Hello, welcome to the comfortable pants auction edition of Slate Money,

your guide to the Business and Finance News of the Week.

If you are in the market for sweatpants and frankly

who isn't these days would you like a sophisticated auction mechanism to work out how much

to pay the fact is there probably is one. We are

going to talk about that in this week's slate money. We are also going to talk

about tax evasion at private equity firm Vista Equity Partners, or rather its founder, Robert Smith, not to be confused with the lead singer of the cure, and his first big investor, Robert Brockman.

We are going to talk about performance reviews

and whether they even make sense during a pandemic.

And in the sleep plus, we are going to talk about what it makes sense to wake people up in the middle of the night to tell them.

So one other note, the first segment about Tax Evasion is a little bit subpart in terms of my own personal audio quality.

Oh, I should mention that I'm Felix Salmon of Axios, and I'm here with Emily Pek of Huffpost.

Hello.

I'm here with Anna Shimansky of Breaking Views.

Hello.

I am not at C-Plane Armada Studios in Brooklyn, so I don't sound as good as I have done for the past few

weeks.

I am sitting at home in a pandemic addled fog, and because of that I forgot to turn on my recorder for the first segment so the first segment

I don't sound so great but Jessamine rescued me at the end of the first segment and then for the rest of the show I should sound more like this all of that is coming up on slate money

Okay, so the big news of this week is tax crime.

We have 140 million dollars of fines going to Robert Smith,

who's this big private equity honcho, who founded Vista Equity Partners, and whose

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