The Wall Street Skinny

With hyperscalers like Meta, Google, Amazon and SpaceXAI burning through cash, we decided to answer the question underneath all of it: what is this money actually buying? In this episode we start high level with a primer on the AI ecosystem or what Nvidia's CEO Jensen Huang calls the "five-layer cake" of AI — energy, chips, infrastructure, models, applications. We get into the vocabulary everyone uses and nobody defines: what a hyperscaler actually is, how it differs from a frontier model company like OpenAI or Anthropic, why Oracle only plays in one layer while Google plays in all five, and what a NeoCloud like CoreWeave is really doing when it borrows against its own chips. Then we get into the grid — all three of them — including how power prices get set, the difference between regulated and deregulated states, why Meta's $200 billion Project Hyperion campus in Louisiana needs enough electricity to power half of Manhattan in the summer, and why the new rule for data centers is essentially "bring your own electrons." We also dig into the tax incentives driving the timing of all this spend, and why states are competing so ferociously for projects that employ almost no one once the construction crews go home. Then we bring on an extra special guest: power expert. Ron Kelly, who spent 50 years in power and energy — as an engineer, at Calpine, and developing natural gas-fired power plants and solar plants all over the United States the country. He also happens to be Kristen's dad. His take is bracing: he's seen this movie before. Between 1995 and 2005, roughly 300 gigawatts of power projects were announced on the promise of the internet. 168 got built, 130 were canceled, the rest died, and Enron, Mirant, NRG, and Calpine all ended up in Chapter 11. Today's data center pipeline is about the same 300 gigawatts. Ron explains risks that could complicate the build out necessary to get all the needed power infrastructure online: the interconnection studies, transformer backlogs — plus what he really thinks about the security of the largest machine humans have ever built. Connect with Ron at   / ronald-kelly-pe-mba-3587a718  

Send us Fan MailHow much do people on Wall Street actually get paid? In this episode, we're pulling back the curtain on real compensation numbers for the first decade of a finance career — from analyst to vice president, roughly ages 21 to 30. We break down pay across the investment banking division on the sell side, plus the most coveted buy-side exits: private equity and private credit. For the first time, we're sharing hard data covering base salaries, bonuses, top-bucket vs. bottom-bucket payouts, and how deferred cash and stock create "golden handcuffs" as you climb the ladder.We're joined by the anonymous voice behind High Yield Harry and founder of Buy Side Hub, a platform that crowdsources real, anonymous compensation data from across the industry. Together we dig into how on-cycle private equity recruiting has evolved (and gotten absurdly early), why banks are now fighting to keep their analysts instead of spitting them out after two years, what carry actually is and how it differs between megafunds and lower middle market shops, and whether the buy side is still the promised land — or whether staying on the sell side might actually be the better trade in today's market.Whether you're a college student targeting your first analyst seat, a junior banker weighing an exit, or just curious what these jobs really pay, this episode gives you the data and context to understand your leverage. We also get into hours worked across private credit and private equity, the rise of finance influencers, the declining value proposition of business school, and how AI is reshaping the industry. Check out Buy Side Hub at buysidehub.com for more compensation data, and don't forget to like, subscribe, and drop your questions in the comments!High Yield Harry, an anonymous former credit investor who became a large FinTwit personality. "Harry" runs Buyside Hub, a Compensation Analytics platform for Wall Street professionals, and has a few newsletters including The Wall Street Rollup.Shop our Self Paced Courses:Investment Banking & Private Equity Fundamentals HEREFixed Income Sales & Trading HERESubscribe to our Substack: https://substack.com/@thewallstreetskinny

