Sam Bankman-Fried has been guilty of stealing billions of dollars and faces, potentially, as much as 115 years in prison. Before he was convicted, he was notorious for blabbing constantly to the media. He just couldn’t shut up, and he pretty much convicted himself repeatedly. Now that the trial is over, and he’s awaiting sentencing, can you guess what he’s going to do?
Rush to give interviews to the press, of course.
What do I take away from that?
- He’s an appallingly bad speaker, his answers larded with more “umms” and “likes” than actually content. How did such an uncharismatic turd convince anyone to hand over thousands and millions of dollars?
- He confesses that his contribution to the world so far has been a net harm, and he wants to make amends. How? I’d like to know how he’s going to compensate for siphoning billions of dollars out of the economy while in prison. Trading cigarettes will only get you so far.
- He wants to “make things.” Fine, it’s not as if he made things before. He shuffled money in nefarious ways, he played video games, he used his ill-gotten gains to buy real estate and live the high life. So now he’s going to start?
- SHUT UP, SAM. Stop talking, talking, talking. That’s the first step in doing something.
I don’t believe a word he says. He’s just trying to rehabilitate his reputation, and he’s so unpersuasive and incompetent that he’s not going to succeed.
The babbling narcissist made the mistake of stealing money from the richest segment of the population.
Of course the law enforcement agencies threw all their resources at him. Had he been an ordinary grifter he could have coasted for much longer. And not faced anything like the consequences he is facing now.
You’d be amazed at how much credibility untidy hair can get you among non-tech people in the tech industry.
Could he volunteer for humanitarian work in Gaza?
I think things are bad enough there as it is.
Sam Bankman-Fried and his gang of co-fraudsters had another alternative that would have worked.
Just run their business honestly.
Crypt currencies are new and there was and is an unmet need for the services he provided.
There should be banks for cryptocurrencies. Since these are digital, the banks have to also be digital and online.
You also need a marketplace to trade cryptocurrencies for many reasons.
Not least, because by themselves they aren’t really much in the way of currencies.
To spend them, you need to convert them into real money such as dollars or Euros and this has to be done online as well.
All Sam B-F et al. had to do was run a real business in the normal way and they would have ended up rich anyway. It would have been slower and they wouldn’t have made as many billions of dollars, but how many billions of dollars do you really need to pay your bills?
The other company, Alameda Research, I don’t know as much about.
It’s described as a hedge fund.
It also seems to have lost a lot of money.
They might have been better off just providing services rather than pretending to be digital Wall Street hedge fund managers.
How about he makes some license plates…
This is where FTX failed.
Alameda Research, the hedge fund, ran up huge losses.
To cover those losses, FTX transferred $10 billion in customer funds.
Which is just reshuffling the losses on the books.
I’m just going to say it. The leadership and traders of Alameda Research knew as much about trading and arbitrage as my cat.
Sam B-F et al. also illegally siphoned off billions of dollars in client funds for their own use, which is just theft.
Dunc @ 4. Well said; It didn’t occur to me that he could make things worse, but with his talents…
A jackass who’s done nothing but harm, ruminating about his ruminations…what a jucking foke.
And no, sending him abroad to do more harm isn’t the answer — it’s what right-wing Christians are doing when their original Western audience give up on them. They never compensate or do any restitution for the harm they’ve done; they just inflict the same harm on less powerful people.
Sending him overseas… UNITA, Reagan’s allied warlords planted millions of land mines in Angola.
Removing mines would be a bona fide benefit for the world.
You’ll enjoy this Onion article: https://www.theonion.com/report-here-s-sam-bankman-fried-s-stupid-little-face-a-1850990520
This is a new release, but it’s an old recording – Tiffany Fong recorded this earlier this year, when Sam was still out on bail and at his parents’ house.
Fong is an odd one. She’s a crypto “investor”, but when Celsius Network collapsed she went in hard on them and got some really good information out of them and publicised it, to the delight of her fellow victims. She’s long been a friend of Sam’s. Not sure if she lost money in FTX. So thoroughly a true believer, but worth it for people like me to keep track of. Anyone who hasn’t made my poor life choices to write about crypto may not want to bother of course.
Coffeezilla has a wild video about Mike Lewis, author of “The Big Short”, who was working on a largely flattering book about SBF when FTX suddenly imploded. Lewis apparently decided changing his thesis would be too much work, so he just wrote another half-dozen chapters about the crash and it’s aftermath in which he defends SBF and casts aspersions on everyone stuck trying to clean up his mess.
https://youtu.be/B2z8ikGLRh8?si=pQKowYjkD9AzyOJl
Like you, I have no idea how anyone ever found this hapless dipwad convincing, much less charismatic, but apparently some people really got taken in hard.
Sam Bankman-Fried has been guilty of stealing billions of dollars and faces…
That ought to make it easy for him to hide, if he can just escape long enough to reach his stash.
It may screw up Big Tech’s facial-recognition databases pretty good, for a while, especially if the de-faced continue to stay home…
Raven @ 5: “Crypt currencies are new and there was and is an unmet need for the services he provided.”
