The Money Stuff column titled Musk’s Mars Merger Pay, dated Tuesday, October 27th, 2026.

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Section one: SpaceX/Tesla comp packages

Elon Musk is the chief executive officer and Technoking of Tesla Inc. He has a long-term performance incentive plan. Here are Tesla's summary of the plan and the plan agreement. The gist of it is that Musk is will get about 423.7 million shares of stock, about 12 percent of Tesla, in 12 tranches, each of which unlocks when Tesla hits (1) a market capitalization milestone and (2) an operational milestone.

(Start of Footnote one: Any one of the 12 Operational Milestones can be matched with any one of the 12 Market Capitalization Milestones. End of Footnote one)

The market cap milestones start at 2 trillion dollars and go up to 8.5 trillion dollars, and the operational milestones include eight annual earnings thresholds (50 billion dollars up to 400 billion dollars of adjusted earnings before interest, taxes, depreciation and amortization) and four product thresholds.

(Start of Footnote two: The first tranche milestone is a market capitalization of 2 trillion dollars; the next nine tranches thereafter each require an additional 500 billion dollars in market capitalization for the shares underlying such tranche to become Earned Shares, up to 6.5 trillion dollars; the last two tranches each require an additional 1 trillion dollars in market capitalization for the shares underlying such tranche to become Earned Shares, requiring 8.5 trillion dollar market capitalization for the last tranche. End of Footnote two)

(Start of Footnote three: The last three are all 400 billion dollars; that is, Tesla needs to make 400 billion dollars over three non-overlapping periods, each made up of four consecutive quarters. End of Footnote three)

20 Million Tesla Vehicles Delivered, 10 Million Active FSD, fully self-driving Subscriptions, 1 Million Bots Delivered and 1 Million Robotaxis in Commercial Operation. Any shares he earns vest in March 2033 (if he earns them by 2030) or September 2035 (if he earns them afterwards); if he leaves Tesla before any shares vest, he forfeits them. If Musk earns all of the shares, at an 8.5 trillion dollar market capitalization, the award will be worth a bit more than 1 trillion dollars.

If Tesla does any big acquisitions, the award thresholds will be adjusted in straightforward arithmetic ways:

1. The market capitalization thresholds will be increased by the amount of the acquisition price;
2. The earnings thresholds will be increased by the Ebitda of the target; and
3. If the target makes vehicles or robots or whatever, Tesla will equitably adjust the product goals to prevent diminution or enlargement of the benefits or potential benefits of the award.

Upon a change in control of Tesla, such as a merger with or purchase by another company, any Earned Shares under the 2025 CEO Performance Award will vest, evaluated using the merger value as the market capitalization, but any Unearned Shares that do not become Earned Shares as a result of the change in control will be automatically forfeited. So if Tesla is acquired at a 3 trillion dollar valuation, that will satisfy the first three market cap milestones (2 trillion dollars, 2.5 trillion dollars and 3 trillion dollars), but will make him ineligible for the remaining nine tranches. If Tesla is acquired at its current valuation, about 1.5 trillion dollars, then Musk will forfeit the entire award.

A change in control is a transaction in which Tesla is acquired by someone else; in particular, a merger in which Tesla is the acquired (that is, smaller) company would probably be a change in control.

(Start of Footnote four: There are some other possible change-of-control triggers (about board replacement, etcetera) that seem unlikely to apply in practice. The main one is: Change in Control means a change in the ownership of the Company which occurs on the date that any one person, or more than one person acting as a group (Person), acquires ownership of the stock of the Company that, together with the stock held by such Person, constitutes more than fifty percent (50 percent) of the total voting power of the stock of the Company; provided, however, that for purposes of this subsection (a), the acquisition of additional stock by any one Person, who is considered to own more than fifty percent (50 percent) of the total voting power of the stock of the Company will not be considered a Change in Control. Further, if the shareholders of the Company immediately before such change in ownership continue to retain immediately after the change in ownership, in substantially the same proportions as their ownership of shares of the Company's voting stock immediately prior to the change in ownership, direct or indirect beneficial ownership of fifty percent (50 percent) or more of the total voting power of the stock of the Company or of the ultimate parent entity of the Company, such event shall not be considered a Change in Control under this subsection (a). So an all-stock merger in which Tesla is the (larger) acquiring company is not a change of control: The pre-merger Tesla shareholders own more than 50 percent of the total voting power of the surviving company, in substantially the same proportions as their ownership of pre-merger Tesla. But an all-stock merger in which Tesla is the (smaller) acquired company seems to be a change of control: The pre-merger Tesla shareholders own less than 50 percent of the surviving company. Of course there's a lot of overlap between Tesla and SpaceX shareholders, so arguably the pre-merger Tesla shareholders do end up with more than 50 percent of the surviving company. But in substantially the same proportions? Surely not. In particular, the reference to voting power seems decisive: In a SpaceX/Tesla merger with SpaceX surviving, Musk (by virtue of his ownership of super-voting shares of SpaceX) would likely control a majority of the total votes, very much unlike his current situation at Tesla. End of Footnote four)