Send us Fan MailAfter the largest IPO in history (SpaceX, ticker SPCX, priced at $135), only about 5% of the company — roughly $83 billion — is actually free to trade. Insiders are locked up, the banks that underwrote the deal can't lend shares to short sellers, and index funds are being forced to buy as SpaceX joins the Nasdaq-100 and the Russel. In this episode of The Wall Street Skinny, Jen and Kristen, both former Morgan Stanley investment bankers, break down how the IPO was engineered — and the question every SpaceX investor should be asking: what happens when all that locked-up stock can finally sell?First, we cover what is normal in an IPO so you can see what isn't. We cover price talk vs. the $135 take-it-or-leave-it pricing, the green shoe, perpetual futures, and the fast-track Nasdaq-100 inclusion pulling in billions of passive buying. We lay out the risks, meaning the the wall of supply coming. Unlike the standard 180-day lockup, SpaceX is staggering its release: the first ~$240-500+ billion of stock unlocks after the first earnings report around September, with more tranches every few weeks after that — over $1 trillion freely tradeable by December, on the way to a ~$2 trillion overhang once Elon Musk's one-year lockup rolls off.  But we also lay out why the passive buying actually helps dampen that supply PLUS why many institutional investors are NOT bearish on the stock despite the insane valuation.If you want to learn MORE from us, check out our Investment Banking & Private Equity Fundamentals course where we go deep into accounting, Excel and Financial modeling, valuation (DCF, comps etc.), M&A analysis and LBO analysis. https://thewallstreetskinny.com/investment-banking-private-equity-fundamentals/If you're just here to have fun, subscribe for more high finance explained through the lens of pop culture, markets, and your favorite shows.Shop our Self Paced Courses:Investment Banking & Private Equity Fundamentals HEREFixed Income Sales & Trading HERESubscribe to our Substack: https://substack.com/@thewallstreetskinny

Send us Fan Mail Mindy Kaling's new sitcom "Not Suitable for Work" just dropped, and we have thoughts. We are two Wall Street veterans breaking down everything the show gets right — and wrong — about what it actually looks like to show up as a first-year analyst at a bulge bracket investment bank, navigate office politics (and romance!), and try to build a life in New York City on a salary that sounds impressive until you see the rent. But this episode goes way beyond the finance. We're digging into the bigger questions the show raises: Is the Gen Z "lazy" narrative fair, or are young people today actually working harder than any generation before them for a fraction of the opportunity? What does the clash between generations reveal about the tension between hustle culture and the new workplace? And when a show in 2025 depicts five young people meeting, dating, and falling for each other entirely without apps, is that wish fulfillment or an active campaign for something we've lost? We're also getting into the male-female dynamics, the nepo baby problem, the intergenerational clash between millennials and Gen Z, and what it means that the most cutthroat character in the entire friend group is a woman. Plus — what does it say that the show's most pointed commentary on AI lands not in the banking storyline, but through a struggling med-student-turned-actor being asked to dig the grave of his own profession? We LOVE reviewing books, movies, tv shows, and everything in pop culture from a finance aspect --- send us your ideas for what you want us to review next! Shop our Self Paced Courses: Investment Banking & Private Equity Fundamentals HEREFixed Income Sales & Trading HERE Subscribe to our Substack: https://substack.com/@thewallstreetskinny

Send us Fan Mail While everyone's been fixated on the SpaceX IPO, Google quietly pulled off the largest equity offering in history—roughly $85 billion—and basically front-ran the entire market to do it. In this episode of The Skinny on Wall Street, Kristen and Jen break down why a cash-printing machine like Alphabet would raise money at all, and why they did it in the most fascinating way possible: a Berkshire Hathaway private placement at a discount, a common stock offering across Google's quirky three share classes, a $40 billion at-the-market program, and the structure that confuses almost everyone—the mandatory convertible.If you've ever nodded along to "convertible debt" but secretly wondered what the hell stock that converts into stock actually is, this one's for you. Kristen (the First Lady of Valuation herself) walks through exactly how a mandatory convert works—why the number of shares you receive is a moving target tied to the share price, how the conversion math plays out from zero to a 25% premium and beyond, and why Google layered on a capped call to claw back even more upside. Along the way, they get into book-runner drama, IPO fee structures, why Tesla loved these trades, and what it really signals when sophisticated issuers are dumping rich equity, rich volatility, and rich call skew onto a market full of bullish retail buyers.The bigger picture? This is the AI build-out narrative wearing a new outfit. With 100% CapEx deductibility on the table and a talent war driving nine-figure pay packages, the smart money is raising as much as it can, as fast as it can—and using the hype to do it on favorable terms. Tune in for a clear, no-jargon breakdown of one of the most interesting capital markets moves of the year. Want to go deeper? Check out our Investment Banking & Private Equity Fundamentals course taught by Kristen Kelley—20 years of Wall Street knowledge, yours for two years. Shop our Self Paced Courses: Investment Banking & Private Equity Fundamentals HEREFixed Income Sales & Trading HERE Subscribe to our Substack: https://substack.com/@thewallstreetskinny

