Matt Levine’s Money Stuff: Ripple Is a Security and It Isn’t

Programming note: Money Stuff was supposed to be off today, but is not.

Ripple

Statistically speaking, almost nobody who has ever bought Meta Platforms Inc. stock bought it from Meta. Between its founding in 2004 and its 2012 initial public offering, Facebook (as Meta was then called) raised about $2.9 billion by selling stock to venture capitalists. That IPO raised about $16 billion, though only about $6.8 billion went to Facebook; the rest went to early investors who sold their own stock in the IPO. Facebook did another stock offering a year later, raising another $1.5 billion for the company; ...