How Matt Levine juggles writing about Elon Musk and crypto

Matt Levine

Elizabeth Lopatto of The Verge interviewed Matt Levine, who writes the popular “Money Stuff” newsletter at Bloomberg News.

Lopatto writes, “Matt Levine would like you to know that Elon Musk does not actually ruin all of his vacations. Sure, he was at Sesame Place, the theme park just outside Philadelphia, with his kids when Musk announced his Twitter bid, and then stayed up until midnight that night to get his newsletter, Money Stuff, out. But that was kind of fun! ‘My life has not been ruined by having to write about Elon Musk on Saturdays,’ the former mergers and acquisitions lawyer told me. And in M&A, everything happens on the weekend.

“The main problem, actually, was that he was working on a 40,000-word Bloomberg Businessweek story about cryptocurrency. ‘I’m doing a bit,’ he says. ‘I don’t really take vacations.’ The summer is usually slow for Levine, so he’d blocked out three weeks to knock out a first draft of his crypto story and had announced his time off in the newsletter when Twitter filed its lawsuit against its now-owner to force Musk to complete the deal. So Levine was back the next day to write about it.

“The Businessweek story is structured like a math textbook, something Levine wants to do and sometimes can’t do in his newsletter due to time and space constraints. ‘If you read an upper-level math textbook, it starts from the dumbest thing, like, ‘This is what a number is,’’ he says. ‘It starts from that basic premise and builds from there, and I love that format, and I love that ambition for writing about complicated topics.’ Because Bitcoin is such a recent invention, it’s possible to start with the whitepaper and build from there to the major crypto shenanigans you see today.”

Read more here.

Chris Roush

Chris Roush was the dean of the School of Communications at Quinnipiac University in Hamden, Connecticut. He was previously Walter E. Hussman Sr. Distinguished Professor in business journalism at UNC-Chapel Hill. He is a former business journalist for Bloomberg News, Businessweek, The Atlanta Journal-Constitution, The Tampa Tribune and the Sarasota Herald-Tribune. He is the author of the leading business reporting textbook "Show me the Money: Writing Business and Economics Stories for Mass Communication" and "Thinking Things Over," a biography of former Wall Street Journal editor Vermont Royster.