I can’t say that I agree. Cryptocurrencies have, to date, been useful for nothing other than fraud. We don’t need cryptocurrency at all, and therefore we don’t need businesses like FTX and Alameda which provide services related to crypto.
There literally aren’t crypto businesses which aren’t shady in some way. The initial promise, whose fulfillment could have made crytpocurrency worthwhile, was that you could build a no-trust currency capable of replacing conventional currencies (AKA “fiat” currencies in cryptobro/ancap terminology). In practice this promise has been proven to be a complete lie. Literally none of the cryptocurrencies out there are actually useful as currency. The only use case is investment scams, pyramid schemes, and so forth. It’s all speculative nonsense – “trust me bro, this currency is going to the MOON” hype.
It’s entirely unsurprising that FTX/Alameda was a house of cards and SBF was a criminal. It’s the expected norm for this space. If you want to run an honest financial business, you don’t go into crypto.
Also, how “new” was crypto at the time SBF got into the game?
raven@5– one of the main selling points of cryptocurrency was that it wasn’t controlled by banks or governments; avoiding all that regulation sounds good until you realise most of those regulations are there to protect investors.
Even before the scandal broke, SBF was interviewed for a finance podcast that had one of the hosts breaking into the conversation to say, ‘I don’t know if you mean it this way, but what you’re describing sounds like a classic Ponzi scheme’, and SBF replied with something like ‘well, it is what it is and people just don’t understand how the crypto market works.’ SBF was always an entitled idiot…and I have zero sympathy for the investors that lost money to him. FTX was obviously shonky, even in SBF’s own very public words. Investors had months to get their money out between that interview and the inevitable collapse.
PZ — Let him talk. He’s far too stupid* to understand the concept of self-incrimination, so it’s all potential evidence. I’m sure his attorney smacks head on desk several times a day.
Seriously stupid. This is a licensed fund manager who was surprised to learn that transferring client funds without permission is criminal and surprised to learn that investors and reporters sometimes check balance sheets. I bet he thinks the 5th Amendment means self-incriminating evidence can’t be used in court.
chrislawson, it’s one of those cases where it worked damn well, until it didn’t.
Well, feel free. Still, they were rich investors, professionals, even.
https://www.businessinsider.com/ftx-sam-bankman-fried-league-of-legends-investor-pitch-meeting-2022-11
Well, he’s fucked anyway, so might as well try.
And the thing with trying to pretend to be naive but innocent is you don’t get backsies if you ever admit to anything at all.
(Me, I think of his olds. They benefited greatly, but now things look kinda embarrassing for them)
Still, they were rich investors, professionals, even.
Not sure what you meant by that, but it kinda sounds like you think “rich” and “professional” are different gradations of the same thing. Which of course they’re not.
…avoiding all that regulation sounds good until you realise most of those regulations are there to protect investors.
And it sounds even better after you realize that, at least if you’re one of the “entrepreneurs.”
Sam Bankman-Fried has been guilty of stealing billions of dollars and faces…
Nah, he’s nowhere near smart enough to compete with Arya Stark’s favorite cult.
Raging Bee,
If you had perused the link I provided, your lack of knowledge would have been ameliorated and you would then know to what I referred by that.
A fair bit of money, let us say. Bananas being bought, end product. Convincing!
Hundreds of millions of dollars in 2021 from Sequoia alone.
(Look up Galaxy Digital, Sequoia and Robinhood if you care to)
Well I certainly feel vindicated by history. Nearly a year ago, I told you it was a simple grift and that he will be liable for everything https://freethoughtblogs.com/pharyngula/2022/12/12/sbf-is-finding-out/#comment-2160908
@24 John, you really need to stop digging. The only thing it proves is that SOME professionals were the victims of the scam as well as what might be called regular folks. And some of those professionals weren’t grifted but were overruled by their superiors in the same company. And some, as with all Ponzi schemes, got out of it richer.
jo1storm, heh. I should’ve been more succinct, Institutional investors.
(Not individuals)
Here, for you:
“Sequoia Capital Values Investment at $0
In 2021, several venture capital firms made significant investments into FTX with Sequoia Capital participating in a $420 million in a round that increased the exchange’s valuation to $25 billion in October 2021. Other investors included Ontario Teachers’ Pension Plan Board, Sea Capital, IVP, ICONIQ Growth, Tiger Global, Ribbit Capital, Lightspeed Venture Partners and funds and accounts managed by BlackRock.”
(https://www.thestreet.com/investing/galaxy-digital-sequoia-dont-expect-to-recoup-money – Ellen Chang Nov 10, 2022)
So, those superiors weren’t professionals?
(Heh. I do love your efforts. Cargo cult will never die!)
—
The banana reference, is it still obscure to you?
(Just checking)
26 Still failure to comprehend, I see?
“So, those superiors weren’t professionals?” Nope, they are in the first part of some professionals who got scammed. You can literally separate them in three groups of professionals. Some got scammed, some didn’t get scammed but either didn’t take part or were overruled by the first group, some got scammed but got out of the Ponzi scheme in time and got rich. Learn to read.