Send us Fan Mail We've done the finance of Industry, the finance of Succession, the finance of Belle Burden's Strangers — but we've never done the finance of CREATORS. So when Spotify invited us to their Investor Day, we knew we had to sit down and ask the question every aspiring musician, podcaster, and Instagram creator is obsessing over: in a world where everyone wants to be a creator, how does anyone actually get paid?In this episode, we talk with Gustav Gyllenhammar, SVP of Markets and Subscriptions at Spotify, about the surprisingly complicated machinery behind every stream you play. Where does your $12.99 a month really go? How much does a million downloads of a song actually pay out? And how did a company born out of a piracy-ravaged Sweden convince an entire generation to start paying for something they'd grown up expecting for free? We get into the labels-versus-songwriters split, the rise of the independent artist, and the one number that explains why Spotify thinks it's playing a completely different game than the AI companies scraping the internet for content.Which brings us to the real tension underneath it all: as LLMs hoover up the work of writers, musicians, and creators everywhere, who's building a model to actually compensate them — and is Spotify offering a better blueprint? We dig into Spotify's philosophy on AI, why they waited so long to touch it on the music side, what "Time Well Spent" means when every other platform is optimizing for your attention, and whether the creators who power these platforms are about to get boxed out of their own economy. Plus: the new Universal Music partnership, the audiobook feature Jen has been praying for, and why a direct listing might be the most underrated way to go public. Shop our Self Paced Courses: Investment Banking & Private Equity Fundamentals HEREFixed Income Sales & Trading HERE Subscribe to our Substack: https://substack.com/@thewallstreetskinny

Send us Fan Mail In this episode, we dig into one of the biggest market questions hiding behind the hype around mega IPOs: what happens to passive index investors when companies like SpaceX, Anthropic, and OpenAI go public?  We ask why the VIX and major indices like the S&P 500 and Nasdaq look calm, while single-name stocks like Tesla are showing much higher implied volatility, and why the spread between index volatility and individual stock volatility has reached extreme levels. Along the way, we break down the dispersion trade, implied versus realized volatility, and whether upcoming IPOs could force investors to rotate out of existing AI, tech, and “Elon trade” names to fund new allocations.We also explore how changing index rules could reshape the market structure itself. Should a massive company like SpaceX be included quickly in the Nasdaq or S&P 500? How do float requirements, seasoning periods, profitability screens, and liquidity constraints affect ETF investors and passive funds that have to buy the underlying shares? We debate whether excluding these mega-cap IPOs would distort benchmarks, whether including them could create liquidity pressure, and how SpaceX, Anthropic, and OpenAI could change the relationship between passive investing, active stock picking, and index volatility.Finally, we ask whether today’s market setup is starting to echo the dot-com bubble, with bullish sentiment, a low put/call ratio, AI enthusiasm, and a wave of high-profile IPOs creating both opportunity and risk. Are investors buying call options like lottery tickets? Could the arrival of new public AI and space stocks drain capital from the Mag Seven, Tesla, software, and private markets? And as AI infrastructure companies become publicly investable, we question whether the real winners will be the foundational LLM providers, the tech giants, or the next generation of startups built on top of them. Shop our Self Paced Courses: Investment Banking & Private Equity Fundamentals HEREFixed Income Sales & Trading HERE Subscribe to our Substack: https://substack.com/@thewallstreetskinny

Send us Fan Mail No one is talking about the insane thing that's happened to Big Law partner compensation over the past decade — and how it stacks up against Wall Street. In this deep dive we broke down EXACTLY what's going on. What started as an attempt to quantify how much Belle Burden's husband — from the cultural phenomenon Strangers — was actually earning during their marriage, after he left Davis Polk and landed at an equity long/short hedge fund, turned into a full-blown investigation: how Big Law and hedge funds really make money, what the compensation structures look like, and who actually comes out ahead. We were positive we knew the answer. We were wrong. Here's what we're not going to spoil — but here's what's on the table: One firm reportedly offered $80 million over three years to poach a single partner. That's not a typo. That's hedge fund money… for a lawyer. The top firms are clearing eight figures per partner — and we name them. The Financial Times has reported some hedge fund traders are being offered 9 figures comp packages but how does it vary roles by role, firm by firm and year by year,   We get into the lockstep model, the eat-what-you-kill brutality of the buy side, "two and twenty," and the math of who's really ahead at 25, at 35, at 45 — plus the quiet shift that flipped the entire game while almost nobody outside the industry was watching. 📩 The FULL breakdown, complete with financial model if you want to see play with key assumptions lives on our Substack: https://substack.com/@thewallstreetskinny  🎧 Our original breakdown of Strangers: https://youtu.be/3fbWStK44P0?si=N5Qif1UhVxz06i7l 🏛️ For the deal nerds — our Caesars Palace coup series: https://youtu.be/VKROBLck-RA?si=oF8tiwyuwvthXM26 Shop our Self Paced Courses: Investment Banking & Private Equity Fundamentals HEREFixed Income Sales & Trading HERE Subscribe to our Substack: https://substack.com/@thewallstreetskinny

