Memestocks are Spreading
Slate Money
Slate Podcasts
4.1 • 1.1K Ratings
🗓️ 11 April 2026
⏱️ 51 minutes
🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
This week: Retail investors usually stick to the stock market, but many are rushing to make bets on oil futures. Felix Salmon, Elizabeth Spiers, and Emily Peck discuss Emily’s piece about “dumb money” moving into more sophisticated trading markets—thanks to new crypto-driven platforms—and what’s motivating the trend.
Then, the hosts examine Bill Ackman’s grand plan to take over Universal Music Group, and explain the difference in how his SPARC differs from a SPAC.
Finally, the hosts delve into the New York Times’ quest to uncover the mysterious creator of Bitcoin, the pseudonymous Satoshi Nakamoto, and argue over the investigation’s conclusion.
In the Slate Plus episode: Do men suck at grocery shopping?
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Podcast production by Jessamine Molli.
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Hello and welcome to Slate Money, your guide to the business and finance news of a week in which we happily avoided thermonuclear annihilation. |
| 0:20.2 | I am Felix Salmon of Bloomberg. |
| 0:22.1 | I'm here with Emily Peck of Axios. |
| 0:24.3 | Axios Markets, please subscribe. |
| 0:26.0 | I'm here with Elizabeth Spires of the New York Times. |
| 0:29.0 | Elizabeth Spires is going to defend the New York Times. |
| 0:32.7 | What pays her? |
| 0:33.6 | And I feel like this is... |
| 0:34.6 | Hi. |
| 0:35.2 | That is all coming up later in the show when we talk about Satoshi Nagamoto. |
| 0:42.3 | We are also going to talk about Bill Ackman, who is a crazy billionaire who wants to merge his |
| 0:49.3 | non-entity of a public company with another public company. |
| 0:52.3 | It's worth talking about, so we do. |
| 0:53.3 | But first of all, we need to talk about |
| 0:56.2 | who are these people trading billions of dollars on oil futures |
| 0:59.8 | on offshore crypto exchanges? |
| 1:02.0 | It's kind of wild. |
| 1:03.3 | We have a Slate Plus segment on grocery shopping |
| 1:06.4 | and whether men are worse at it than women are. |
| 1:09.8 | It's all coming up on Slate Money. |
| 1:19.2 | Emily, let's start with you this week, |
| 1:21.8 | because you wrote a fabulous piece on Axios markets |
... |
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