Sep 22, 2021 Sign Up

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"That's my lesson for taking a vacation: Vacation will kill you." – Elon Musk (on the time he almost died from malaria while on holiday)

Good morning! El Salvador President announced that they bought the dip on Bitcoin prices. 150 additional coins ($6.4 million) purchased to now hold 700 coins. In the weird move of the day, AMC CEO Adam Aron asked his Twitter followers if AMC should accept Dogecoin as a form of payment. Tiger Woods is getting in on the NFT action and is partnering with NFT platform, Autograph on a digital collection that will be sold on DraftKings Marketplace.

If you missed the private equity recruiting guide yesterday, here it is in all its glory. If you have questions/feedback, just respond to this email. Happy Reading.

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1. Story of the Day: Goldman Revolt Had TPG Roots

So who were the infamous 13 Goldman Sachs disciples who caused one of the biggest revolts on Wall Street earlier this year? Turns out the son of TPG Capital Vice Chairman Jonathan Coslet was one of the ringleaders behind the now viral PowerPoint presentation.

The leaked slides, complained of “inhumane” treatment and 95-hour work weeks that left analysts little time to eat, sleep and shower and damaged their physical/mental health. The reverberations from the slideshow were felt across the financial industry. Over the next few months nearly all banks gave analysts handsome raises and Goldman boosted 1st year base pay to $110k from $85k.

Joey Coslet is definitely a strange messenger for the Analyst Lives Matter movement. TPG, the $108 billion private equity fund where his father is vice chairman, probably is the one place on earth, which has worse work conditions than Goldman Sachs. Just ask fellow PE firm, Apollo where Associates were given $200k bonuses just to stick around.

If you hadn't guessed by now, Coslet, 23, has a classic Chad background: studied at Wharton, interned at Goldman and TPG before joining Goldman TMT, where he still works.

Short Squeez Takeaway: Jokes aside we should all be thankful to Joey Coslet and his 12 homies. If you are an IB or PE analyst/associate, you likely got a raise because they complained so passionately.

Last May the elder Coslet posted on his Facebook: "So excited you will be working just a block away from my office. Lots of lunches, if they let you out of work :)" Let's add this to the list of worst aging posts of all time.

Source: Bloomberg, NYP

2. Markets Rundown

• S&P 500 extended losses to a fourth day in a row Tuesday, marking the worst stretch for the S&P 500 since mid-May, after worries about China’s indebted property company Evergrande were blamed for Monday’s global equity rout.

Movers & Shakers

• (+) Uber ($UBER) +12% after the company boosted its third-quarter financial outlook in a regulatory filing.
• (+) ConocoPhillips ($COP) +4% after announcing $9.5 billion acquisition of West Texas oil field assets from Shell.
• (–) Draftkings ($DKNG) -7% after news that the online gaming giant made a bid to acquire UK sports betting company Entain.

3. Top Reads

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4. Book of the Day: Antifragile: Things That Gain from Disorder

In The Black Swan, Taleb outlined a problem, and in Antifragile he offers a definitive solution: how to gain from disorder and chaos while being protected from fragilities and adverse events. For what Taleb calls the "antifragile" is actually beyond the robust, because it benefits from shocks, uncertainty, and stressors, just as human bones get stronger when subjected to stress and tension. The antifragile needs disorder in order to survive and flourish.

Taleb stands uncertainty on its head, making it desirable, even necessary, and proposes that things be built in an antifragile manner. The antifragile is immune to prediction errors. Why is the city-state better than the nation-state, why is debt bad for you, and why is everything that is both modern and complicated bound to fail?

Extremely ambitious and multidisciplinary, Antifragile provides a blueprint for how to behave - and thrive - in a world we don't understand, and which is too uncertain for us to even try to understand and predict. Taleb’s message is revolutionary: What is not antifragile will surely perish.

5. Short Squeez Picks

6. Daily Visual: Global Recorded Music Industry Annual Revenue

Source: Axios

7.  Daily Acumen: Labor and Value

Adam Smith and David Ricardo argued that all value comes from labor, and the value of something is in the amount of labor it took to produce it.

But Henry George understood that this is backward. The value of something lies in how much labor we’re willing to exchange for it.

Too often, we’re tempted to price things based on what they cost us to make. It’s more useful to price things based on what they’re worth to those that might want to buy them.

Source: Seth Godin

8. Memes of the Day

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