Elon Musk is the chief executive officer of Space Exploration Technologies Corp. He has a long-term performance incentive plan. Here are SpaceX's summary of the plan, the original award agreement from January, a modification to the agreement from March to reflect SpaceX's acquisition of xAI, and SpaceX's general equity compensation plan. The gist of it now is that Musk will get up to about 1.3 billion shares of SpaceX, in a variety of tranches, contingent on hitting market capitalization milestones ranging from about 1.065 trillion dollars to 7.5 trillion dollars. Most of the shares are also contingent on the Company's establishment of a permanent human colony on Mars with at least one million inhabitants, but some are instead contingent on the Company's completion of non-Earth-based data centers capable of delivering 100 terawatts of compute per year. None of the shares can be awarded unless at least one of those milestones is hit; market cap alone is not enough.

If SpaceX does any acquisitions, the board can adjust the market cap milestones. This is less mechanical than the Tesla award, just the Board (or a designated committee thereof) may equitably adjust the Market Capitalization Milestone in the event of material corporate actions, acquisitions or dispositions. The Mars-colony and space-data-center milestones do not adjust. You could imagine that, if SpaceX had a six hundred thousand-person Mars colony and it acquired another company with a four hundred fifty thousand-person Mars colony, the threshold really should be adjusted; otherwise Musk could meet the Mars-colony-population requirement by Mars-colony acquisition rather than by organic Mars colonization. But I can understand why the board did not actually negotiate for that adjustment. The plan does not generally provide for accelerated vesting on a change in control.

So what happens if SpaceX and Tesla merge, as they are considering? Well, it depends on exactly how the deal works, but I would assume that:

1. Any deal will be an all-stock merger in which neither company is paid a significant premium.
2. Probably that means that current SpaceX shareholders will own more of the combined company than current Tesla shareholders; SpaceX's market capitalization as of yesterday's close was a bit more than 2 trillion dollars, while Tesla's was a bit more than 1.5 trillion dollars.
3. Also, SpaceX will be the surviving company as a legal matter, because Musk owns super-voting stock of SpaceX, while Tesla has no super-voting stock, and Musk has been clear that if he's going to build a robot army he wants perpetual control of it. My back-of-the-envelope math is that, if SpaceX and Tesla merge, Musk will end up with about 78 percent of the voting power of the combined company.

(Start of Footnote five: That is: Musk owns about 5.57 billion SpaceX Class B shares (out of 5.6 billion total), and about 849.5 million Class A shares (out of about 8.25 billion total). The Class B shares get 10 votes per share, giving him about 88 percent of the total voting power. (The filings I am citing are a little inconsistent, because they are from different times, so don't take this too literally, but this is about right.) He owns about 699.6 million shares of Tesla, out of 3.95 billion total, so he has about 18 percent. I'm assuming that (1) SpaceX is worth 2 trillion dollars, (2) Tesla is worth 1.5 trillion dollars, and (3) the merger divides up value on that basis, meaning that Tesla shareholders get about 42.9 percent of the combined company and SpaceX shareholders get the other 57.1 percent. I'm also assuming that SpaceX is the surviving company, and that all Tesla shares get converted into SpaceX Class A (low-vote) shares at a ratio of about 2.63 SpaceX shares per Tesla share. (This is much higher than you'd get by just dividing the price of Tesla stock by the price of SpaceX stock, I assume because Tesla's reported market cap reflects more options, convertibles, etcetera, than SpaceX's does; again don't take this math too seriously.) At that ratio, the surviving company would have about 24.2 billion shares outstanding (13.9 billion from SpaceX and 10.4 billion from Tesla), of which 5.6 billion would be high-vote Class B shares mostly belonging to Musk. Musk would own about 5.57 billion Class B shares, as well as about 2.69 billion Class A shares (reflecting his Tesla stock as well as some existing SpaceX Class As), giving him about 58 billion out of 75 billion votes. End of Footnote five)

