Eric Jackson
@ericjackson • 173,254 subscribers
Upstream of Kalshi/Polymarket | I call outcomes before markets price them | Strategy/Mgmt PhD, Columbia B School | @emjcapital | @EMJXai $SRXH | @EventHorizonIQ
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Everybody has a theory about why André 3000 stopped making rap records. Nobody has a theory about this one, because as far as I can tell nobody reported it. Recordation V9991D471, recorded 15 July 2021. First party, verbatim: Andre Lauren Benjamin, professionally known as Andre 3000, individually and dba Gnat Booty Music, and Wedontplayevenwhenwebeplayin LLC. Second party: Primary Wave Music IP Fund 3. Roughly 570 compositions. It is publishing rather than masters, and the document is 33 pages for 570 titles, which means it is a short form sitting on top of a long form nobody recorded. The share he actually assigned is not stated anywhere I can see. Now search the other man. Antwan Patton returns 511 hits and 150 recordations, and he is a party to none of them. Every hit is his name appearing as a writer inside somebody else's paperwork. Recording a transfer is optional and plenty of deals never get filed, so the only sentence I can support is that no recorded transfer names him. One of them shows up in the register as a seller. The other shows up only as a name inside other people's documents. Which raises the obvious question: André sold publishing, so why not the records. Because the records were never his to sell. SR0000340520, registered 6 October 2003. Claimant: "© ℗ Arista Records, Inc. (employer for hire)." Two solo albums, two number one singles, one registration. There is no separate registration for The Love Below anywhere. I looked. A sound recording registration follows the claimant's unit of commerce. Arista sold one product, so Arista registered one work. What makes it worth showing you is that the register was perfectly willing to give this catalog two numbers when it wanted to. Stankonia has two registrations. Aquemini has two. Go look at what separates each pair, and it is a profanity. Watch the claimant line move across the catalog. ATLiens 1997, LaFace. Aquemini 1999, Arista, with LaFace named as employer for hire inside the authorship line. Stankonia 2001, back to La Face. The double album 2003, Arista Records Incorporated. The singles in 2004, BMG Music. Idlewild 2006, LaFace Records LLC. Six filings, five versions of the same corporate family, and one thing that never changes. Employer for hire is on every single one. Across every sound recording OutKast ever released, Antwan Patton and André Benjamin appear as claimant exactly zero times. One filing is not like the others. Southernplayalisticadillacmuzik came out in April 1994. It was not registered as a sound recording until 2 February 2018. Twenty four years. And the claimant on that 2018 filing is Arista Records Incorporated, which is strange, because Arista had assigned the whole thing to Sony 9 years earlier. The address on the form is 25 Madison Avenue, 22nd floor, New York, which is Sony's building. Here is how it got to Sony. Recordations V3582D733 and 734, filed 3 September 2009. First party Arista Records LLC, second party Sony Music Entertainment, executed as of 27 December 2008. 734 pages, 1,702 titles. Speakerboxxx/The Love Below is one row in that schedule. The next day, a second document, LaFace Records LLC to Sony, 67 titles, carrying ATLiens. Both executed as of the same December day, because that is a corporate closing date rather than anything to do with music. Last thing, and it is live right now. Section 203 lets an author terminate a grant 35 years on and take the work back. It is how Victor Willis got the Village People songs. Termination notices filed under OutKast, André Benjamin, Antwan Patton: zero. Before you decide that means nothing, I checked whether the system would show me one if it existed. Victor Willis returns 10. LaFace Records returns 3. One of those 3 is Usher. He served his notice on 23 June 2025, on Sony, as successor to LaFace. Same label. Same era. Same successor company. He filed. They have not. Southernplayalisticadillacmuzik turns 35 in 2029. Every document above is free and public.
Eric Jackson1,186,459 просмотров • 3 дней назад
Mark Walter has to take roughly $20 billion of loans off his insurers by December 31. There are 4 ways to do that. Sell the loans: nobody buys paper under a grand jury subpoena. Grow: the company has to be 4 times bigger in 2 quarters. Reinsure: the good assets leave, the loans stay, the ratio goes UP. Sell things and repay in cash. The Lakers covered about a third.
Eric Jackson2,231,791 просмотров • 18 дней назад
Everybody reported Jay-Z got $750 million for D'Ussé. That number comes from one sentence, in one Bloomberg Law article: "at a $3 billion valuation, the deal WOULD be worth at least $750 million." Would. At a valuation nobody confirmed. No filing states a price. The register says something else. D'Ussé trademark, reg. 4376899. Owner: D'Ussé LLC, 2701 Le Jeune Road, Coral Gables. That is Bacardi's headquarters. Renewed for 10 years, accepted 3 October 2023. Eight months AFTER the settlement, still in the joint venture's name. The trademark never moved because it was never what got sold. What moved was a membership interest in a Delaware LLC. And there is no public register anywhere in this country where you can look that up. The biggest deals in this business are the ones you cannot check.
