Money Talks: I Was a Billionaire’s Right Hand
Slate News
Slate Podcasts
4.5 • 6K Ratings
🗓️ 20 February 2024
⏱️ 25 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Felix Salmon sits down with Carrie Sun, whose book Private Equity: A Memoir recalls her life as the right-hand woman of a billionaire hedge fund manager. Burnt out on corporate life, Carrie wanted a low-key day job while she pursued her writing career. Instead, she found herself in a world of high-octane Wall Street hustle where profit is paramount. She and Felix discuss Wall Street culture,
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Podcast production by Jared Downing and Cheyna Roth.
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Hello! Welcome to Money Talks from Slate Money. I'm Felix Salmon of Axios and I have read a really great page turning book called Private Equity and the author is |
| 0:28.2 | right here with me. Carrie's son, welcome. Thank you, Felix, for having me today. It's an honor to be |
| 0:34.4 | speaking with you. So welcome and introduce yourself. Who are you? |
| 0:41.1 | I'm Carrie's son, author of the memoir, Private Equity, as you just said, Felix. |
| 0:45.8 | I was a quant. Then I worked out a couple large hedge funds. I quit the world of high finance |
| 0:53.6 | a few years ago to get my MFA in |
| 0:56.0 | creative writing. And now I'm a full-time writer out with my first book. The book is called private |
| 1:01.7 | equity. It's great. We are going to talk about your time at the hedge fund. We're going to talk about |
| 1:08.6 | the pursuit of money and what kind of people do it. We're going to talk about the pursuit of money and what kind of people |
| 1:11.3 | do it. We're going to talk about what happened to you. Your, you're like long and varied |
| 1:17.0 | career. Talk about trauma. We're going to talk about capitalism. It's a kind of juicy |
| 1:23.8 | conversation and it's all coming up on slate money. |
| 1:31.5 | So this is a memoir. |
| 1:33.4 | This is a memoir about you working for one of the more famous hedge funds out there, Tiger |
| 1:41.1 | Global, and your time there not actually as a hedge fund manager or even a |
| 1:47.0 | would-be hedge fund manager, but rather as the assistant to the hedge fund manager, as you say, |
| 1:53.6 | you went to MIT, you were a quant. |
| 1:57.5 | Explain to me how your career path kind of verged off the whole, you know, I'm going to become a |
| 2:06.5 | master of the universe and make lots of money as a finance, as a hedge fund manager, and into the |
| 2:12.1 | whole, you know, assistance track. The origins of my interest in finance are complex. I grew up with very few |
| 2:22.5 | means. My parents were graduate students from China, and they were working odd jobs in Minn, |
| 2:30.0 | Michigan while I was growing up. And it was a struggle to get by. And so from a very early age, |
... |
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