On those assumptions:

1. There's a change of control of Tesla at a valuation below 2 trillion dollars, so his entire Tesla pay package goes away.
2. He keeps his SpaceX pay package, but SpaceX's board may equitably adjust the Market Capitalization Milestone. There's no rule for how it does that, but it could, for instance, add 1.5 trillion dollars to each market cap milestone, to reflect the Tesla acquisition. (This is how Tesla's pay package would adjust, if Tesla were the surviving company.) Or it could multiply each milestone by, say, 1.75, to reflect the percentage increase in the company's size. (That seems to roughly reflect how SpaceX adjusted his pay package when it acquired xAI: His original SpaceX pay package had milestones ranging from 400 billion dollars to 6 billion dollars, but when SpaceX acquired xAI, at a nominal value of 1 trillion dollars for SpaceX and 250 billion dollars for xAI, those were all adjusted up by 25 percent. This seems to me to be fairer, and stricter, than just adding the market cap to the milestones.)

So, to get his full SpaceX pay package after the merger, Musk would need to get the company to about a 13 trillion dollar valuation. And put 100 terawatts of data centers in space. And put a million people on Mars.

If he did that, the pay package would be worth on the order of 1 trillion dollars or so, hey, great. Also, though, if he did that, his existing equity stake in the combined company, a bit more than one-third of the stock, would be worth more than 4 trillion dollars. Also, if SpaceX got to a 13 trillion dollar valuation without the Mars colony or the space data centers, his existing stake would be worth more than 4 trillion dollars. Owning one-third of a giant company is pretty valuable, with or without Mars colonies.

That said, all of this is pretty discretionary. The boards of Tesla and SpaceX could demand that Musk reduce his pay package in any merger. Or they could grant him some extra pay for doing the merger.

I guess my point is that you shouldn't worry too much about Elon Musk's moonshot pay packages, in the context of a potential SpaceX/Tesla merger. Like:

1. The point of the Tesla pay package is mostly to get Musk more voting control of the company, so he can keep an eye on the robots. But a SpaceX merger would serve that purpose much more directly: It would just give him super-voting control of the whole robot army and obviate the need for any new Tesla shares.
2. The point of the SpaceX pay package is, in part, to motivate Musk to work hard to create value, but it is also kind of for show. Ooh he's getting paid for Mars colonies, fine, but the basic fact is that Musk owns about 46 percent of the economic value of SpaceX right now, so he keeps half of any increase in its value anyway. He doesn't really need any more shares to motivate him to increase its value.
3. If he's going to merge Tesla and SpaceX, it's not for some sort of clever jiujitsu with his pay packages.
4. It's to get voting control of Tesla.

Section two: MidCap

Here's some dumb business development company math. Let's say I run a publicly traded BDC, a closed-end private credit fund open to retail investors. Like a lot of BDCs, mine trades at a big discount to its net asset value: My financial statements say that my BDC is worth 100 dollars per share, but its stock trades at 70 dollars per share.

You run a different public BDC, which also trades at a discount. Your BDC has a net asset value of 10 dollars per share, and it trades at 8 dollars.

I am tired of getting complaints about my BDC and I would like to get rid of it. I decide to sell it to you. How much should you pay for it? Some options include:

1. 100 dollars per share, its net asset value, reflecting the value that I and my auditors ascribe to its assets;
2. 70 dollars per share, its trading price, reflecting the value that my shareholders seem to ascribe to its assets; or
3. something in between.

Let's say we agree on 90 dollars per share: You get a 10 percent discount, buying my loans for less than their fair value, but my shareholders get a 29 percent premium, selling their shares for more than their market value.

How do you pay? Well, you could write me a check for 90 dollars per share. But realistically this is going to be a mostly stock deal: My BDC will be folded into yours, and my BDC's shareholders will become shareholders of the combined BDC. So you will issue shares of your BDC to pay for my BDC.

How many? Well. You owe my shareholders 90 dollars for each share of my BDC. Your BDC has a net asset value of 10 dollars per share. So, 9 shares of your BDC would be worth 90 dollars. Right? Oh of course your BDC trades at 8 dollars per share, so 9 shares would have a market value of 72 dollars. But it's worth 10 dollars per share. So 9 shares.

The point is that:

1. We get to announce that you're buying my BDC for 90 dollars per share, a 29 percent premium to its trading price, and
2. You actually deliver shares of your BDC worth 72 dollars for each share of my BDC, a 3 percent premium to its trading price.