Eric Jackson55,872 просмотров • 1 день назад
Jack Dorsey bought Jay-Z's Tidal for $297M. Everyone knows that number. The SEC filing says he paid $233M. For 86.8% of a company worth less than half its 2017 price. 16 artists launched it as "owners." The paperwork names exactly 1 of them, and gives him a board seat. A press release is not a filing. 🧵
Eric Jackson1,414,860 просмотров • 1 месяц назад
Someone asked how Rick Ross has money with "one hit twenty years ago." I pulled the documents. ⭐ His album *Set in Stone* debuted at No. 39 with ~2,000 pure sales. His catalog does **3,587,654 Spotify streams a day**, ~1.3B a year, with no release required. ⭐ I searched the federal copyright register for him selling that catalog. 127 mortgage security agreements carry his name. I opened the parents: **every one belongs to somebody else.** Lil Wayne's assignment of 1,018 works to a trust. Kanye's chain. Nicki Minaj's. He's in them as a co-writer. **There is no recorded sale of a Rick Ross catalog anywhere in that database.** ⚠️ But "never sold it" is not "kept it." The recording registrations name **Island Def Jam / UMG** (Teflon Don, Port of Miami) and **Sony** (Port of Miami 2) as claimant. What the register shows him holding is the publishing and the name. ⭐ Where it actually comes from, four databases deep: · catalog annuity, 595 tracks · **Boss Wings Enterprises: 244 workers across 5 Wing Stop locations** per a 2022 DOL action. Wingstop 10-K AUV: $2.0M/store · a ticketed car show on his own land, 5th year, its own Florida corporation · fee dates: theaters, casinos, an HBCU homecoming, a symphony show, a cruise ⭐ And the question under the question. *Ross v. Roberts*, 222 677 (2013): summary judgment affirmed, transformative use, First Amendment protected. **The name is property and a court said so.** What I could NOT verify: the county parcel record, any store count, and any attendance figure in either direction.
Eric Jackson179,979 просмотров • 7 дней назад
Everyone says Bad Bunny owns his masters. I pulled the Copyright Office registrations. The author on the sound recordings is Rimas Entertainment, LLC — status: "employer for hire." Work made for hire means there is no 35-year termination right. The clock never starts. Day 351:
Eric Jackson709,824 просмотров • 1 месяц назад
Nas is the guy everybody points to as the smart one. Mass Appeal. Into Coinbase before most people had heard of it. Ring, Dropbox, PillPack. When people argue about which rapper understood business first, his name comes up before anybody else's. So I pulled Illmatic on the government's copyright register. It's free. Anyone can do it. Registration SR0000207177, filed June 28, 1994. The claimant line reads: Sony Music Entertainment, Inc. (employer for hire). That's the most revered album in the genre, and on the federal record it's registered as work made for hire. It Was Written, two years later, SR0000220016. Same phrase. Sony Music Entertainment, Inc., employer for hire. Then something changes. Stillmatic, 2002, SR0000305698. Claimant is still Sony. But the words "employer for hire" are gone. Same label, same artist, 8 years apart, and the authorship language is different. Nobody explains that in a documentary. Now the part I didn't expect. Pull the song instead of the recording. It Ain't Hard To Tell, the track that closes Illmatic. Registration PA0000921815. The claimants are Zomba Enterprises, Skematics Music, and Ill Will Music, Inc. That's his. Named for his friend Willy Graham. So the same album sits in two different places in the same government database with two different answers. Sony holds the recording as employer for hire. His own company is a named claimant on the song underneath it. A master is the recording. A composition is the song inside it. They get owned separately and sold separately, and almost nobody says which one they mean. One more thing. There's a 2009 filing that pulls Illmatic into a document covering 832 titles across 663 pages. Sony BMG renamed itself Sony Music Entertainment in January of that year. Every number above took about 20 minutes and cost nothing.
