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Notes -
I'm not talking bout FTX.us I'm talking about Sam Bankman Fried, which open secrets lists among it's "top donors" as having donated 38.8 million to Democratic causes during the 2022 election cycle.
I agree on that, but he seems to have done his donating through FTX and not merely his own personal fortune (which he now claims he doesn't have, anyway). This is where him giving interviews is shooting himself in the foot, because he later claimed to have personally donated to the Republicans as well, and there's not much sign of it. The "I did it via dark money" can't be proven one way or the other. Openly available figures are that he/associates gave much more to the Democrats than the Republicans. He did donate to Republican candidates but not in the same amounts of money. For 2020 all the donations went to Democrats because he was fully backing the election of Joe Biden.
He did cynically/realistically donate to both parties (your opinion on this will depend on your view of both parties) and he did it to get the kind of legislation around crypto, and favourable regulating, that he wanted pushed. He claims now that he had to hide donating to Republicans because of the circles he moved in, and I don't doubt it - his parents, Stanford, MIT, Bay Area, EA, and the whole circus are signed up to "The Republicans are the Evil Party". So admitting out loud he was giving money to get certain Republican candidates elected/re-elected would have gotten him excommunicated from the circles he wanted to be in.
I don't see this as hypocrisy, because it's standard behaviour for business everywhere: you donate to both big parties because you can't afford to be on bad terms even with the 'enemy' side. People who believe Republicans are all Trump-worshippers and Trump is Literal Anti-Christ will of course see this as treasonous, as giving aid and comfort to the enemy, and all the bad things: helping the party of anti-immigration, of racism, sexism, homophobia and transphobia, of science denial and climate change denial? How could you call yourself an EA after that?
This kind of 'saying the quiet part out loud' is why his lawyers are advising him to keep his yap shut. He might have been depressed or in a bad mood the day he gave that interview, so he took the cynical line on EA etc. and told all. Bad strategy if you're trying to develop a story about how you never did nothing wrong and sticking to that story.
Phone interview where he claims to have donated 'dark' as well as other things; the line is bad so I can't make out all he says:
True? Sorta true? Lying for some reason? Who knows? His rationale seems to be that donating to candidates has maximum effect when you do it for the primaries, because that's where you can influence what candidates get picked. So, presumably, he wanted candidates selected that would be favourable to his interests, which means Republicans interested in crypto and/or seen as moderates. Much the same strategy as that allegedly used by the Democrats in the mid-term elections where they supported extreme Republicans candidates in the primary selections, knowing they would then lose in the election itself.
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