How’s your PnL looking so far this year? Happy your long dollar position is starting to look good? Or are you annoying your b-school alumni affairs office asking them to post more jobs for experienced grads (Hey, Columbia, are you reading this? Get to work!).
Either way, if you have time to read this, I’ll bet you’re not doing as well as Adam Levinson. No, not that jerk from Maroon 5 — that’s Adam Levine.
Adam Levinson is doing WAY better than Adam Levine. For one, no one’s calling him a no-talent bastard to his face. For another, Fortress Investment Group just gave him $300 million in shares. But that’s not the first time he made more money than you or that weasel Adam Levine.
According to Jeffrey Cane of Portfolio.com (who wrote a piece linking to a lot of other pieces I didn’t read; As a former derivatives trader, I like to think of this as derivative journalism):
“Levinson, whose annual income Trader Monthly estimated a year ago was between $75 million and $100 million, joined Fortress in 2002 from Goldman Sachs. “
Then Cane asks the question we all ask ourselves when we read such things, if only to make ourselves feel better:
“The package shows that even amid a slowdown, firms are still paying out huge sums to star traders and dealmakers. Are they worth it?”
If you’re not Adam Levinson, the answer to that question is usually, “Hell no! Give that money to me!”. However, if you’re Adam Levinson, the answer is inevitably, “Hell yes! I should be paid more!”
Apparently, a Citigroup analyst disagrees with Fortress and Levinson and Cane provides a nifty quote. However, at the rate things are going, Levinson can buy out Citigroup, fire the analyst, and delete Adam Levine’s bank account so we don’t have to read about his dating exploits ever again.
Apropos of nothing, I always think of this site when i think of Adam Levine.
It’s hard to underestimate the confusion that afflicts journalists when their journeys take them to any place where wealth intersects with politics. Even otherwise sharp writers can find themselves befuddled. A typical response is to retreat into a storied morality tale in which the “workers” or some small business—typically, a business that makes things the smart-set likes—fights against bigger businesses attempts to warp the political machinery in their favor.
Is criticism of Portfolio just jealous sniping from rivals? That’s more or less the take of The Deal’s Matthew Wurtzel.
How is that $100+mm magazine launch doing? You remember, the magazine that will print stories that are way over-covered in the first place but create novelty in having celebrities like Tom Wolfe write reductionist generalizations in flowery prose. Maybe that golden cityscape on the first cover of Conde Nast Portfolio was pyrite after all. Gawker has released some Portfolio sales figures received from an insider and although it may be too early to tell, Gawker reports that industry insiders are saying Portfolio kind of bombed at newsstands, considering the financial muscle used to peddle it.
Other than looking a little confused when holding up the 
First, a word about the cover: Only a company as fat and complacent as Conde Nast would be arrogant enough to launch a new business magazine with a cover that gives the reader no idea that it’s a business magazine. There are two possibilities here. (1) Portfolio thinks that newsstand readers will look closely enough to see the subtitle “business intelligence” just below the title, despite all available research indicating that they generally don’t read anything in fonts smaller than GIGANTIC, or (2) Portfolio imagines everyone everywhere already knows what they are because they’ve gotten quite a bit of media trade press and people who work in media tend to think that everyone everywhere pays attention to media news when, in fact, they don’t. (Other things most print media consumers don’t pay attention to: bylines. But more on that later.) We know Conde Nast does cover testing for some of their magazines—Vogue, Vanity Fair, etc. We can only assume the $15,000 or so it would have cost to do that for the “Premier” issue was used to pay people to pick lint from Tom Wolfe’s trademark white suit. Or maybe to pay for the first 15 words of his piece, which are as follows: “Not bam bam bam bam bam bam but bama bampa barama bam bamity bam bam…” (Here Wolfe exhibits the typical mentality of a Conde Nast freelancer who is paid by the word: why not insert a few extra bams?)