Eric Jackson34,078 просмотров • 2 дней назад
Bloomberg broke that a LeBron James entity borrowed ~$300M from two life insurers against his non-NBA income, and wrote that "terms are otherwise scant in the records reviewed by Bloomberg." I bought the records. Midland National (66044) and North American (66974), 2025 annuals. `49549*-AA-3` secured term loan, 4.800%, funded 03/06/2018, matures 12/01/2049. **NAIC 1.E PL.** `49549*-AB-1` secured term loan A-2, 5.750%, funded 09/01/2022, matures 12/06/2056. **NAIC 1.G PL.** NAIC 1 is the top tier, the treatment given to high grade corporate debt. PL means private letter rating. The filing withholds the agency and withholds the analysis. What surfaces is the grade and the capital charge that follows from it. Matt Levine asked that morning whether a LeBron bond "could be an investment-grade credit instrument." It is. It's in the filing. Then I counted the rest. **658 privately rated positions across the two insurers.** King James Funding is 2 of them. Three lines below LeBron sits Vanderbilt University Medical Center at ~$102M. ⚠️ ~$11.8B of ~$78B is a proxy pending confirmation of the dollar column. The COUNT of 658 is solid. Treat the dollars as an order of magnitude. Sammons has >$147B in assets and >1.7M policies. Guggenheim was the sole asset manager until 2021 and still runs ~73% of the book. LeBron has done nothing wrong. His spokesperson calls it a securitization of personal non-NBA income, the 2022 deal was NBA-approved, and Bloomberg says plainly there's no link to the Walter inquiries. He's the door. The room is 658 positions graded in a way nobody outside can read. They had the sources. I had the filings. Anyone can buy them.
Eric Jackson100,707 просмотров • 10 дней назад
Big Sean, Dec 2021: he spent "hundreds of thousands" auditing his own label and says he's owed ~$6M. Everyone quoted the $6M. Nobody quoted the sentence before it: he audited *"thinking Universal owed me this money, and the money had been paid to G.O.O.D. Music."*
Eric Jackson42,619 просмотров • 4 дней назад
Tory Lanez sold an album as an NFT in 2021 — a million copies at a dollar each, "a million dollars in less than a minute." It became the proof artists could go around the industry. I pulled the SEC filings. The platform was a subsidiary of a NASDAQ-listed company. Its own CFO told the SEC the NFT business did $216,000 of revenue against $408,000 of cost of sales, and was “immaterial." And on what buyers received: "the right to access" — while "the artist grants license to use the original content, but maintains ownership." No master. No royalty. A login. On a site that today returns a server error. Day 349.
Eric Jackson178,094 просмотров • 1 месяц назад
Mark Walter needed cash before the Lakers deal. First he asked Apollo to lend against his Lakers stake. They said no. Then he went to Charter. Charter's Spectrum SportsNet still owes roughly $8B on Dodgers TV rights through 2038, and about $3B on the Lakers through 2031. Walter asked them to pay a smaller number now and tear the contracts up. They said no too. Reported by John Ourand. Full conversation with Ethan Strauss
Eric Jackson85,035 просмотров • 16 дней назад
Mark Walter's insurers told Bloomberg they would take $8 billion of affiliated loans off the books this quarter. I bought all 7 filings. The number came down $115 million. That is 1.4%. The biggest company is holding MORE than it was in December, $19.1 billion, up $896 million. Its ratio improved only because they grew the balance sheet $5.45 billion around it. Then on August 17 they filed the answer. His own holding company agreed to buy up to $6.5 billion of the loans off the insurance company he owns
Eric Jackson87,649 просмотров • 17 дней назад
SpaceX started trading today. Everyone's covering the pop, the trillion-eight valuation, the trillionaire watch. The number that matters: they reserved 20-30% for retail investors. Normal is 5-10. And they walked away from $175B in demand to do it. The biggest IPO in history wasn't a fundraise. Day 297:
Eric Jackson387,877 просмотров • 2 месяцев назад
Still one of the greatest movie scenes 30 years later… and perfectly summarizes why I make my daily videos! 😋🔥🫡🙌🏻
Eric Jackson15,625 просмотров • 2 дней назад
GIH Borrower, LLC. Delaware. Formed Aug 12, 2024. Three and a half months later it borrowed $1.175B. First lien, cov-lite, SOFR+250, due Nov 2031. Underneath it sits Guggenheim's $367B asset management business. Fri Aug 14: it told lenders Q2 revenue fell 38% to $186M, earnings down 77%. Mon Aug 17: the loan fell ~20 points to below 80 on broker runs. Sammons bonds hit all-time lows. Wed Aug 19: Guggenheim Investments president Dina DiLorenzo told lenders the drop excluded advisory fees from Guggenheim Private Investments that will be booked in Q3. So it's a revenue-recognition timing question. And per Crain's, the accounting at that same unit was the subject of the whistleblower report that helped start the federal probe. Three SEC-filed fund valuations had this loan at par as recently as June 30. Steele Creek 100.0, Franklin 100.375, Morgan Stanley 100.29.
Eric Jackson56,607 просмотров • 14 дней назад