(Start of Footnote six: This is all loose and static, and in fact arguably the discount on your BDC should increase because it is blending in my BDC's (more discounted) loans. End of Footnote six)

Is that something? I dunno. Anyway:

Ares Capital Corp. said it agreed to buy private credit fund MidCap Financial Investment Corp. from Apollo Global Management Inc. in a cash-and-stock transaction with an enterprise value of 2.6 billion dollars.

Under the terms of the deal, MFIC shareholders will receive 10 dollars and 88 cents per share, consisting of about 1 dollar and 21 cents in cash and 9 dollars and 67 cents in Ares Capital common stock, the companies said in a statement Tuesday. The price is about 30 percent higher than MFIC's closing price Monday.

Here's the statement. The consideration is approximately 1 dollar and 21 cents per share in cash, provided by a subsidiary of Ares Management, and approximately 9 dollars and 67 cents per share in Ares Capital common stock, adjusted for a cash special dividend. The shares of Ares Capital common stock will be calculated based on an exchange ratio using a value for the Ares Capital common stock equal to the greater of 1. Ares Capital's NAV per share prior to closing and 2. Ares Capital's share price. MidCap's preliminary estimate of net asset value per share as of September 30th, 2026, is approximately 12 dollars and 86 cents. Ares Capital's net asset value per share is 19 dollars and 31 cents; the stock closed at 18 dollars and 61 cents yesterday, about a 4 percent discount.

So:

1. MidCap's NAV is 12 dollars and 86 cents per share, and it closed on Monday at 8 dollars and 36 cents per share, about a 35 percent discount.
2. It's being acquired by Ares Capital at 10 dollars and 88 cents per share, a 30 percent premium to its trading price and a 15 percent discount to NAV.
3. But 9 dollars and 67 cents of that consideration is in the form of stock of Ares Capital, which trades at a (small) discount to NAV. That 9 dollars and 67 cents of Ares Capital stock (at NAV) is worth about 9 dollars and 32 cents (at market prices).

Ares Capital trades at quite a small discount, so the effect here is not that notable; it is hardly worth discussing the difference between Ares Capital's stock price and NAV. But it does seem like there will be more BDC consolidation, and many public BDCs trade at larger discounts. And when they announce acquisitions, they will probably use their net asset values in reporting the deal value, not their trading prices.

(Start of Footnote seven: We talked in April about a proposal by Rezolve Ai to buy Commerce.com for 1 dollar and 44 cents per share in Rezolve stock. Commerce.com sensibly said no, because its stock was trading at 2 dollars and 73 cents. Rezolve said, no no no, you have it all wrong: Wall Street values Rezolve Ai at 11 dollars, nearly 4 times the current trading price, so really Rezolve's proposed deal was worth 5 dollars and 50 cents of implied value per Commerce.com share. I found this very funny, but is that a teeeeeny bit what is happening here? End of Footnote seven)

Section three: Pattern day trading

My general model is:

1. Retail investors' stock trades are generally uninformed and, effectively, random. If a retail investor buys an index fund and holds it for 20 years, she'll probably make money, because the stock market generally goes up over time. But if she buys an individual stock and sells it in an hour, it's just a coin flip whether it will go up or down. Lots of smart people compete to make stock prices right, the market is pretty efficient, and any particular retail investor is unlikely to have any systematic advantage over the market.
2. This means that the market maker on the other side of a retail investor's trade, who sells when she buys and buys when she sells, generally makes money. The market maker charges the retail investor a small bid ask spread, it sells to her at 50 dollars and 25 cents and buys from her at 50 dollars and 24 cents or whatever, and has almost no risk of adverse selection, so it gets to keep most of the spread. This is an extremely good business that has produced lots of billionaires.
3. Because it's such a good business, the market makers compete to pay retail brokerages (like Robinhood) to take the other side of their customers' trades.
4. The retail customer pays the spread. If she buys and holds an index fund for 20 years, that spread has virtually no effect on her long-term returns. But if she buys a stock and holds it for an hour, (1) her expected gross return is roughly zero and (2) her expected return net of the spread is negative.
5. Thus: The more frequently the customer trades, (1) the less money she has, (2) the more money the market makers have and (3) the more money her brokerage has.
6. All this, but like 10 times more, for stock options or crypto.
7. Not you, though; you're special. You have a system. You trade frequently and make money every month.