Send us Fan Mail Two weeks ago, one of the most powerful women on Wall Street asked us to weigh in on Belle Burden's bombshell memoir: "Strangers". As two women who've lived and worked in every world this book touches — from raising three kids in New York City to working on Wall Street to growing up in Massachusetts and spending summers on Martha's Vineyard — we're uniquely positioned to read between the lines of a story that's been everywhere from Oprah to every video in your feed. In this episode, we break down the full financial picture most coverage glosses over: the prenup that may have been the original sin of the marriage, the real numbers behind a Davis Polk associate's salary vs. a fund-of-funds partner's take, how much Belle's husband likely earned at Arden and Select Equity, the math on a $4M Tribeca apartment and a $5.4M Martha's Vineyard estate, and why "running up quicksand" is the only way to describe trying to build wealth on a W-2 in Manhattan if you don't have a wife who's heiress to a Vanderbilt fortune.  We also dig into the power dynamics — the resentment baked into the prenup negotiation, the "make me a sandwich" moment, the affair with a sell-side banker, and why the cheating partner in these stories is almost never really about the other person. But here's where their take diverges sharply from Belle's own messaging: the real lesson isn't "know your finances" — it's something much harder.  We argue that no amount of financial literacy would have changed Belle's story. Shop our Self Paced Courses: Investment Banking & Private Equity Fundamentals HEREFixed Income Sales & Trading HERE Subscribe to our Substack: https://substack.com/@thewallstreetskinny

Send us Fan Mail In this episode we dig into the state of the American consumer's balance sheet, which on paper isn't broke but is increasingly "boxed in." We walk through eye-opening Federal Reserve data: total household debt hit an all-time high of $18.8 trillion in Q1 2026 (up $4.6 trillion since pre-COVID), credit card balances peaked at $1.25 trillion with rates north of 20%, and while headline wages are up roughly 32% since 2020, real inflation-adjusted earnings have grown just 2-3% against housing, insurance, and grocery costs that have surged 60-80%. The result is a deepening K-shaped economy where homeowners are sitting on a record $17.8 trillion in equity, including roughly $11.6 trillion that's "tappable," but can't realistically refinance out of their 2-3% pandemic-era mortgages.That sets up a fascinating conversation with Kerry Finley, founder of Tacora Capital, about Home Equity Investment options (HEIs), a product profiled in a recent Bloomberg piece. Unlike a HELOC, an HEI isn't debt: an originator like Point Digital buys a percentage of the equity in your home for cash today (with a volatility haircut), takes no monthly payments, and settles up when you sell or refinance. Kerry breaks down a clean example using a million-dollar home with a $600K mortgage, explains why this product fits borrowers who can't clear the 750+ FICO bar for a HELOC (including 1099 and K-1 earners), and why the average returns on these instruments have been around 17% since 2015.We also explore why this isn't a 2008 redux, where HEIs fit in residential real estate's hyper-local landscape, and how the product might actually serve as a credit-curing tool for consumers carrying expensive card debt.  Shop our Self Paced Courses: Investment Banking & Private Equity Fundamentals HEREFixed Income Sales & Trading HERE Subscribe to our Substack: https://substack.com/@thewallstreetskinny

Send us Fan Mail We sat down with Elizabeth Burton, the new Chief Strategist at Fortress, one of the world’s biggest and most respected hedge funds, to ask what actually matters most in this market — and her answer might surprise you.This is the same Elizabeth Burton who, back in 2020, made the call that inflation would be sticky, not transitory — while much of the market, and even the Fed, was still arguing the opposite. Now she’s back with another uncomfortable view: the market may be focusing on the wrong risks again. In this episode, we ask why the bond market matters so much, whether investors are too eager to believe we’re going back to a 2018-style world of low rates and easy returns, whether the panic over private credit is missing a bigger problem in private equity, and what happens if AI disruption doesn’t stop at software.We also get into the next sector that could be blindsided by AI, why the allocator world may become increasingly K-shaped, how the biggest institutions could fall behind if they can’t move fast enough, and what market risks keep investors up at night even more than private credit. Plus, Elizabeth tells us how she almost became a New York City beat cop, why Fortress is not the private equity shop some people think it is, and how she almost got denied insurance coverage after being accused of climbing Mount Everest. You do not want to miss this episode!! Shop our Self Paced Courses: Investment Banking & Private Equity Fundamentals HEREFixed Income Sales & Trading HERE Subscribe to our Substack: https://substack.com/@thewallstreetskinny

