bitcoin at night and then during the day holds treasuries. And all these ETFs charge fees more than is typical, maybe like 1 % a year, stuff like that. And it's really become kind of a bit of a wild west of ETFs out there.

1:01:33It's an amazing business model because we have now reached the point at which the cost of launching an ETF is very low. And if it's successful, which I think everyone who launches one of these ETFs knows that there's a low probability of it succeeding. But if it succeeds, you can make an absolute fortune. And so it's a kind of rational thing. You know, you spend like, I don't know,$100 ,000, you launch your ETF, and then it probably fails and it disappears. But there's like a 1 % chance that it doesn't and you can make millions. And so that's a rational bet to take and everyone's making that bet.

1:02:09But yeah, it's dumb. Like for a very, very long time, the standard thing about stocks is there are way too many stocks and you will never be able to pick the one that is going to outperform. So like just buy an index. But we now live in a world where there's 10 times as many funds as there are stocks. And so if you don't think you can pick a stock, like what on earth makes you think you can pick a fund? The chances of picking one of the funds that outperforms is way lower than picking one of the stocks that outperforms. And we know that you can't pick the stock. If you don't believe in stock picking, you shouldn't believe in fund picking.

1:02:40Felix Salmon: And if you do believe in stock picking, then just pick the stocks. Don't try and pick the funds. The whole thing is dumb as sand. I knew you'd have a take. I'm with Jason Zweig on this one. Avoid the dumb, stupid, small ETFs. They make no sense. Anyway, if you disagree with me, let me know. SlateMoney at Slate.com. Otherwise, thanks for listening. Thanks to Jessamine Molly for producing. Thanks for emailing us and staying loyal listeners. We will have a Slate Plus segment on something? SpaceX. SpaceX, yes. We're going to talk about Elon and Slate Plus. So if you're a subscriber, thank you for subscribing.

1:03:14Other than that, we'll be back next week with more Slate Money.

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1:04:49Felix Salmon: Slate Money is brought to you by Charles Schwab. Decisions made in Washington can affect your portfolio every day. But what policy changes should investors be watching? Listen to Washington Wise, an original podcast for investors from Charles Schwab, to hear the stories making news in Washington right now. Host Mike Townsend, Charles Schwab's Managing Director for Legislative and Regulatory Affairs, takes a nonpartisan look at the stories that matter most to investors, including policy initiatives for retirement savings, taxes and trade, inflation concerns, the Federal Reserve, and how regulatory developments can affect companies, sectors and even the entire market.

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