We have talked about this model frequently. We used to talk about it a lot because payment for order flow, the thing in Step 3 where market makers pay brokers to trade with their retail customers, was controversial and mysterious; people thought that the market makers were front-running the retail orders, and I had to keep explaining, no, the market makers just really like collecting the spread trading against random orders.

More recently, though, we talk about it a lot because brokers and market makers are in the business of encouraging more trading. On this simple model, market makers and brokers' profits go up as retail trading frequency goes up, at the expense of the retail traders. So the game is to get retail traders to trade more. How do you do that? Well:

1. Robinhood's innovation of commission-free trading really helped. If the visible dollar cost of a trade is zero dollars, people will trade more. (And pay the bid-ask spread more frequently.)
2. Giving customers more short-term gambling products to trade helps. If every day there are new stock options that expire that same day, (1) that's fun and people will buy them and (2) customers can't buy and hold them for 20 years, because they expire in a day. More trading, more bid ask spreads. In the limit case, you could offer sports betting in a brokerage account: People love to bet on sports, and sports bets expire in a day (if you bet on today's game) or even faster (if you bet on, like, whether the next pitch will be a ball or a strike). Way more betting. When I started writing you could bet on sports in your brokerage account I was joking, but now it is simply true.
3. The big current push is agentic trading: Retail traders can only make so many trades per day, because they have to eat and sleep and go to jobs, but the promise of agentic AI is that retail traders can set up dozens of agents to make hundreds of trades per day

The point that I want to make here is that this model is blindingly obvious and absolutely everyone knows it, except I guess for some (not all!) retail day traders, though some people's businesses depend on pretending not to know it.

(Start of Footnote eight: Last week the Wall Street Journal had a good interview with the chief executive officer of Charles Schwab, who absolutely knows this and doesn't pretend not to. He noted that many of the firms pushing for agentic trading are those whose profits depend largely on the volume of customer trades, and added that some of these are firms that describe gambling as an asset class. (True!) End of Footnote eight)

In particular regulators know all of this stuff, and have occasionally thought about how to mitigate it. One crude approach might be to have a rule saying something like brokers should not let their small-dollar retail customers do too many day trades. Like, if you have a small brokerage account and are constantly buying stocks and selling them an hour later, chances are that over the long run you are just transferring money from your account to your broker and a market maker. Not you, you have a system, but a lot of people. Your broker might like that, but the regulators, if they are interested in consumer protection, might not. They might tell your broker not to let you do that. No more than four day trades a week, the regulators might say.

But you have a system! There is something un-American about this proposal. Regulators telling brokers not to let their customers trade too frequently, to protect the customers from themselves? No no no. The customers have a right as Americans to trade as often as they like. They might win!

In fact, the US Financial Industry Regulatory Authority did have a rule like this: A customer who made four or more intraday trades in a margin account in any five-business-day period was classified as a pattern day trader, and the rule required pattern day traders to have at least twenty-five thousand dollars in their accounts. If you had a small brokerage account, you couldn't use it to frenetically day-trade stocks. But Finra repealed that rule in April because (1) sure, it's un-American and (2) look around, man: You can bet on sports in your brokerage account, and it seems quaint to limit you to four day trades a week.

On Friday, Bloomberg's Simone Foxman wrote about the results:

Retail trading in investments like stocks and options is hitting record levels, a frenzy unleashed in large part by a recent rule change that made day trading far easier for small investors.

Trading volumes at Robinhood Markets Inc. and Webull Corp. surged since June when regulators eliminated a longstanding rule that limited investors with less than twenty-five thousand dollars in margin accounts from making more than four day trades in five business days. The change has supercharged trading at a time when stock prices are close to record highs and new investors, inspired by social media, are being drawn into the market.

The move by the Financial Industry Regulatory Authority to repeal the so-called pattern day trader rule was welcomed by trading firms and many small investors who said the old restrictions tied their hands during fast-moving market action. You were so limited. It wasn't really fun, said Peter Tuchman, a Wall Street veteran who runs courses for retail traders as part of Wall Street Global Trading Academy.

But investor advocates see things differently, worrying it's another sign that, for many Americans, stock trading is no longer about building long-term wealth: It's a speculative hobby, similar to prediction markets and online sports betting.

The rule change is another example of making it easier for people to blur the line between investing and gambling, said Benjamin Schiffrin, director of securities policy at investor protection advocacy group Better Markets.

I can see both sides. On the one hand, limiting day trading really isn't fun. On the other hand, maybe fun isn't the goal?

