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So tired of seeing this guy's greasy hair and face everywhere. Not that it matters much, but I don't we can conclude this early that he enriched himself with billions of FTX customers proceeds. His wealth was entirely based hypothetical holdings that for reasons that have yet to be understood, evaporated. It says that $1 billion is missing but the presumption of innocence means a very high burden of proof must be cleared , even if to some of us it seems obvious he stole the money. It hasn't even led to an indictment yet, yet we're confident in casting aspersions.
But self-serving , pretend altruists are not unheard of. Megachurch pastor fraud is a dime a dozen. https://www.google.com/search?q=Megachurch+pastors+fraud
It’s even dumber than that. He didn’t use customer funds to enrich himself. He used customer funds to bail out his girlfriend’s hedge fund so she could keep trading shitcoins on margin.
his latest defence is FTX didn't have a bank account so customers were transferring money to Alemeda and then OOPSY DAISY the money was never transferred from Alemeda to FTX. (https://www.vox.com/future-perfect/23462333/sam-bankman-fried-ftx-cryptocurrency-effective-altruism-crypto-bahamas-philanthropy) I'm not sure how that covers all the deposits because presumably you could transfer crypto as well.
there is a bunch of interesting DMS between the reporter and SBF including this:
SBF--secretly based? Were people wrong about him being a Democratic operative hoping to advance globalist interests?
I think he is an operative of a single interest, himself.
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This is what’s so interesting about the whole thing. Sam and Caroline aren’t ordinary your everyday scammers. These are batman villains. It’s not enough simply to stop them, they must be refuted.
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I wonder how crypto prices going to zero would affect his his punishment. Would the damages be assessed at 2021 prices or hypnotical much lower prices?
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Wild article. I wonder if he is speaking freely because he is oblivious to his legal jeopardy, because he has already resigned himself to spending the rest of his life in prison, or because he is already living in a cave in some non-extradition jurisdiction.
He posted on Twitter that he didn't think the convo would be published.
Prosecutors aren't limited to reviewing what has been published...
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He seems to just be very chill. Maybe it was the drugs making him jittery, after all. https://twitter.com/psyopcop/status/1592977107281666049
Fair... but the interview seems pretty likely to be quoted back to him by prosecutors, and I don't understand how he couldn't foresee that, especially with two law professors as his parents.
No one can resist the siren call of #ThingsIWillRegretWriting, especially when it seems like their only chance to get their side of the story out there. And especially especially in a live interview where you don't have time to think.
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My thoughts more or less exactly.
“SV venture capitalist detonates spectacularly”...isn’t really newsworthy. Not to me, out here in Texas. I’m sure it’s absolutely miserable for those who lost everything, and rather unpleasant even if one was tangentially involved, but most of us are neither. So—my sympathies to the victims, and I wish everyone could shut up about it so I can stop defending EA from the Worst Argument in the World.
Most Silly Valley blowups are not banks. FTX was, in reality, a bank (although it fraudulently claimed not to be, by saying that customer deposits were fully backed by cash and crypto reserves in specie). Bank blowups cause a lot of innocent third parties to lose money - FTX/Alameda didn't just lose all of Sequoia and Softbank's money - it also lost $8 billion of customer money.
In the sane world, we don't let people run a bank the way they run a Silly Valley juice startup.
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Someone making earnest attempts that go bad isn't the same thing as intentionally misleading depositors and taking their money without their knowledge for various speculative bets. I think people who wish to whitewash what he did haven't frankly read up enough on the details.
I don’t want to whitewash him. It sure seems like he was negligent, if not predatory.
“Spectacular detonation” was intended to include massive fraud and other happenings which are not normal, not okay...but not unprecedented. EA critics have been eager to jump on SBF’s weird extremism and blame EA. Never mind the amount of crypto and finance meltdowns under similar circumstances.
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