@ 27 jo1storm
Just a pro-tip. Morales is a long time troll who has no intention of a rational argument. He’ll say whatever it takes to keep you on the hook. No integrity of any kind whatsoever.
@28 Silentbob
I know. No “arguing in good faith” coming from him at all.
nonlinear feedback, @ #15:
Yeah, that was the intial pitch, but it has a couple of problems with it… Firstly, you can’t fix people problems with technology – 4096-bit keys will not stop people giving their credit card details to scammers. Custody is a genuinely hard problem in crypto, and there simply are no good solutions… Either you give your keys to somebody else to look after, which means to have to trust them, or you keep them yourself, which means to have to deal with all of the security issues around custody yourself – and all of the evidence is that people (even experts) are generally lousy at that.
Secondly, even if it was possible, is it really a good idea? There are a whole bunch of wierd ancap, hard-right-libertarian ideas built into the fundamental concept, that I’d argue means we should regard the whole business with deep suspicion.
Not true – there’s also money laundering for criminal enterprises and sanctions evasion for human rights abusers!
Heh. The yapping of yappy dogs.
Heh. Venture capitalists, investment funds, hell, even pension funds.
Sequoia and the banana thing are (in)famous.
Heh.
“@24 John, you really need to stop digging.”, he bravely essayed.
(Such good faith!)
Organizations cannot be professionals, John. People working in those organizations can, but organizations can’t. So yes, I say this in the best of faith and sincerely wishing the best for you: You’re in a hole, stop digging.
jo1storm:
They’re unprofessional organisations, venture capitalists and pension funds.
Right. That’s why they invested with the beanbag-reclining game-playing fast talker. Hundreds of millions of dollars of unprofessional investment.
Heh heh heh.
Your caperings amuse me. Tell me more about this supposed hole.
Heh heh heh.
The sincerity positively oozes out of you.
Let me repeat it for you, maybe you get the nuance on reread because your reading comprehension sucks.
There are professional organizations but there is not a single organization that is A professional because organizations are not people, John.
Are you kidding?! Corporations are people! They’re more people-y than women! And workers! /s
<snicker>
Clueless cargo cultist.
@37 Lol. Not my fault you can’t read.
Ah, the jo1squall. The poseur.
It is indeed your fault that you imagine you can bluster thus, despite your feeble protestation.
Not only can I read, I can link. Link to things that you can’t read.
Again:
There is a hole, but it’s you digging it.
Look at the date of that link, look at the date of my videos.
(I probably linked to them the last time you tried to bluster your way through)
@39 Lol. I told you there were three groups of professionals. Some were scammed, some were not, some (minority) got out of it better than they were before. Read again.
The point is that no organization can be a professional but they can hire professionals. It is not unimportant, as SBF is finding out: organizations can’t go to prison but professionals (and amateurs) can.
Gotta say, jo1zephyr, you are a most amusing chewtoy.
We’ll see how long you can try to ignore your ignominy.
Heh. You know, it’s there in black & white:
“@24 John, you really need to stop digging. The only thing it proves is that SOME professionals were the victims of the scam as well as what might be called regular folks.”
You repeated what I wrote, but as if you were disputing it.
Silly, but that’s your thing.
Heh heh heh.
And chrislawson has zero sympathy for the investors that lost money to him.
You know, the rich investors, professionals, even.
As you claimed I proved.
You are meandering all over the place.
Investors. Sympathy. Hundreds of millions of dollars worth.
(Not exactly mum and dad investors; professionals, even)
Shut up, John.
Ah, the plaintive pleas of pitiful poseurs.
As a bonus for you, bee that rages, I will expound further.
—
So. “SBF was always an entitled idiot…and I have zero sympathy for the investors that lost money to him. FTX was obviously shonky, even in SBF’s own very public words. Investors had months to get their money out between that interview and the inevitable collapse.”
cf. https://www.otpp.com/en-ca/about-us/news-and-insights/2022/ontario-teachers–statement-on-ftx/
“In October 2021, Ontario Teachers’ invested US$75 million in FTX International and its US entity (FTX.US). In January 2022, we made a follow-on investment of US$20 million in FTX.US. These investments were made through our Teachers’ Venture Growth (TVG) platform, alongside a number of global investors, to gain small-scale exposure to an emerging area in the financial technology sector. Our investment represented less than 0.05% of our total net assets and equated to ownership of 0.4% and 0.5% of FTX International and FTX.US, respectively.
[…]
Ontario Teachers’ investment departments, including TVG, conduct robust due diligence on all private investments. Supported by experienced, external consultants with financial, commercial, and other relevant expertise, and often in consultation with investment partners, due diligence is designed to use company-provided materials and other research to assess the risk related to a specific investment. In FTX’s case, our underwriting process included working closely with third-party advisors and FTX to explore commercial, regulatory, tax, financial, technical and other matters.”
Translation: we could not have expected to lose the money, and in any case it wasn’t that much money.
More to the point, it’s a claim that it in no way looked shonky to them.