Section four: Prediction market indexes

Back in June I joked about prediction market indexes:

It would be fun to construct a prediction markets index. Collect the 100 biggest event contracts on Kalshi and Polymarket, weight them equally or by open interest or whatever, average their prices, and you get an index that tracks the overall level of prediction markets. Prediction-market investors could use the index to benchmark their own performance, and commentators could use it as a shorthand for how the market is doing. Events have become more likely, they could say, or probabilities have gone down on profit-taking, or going into this week's Fed meeting, traders expect things to happen less. Just passive exposure to the market portfolio of probabilities.

This is pretty stupid, but on the other hand I bet there will be an absolutely straight-faced launch of a prediction markets index in like two weeks. I really like the idea of television commentators saying: prediction markets were up today.

I take no pleasure in any of this, but here's this:

S and P Dow Jones Indices and Kalshi are joining forces to build the next generation of financial markets. Through a multi-year partnership, we'll work together to create indices from Kalshi event contracts and give investors new ways to trade S and P DJI's benchmarks on Kalshi.

Event contracts turn expectations about real-world outcomes into prices. As people trade on Kalshi, those prices reflect their changing views on what is likely to happen. Bringing related contracts together into an index would let people see how expectations are shifting across a whole category of events.

Think about what that could open up.

An index of political power, bringing together expectations across elections and control of government. An index of supply chain risk, combining signals about potential disruptions to trade. An index tracking AI's impact on employment, helping people follow expectations about changes in the labor market.

An index of sports outcomes, which carry economic consequences for broadcasters, advertisers, cities, and small businesses. An index of weather risks that shape harvests, energy demand, and business revenues.

Each could bundle individual event contracts into a single indicator, helping people understand how related risks are evolving. A business following weather risks, for example, could monitor expectations across the regions where it operates. Someone following politics could see how expectations are shifting across multiple races.

Fine, it's fine, it's fine. It's not literally events have become more likely. It's more like Democrats have become more likely to win the midterms, or New York is going to have a good year across the major sports, or a bunch of AI-job-loss bets are becoming more likely or whatever.

And then of course Kalshi will presumably list futures contracts on the indexes, give investors new ways to trade S and P DJI's benchmarks on Kalshi, etcetera, so index arbitrage trades will be possible. Buy the Democrats win the midterms index contract, sell the underlying Democrats-winning-elections contracts, profit from small price discrepancies.

Incidentally. The way stock index arbitrage works is like that: There are 500 stocks in the index or whatever, so you can buy the underlying stocks to replicate the index. The individual stocks are the units that make up the index.

Prediction markets are a bit stranger, though, because there is no, like, fundamental atomic unit. Kalshi lists contracts at different levels of granularity: Right now, it lists contracts like Texas Senate winner? and Maine Senate winner?, but also Which party will win the U.S. Senate? and Midterms: Congress Balance of Power?

Let's say you were trying to construct an index bringing together expectations across elections and control of government. How much weight, in that index, would you give to the price of Which party will win the U.S. Senate, and how much weight would you give to the prices of individual senate races? If you were arbitraging that index, is the relevant trade buy the index, short the underlying races, or is it buy the index, short the which-party-to-win-the-senate contract? Kalshi already has broad contracts, and narrow contracts that feed into them, and arbitrages between the two. Now it will have indexes.

Section five: Things happen

AI Talent War Has Quant Firms Racing to Fund PhDs, Build Labs. Weil Gotshal Leaders Spent Frantic Weekend Trying to Stabilize Law Firm. In Anthropic I.P.O., Goldman and Morgan Stanley Slug It Out for Top Bank. A 300 billion dollar Debt Wall Is Looming Over Private-Equity Backed Companies. The winners and losers of the weight-loss economy. Microsoft Will Offer Buyouts to sixty thousand Employees. Bank of England orders review of Revolut's product approval processes. Janus Launches First Tokenized Fund Licensing the Nasdaq-100 Index. DWS to honour just 10 percent of redemption requests at flagship property fund. DoorDash Is in Advanced Talks to Acquire Delivery Rival Instacart. Ben and Jerry's Founders Have Been Exploring Deal to Separate Company From Magnum. GM to Leave NYSE for Stock Listing on Tech-Focused Nasdaq. Treehouse of Horror ranking.

That was the Money Stuff column titled Musk’s Mars Merger Pay, dated Tuesday, October 27th, 2026, as read by Robo Matt.

All credit for Money Stuff goes to the biological Matt Levine and Bloomberg.

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