Send us Fan Mail Michael Burry just dumped all his GameStop shares. eBay reportedly deactivated Ryan Cohen's account. And the $56 billion "takeover" GameStop pitched on CNBC? It would actually have eBay shareholders paying for most of it themselves. We're back to break down the latest twists in the GameStop–eBay drama — and why this deal is structured unlike almost any takeover Wall Street has seen. In this episode, Kristen walks Jen (and you) through the rollover equity mechanics that make this look less like an LBO and more like a SPAC, the precedent Bill Ackman set when he paid $10 million to get the SEC to approve his SPARC, and why levering eBay up at 7–10x puts the combined company at material bankruptcy risk over the next few years. We also get into why eBay might actually want a version of this deal (just not this version), and whether a  private equity firm could step in with a cleaner bid,  Shop our Self Paced Courses: Investment Banking & Private Equity Fundamentals HEREFixed Income Sales & Trading HERE Subscribe to our Substack: https://substack.com/@thewallstreetskinny

Send us Fan Mail 🚨 EMERGENCY EPISODE: GameStop just made an unsolicited $56 billion bid for eBay, and the math is NOT mathing. After watching CEO Ryan Cohen's bizarre live CNBC interview with Andrew Ross Sorkin (where he kept deflecting questions with answers like "it's on the website"), we hit *record* immediately to break this down.Kristen, our resident investment banking, PE, and M&A expert, walks through why this deal defies the laws of physics:The offer: $125/share, half cash, half stock — roughly $56bn totalGameStop's market cap: under $11bnCash needed: $28bn (GameStop has $9bn on hand + a "up to $20bn" TD Bank commitment letter)Combined company leverage: ~10x EBITDA (a massive LBO is typically 7x — banks don't do 10x)The $17bn equity hole: where is it actually coming from?We compare this to the Paramount/Warner Bros deal (spoiler: that one works because Larry Ellison is bankrolling it), unpack GameStop's curious 5% derivative stake in eBay, and explore the theories floating around — CEO comp package triggers, a possible "uno reverse" play to get eBay to bid for GameStop instead, and echoes of the Porsche/Volkswagen hostile takeover.Plus: Ryan Cohen's background, the dismissed Bed Bath & Beyond pump-and-dump lawsuit, and why no sovereign wealth fund has a strategic reason to write the check.Got a theory on what's really going on? Drop it in the comments.Want to learn how to actually run accretion/dilution analyses and tear deals apart like this? Check out our 35+ hour self-paced Investment Banking & Private Equity Fundamentals course, taught by Kristen.https://thewallstreetskinny.com/premium-self-study/ Shop our Self Paced Courses: Investment Banking & Private Equity Fundamentals HEREFixed Income Sales & Trading HERE Subscribe to our Substack: https://substack.com/@thewallstreetskinny

Send us Fan Mail Jerome Powell's term as Fed Chair ends May 15th, and his likely successor Kevin Warsh is poised to walk into the most fractured Fed since 1992. In this episode, we're breaking down what actually happened at Powell's final meeting, who the dissenters were and why, and what it tells us about the Fed Warsh is about to inherit. But the bigger question we're wrestling with is this: what does Kevin Warsh actually want to do? He's been remarkably vocal for 20 years about his views on monetary policy, and his philosophy represents a real regime change — a more unified Fed, less hand-holding of markets, a smaller balance sheet, and a return to the Fed staying in its lane. We walk through who actually sits on the FOMC and how voting works, what quantitative easing really is and why we started doing it in the first place, the difference between monetary and fiscal policy (and why people keep confusing the two), and why "lower rates" doesn't mean the same thing to all people — including why a Warsh Fed could theoretically deliver a cut to the Fed funds rate alongside higher mortgage rates. We also get into the so-called "Chairman's Curse" — the eerie pattern of catastrophe that has marked nearly every Fed chair transition in modern history — and what event-day risk around FOMC meetings might look like under a chair who wants to communicate less, not more. Plus: Powell's surprising decision to stay on as a governor and the uncomfortable question nobody wants to ask out loud — if we're never going to take our medicine on the deficit, what is the role of the Federal Reserve actually supposed to be? Shop our Self Paced Courses: Investment Banking & Private Equity Fundamentals HEREFixed Income Sales & Trading HERE Subscribe to our Substack: https://substack.com/@thewallstreetskinny