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 Peck of Huffpost.

Hello.

I'm here with Anna Shamansky of Breaking

Views. Hello. I am not at Seaplane 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.

...