Spice World
Slate Money
Slate Podcasts
4.1 • 1.1K Ratings
🗓️ 4 April 2026
⏱️ 42 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
This week: OpenAI completed a $122 billion investment round. Felix Salmon, Elizabeth Spiers, and Emily Peck discuss what this deal says about the private and public markets and try to wrap their heads around the astronomical valuations of OpenAI and SpaceX.
Then, Maryland-based spice company, McCormick, announced it will merge with Unilever’s food division to create a new spice and sauce mega-company. The hosts discuss the unusual case of a smaller company absorbing a larger one, and why Unilever's stock is currently plummeting.
Finally, the hosts break down the WNBA's landmark collective bargaining agreement and why Nobel laureate Claudia Goldin was the MVP of the negotiation.
In the Slate Plus episode: The largest single home sale on record.
This episode is member-exclusive. Listen to it now by subscribing to Slate Plus. By joining, not only will you unlock weekly bonus episodes of Slate Money—you’ll also access ad-free listening across all your favorite Slate podcasts. You can subscribe directly from the Slate Money show page on Apple Podcasts and Spotify. Or, visit slate.com/moneyplus to get access wherever you listen.
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 the Week. |
| 0:17.1 | I'm Felix Salmon of Bloomberg. I'm here with Elizabeth Spires. It's New York Times. |
| 0:21.2 | Hello. And I'm here with Emily Peck of Axios. |
| 0:24.3 | Hello, hello. Please subscribe to Axios markets. |
| 0:26.9 | And we are going to talk about markets this week. We're going to talk specifically about equity |
| 0:31.7 | markets, public and private, and the insane amounts of cash that they seem to be able to direct towards AI companies and |
| 0:40.0 | whether this is a good thing or not. We are going to talk about a massive $69 or $45 billion |
| 0:46.7 | merger, depending on how you count, between McCormick and Unilever Food. We are going to talk |
| 0:53.2 | about WMBA. We're going to talk about WMBA. |
| 0:55.5 | We're going to talk about women making more money for playing sports, |
| 0:59.3 | which, of course, they totally should do. |
| 1:01.7 | We are going to have a Sleep Plus segment |
| 1:04.2 | about the most expensive house ever sold in the history of houses. |
| 1:08.2 | So stay tuned. |
| 1:09.3 | It's all coming up. |
| 1:10.6 | I'm asleep to sleep. |
| 1:20.1 | Okay, so I want to start off by telling a little story. |
| 1:23.6 | Once upon a time, there were these things called unicorns. |
| 1:26.3 | You might remember unicorns. Unicorns were private companies that had a one billion dollar valuation. And everyone's like, that's crazy. Because normally, historically, companies like Amazon went public when it had like a $400 million dollar valuation. Often companies went public when they had like a $40 million valuation or even a four million dollar valuation. The idea is it was amazing that companies |
| 1:48.4 | could grow that big to become worth a billion dollars and still be private. And so people started |
| 1:53.8 | talking about these things called unicorns and the number of unicorns started going up. And then |
| 1:57.5 | people started talking about things called decacorns, which were for private companies worth $10 billion. And then in my early years at Axios, I invented these things |
... |
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