If in doubt Sam Bankman-Fried Strategic Thinking — Strange, Assuming You Might Miss a Bankruptcy Filing Tweet, and billions of dollars in missing client assets — those suspicions certainly dissipated after midnight Wednesday. The fallen billionaire chose to DM with a Vox reporter to discuss the compromised crypto exchange FTX, and provided his answer on a candid level. Many lawyers are nauseous.
The 30-year-old is going through a virtually unprecedented breakdown. In rapid succession, he rose from his MIT prodigy to millionaire, billionaire, and global crypto celebrity, but it all evaporated overnight. He doesn’t seem to be coping well with his downfall.
Last summer, Bankman-Fried explained his ethical framework to Vox reporter Kelsey Piper, saying that unethical behavior is unacceptable, even when serving the “greater good.” said.
their conversation Earlier Wednesday, Piper asked him if he supported it. “Dude, all the dumb shit I said,” he replied. “That’s not true. Not really.”
He said ethics mattered less to a person’s public status than whether they achieved success or not. Told.
“I see why you didn’t give that answer in the interview,” Piper said of the new framing.
Bankman-Fried replied, “Huh.”
Wednesday, 30 murmured He said his comments were not meant to be made public, and that he believed he was speaking to Piper personally as a “friend”. , was thoughtless or overly strong,” he added. disputed She and Bankman-Fried are friends, and he said he didn’t ask that his comments be kept off the record. )
Shady cryptocurrencies boosted their campaign. do they keep it?
FTX investigations are ongoing in both the company’s home country of the United States and the Bahamas, but Bankman-Fried, whose parents are professors at Stanford Law School, has not been charged with any crimes. He did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
This week, the former billionaire also filed a federal lawsuit seeking class action status in Miami District Court, alleging that FTX was involved in a “fraudulent scheme” that caused more than $11 billion in damages to consumers. I was hit. Tom Brady, Naomi Osaka, Gisele Bundchen, shark tank Judge Kevin O’Leary was also named as a defendant. The lawsuit accused FTX of using celebrities to “raise money and entice American consumers to invest… billions of dollars into investments.” [d]A receptive FTX platform to keep the whole scheme afloat. “
$1 Billion FTX Client Money Reportedly Disappeared
Chaos in FTX is progressing rapidly. Here are five of the biggest takeaways of the week.
1. Bankman-Fried regrets filing for bankruptcy.
“I was a mess,” he admitted to Vox. “Big…many times.” But perhaps “my biggest mistake,” he declared, was FTX filing for bankruptcy after failing to secure a bailout and being on the brink of collapse. Around the same time, Bankman-Fried was fired as his CEO, and he claimed the new administration was “trying to burn everything out of shame.” He complained that if he had waited a month longer, he could have unfrozen the withdrawal process and cheered up his customers. Bankman-Fried is now looking to raise $8 billion to bail out FTX. The obvious question is who might turn over that cash. “There’s something about falling,” he said. “Someone knows what it’s like and wants to do something for someone else that no one else did.”
2. His philanthropic persona was at least partially fake.
Bankman-Fried spoke endlessly about the philanthropy known as effective altruism. Supporter Work to “help others” as efficiently and productively as possible. It is similar but differs from classical utilitarianism in several ways. The corrupt billionaire admitted to Vox that some of his public statements about ethics were nothing more than PR crap. “We played this silly game of waking up Westerners and saying all the right shibboleths to make everyone like us.”
3. Bankman-Fried admits his work with regulators was a farce.
The former FTX leader made connections in Washington, testified before Congress, and spoke with regulators and lawmakers. Here’s his real opinion, according to Wednesday’s interview: According to Bankman-Fried, bureaucrats, not just in the world of cryptocurrencies, cannot distinguish between the good guys and the bad guys. The Office of Foreign Assets Control, which is responsible for enforcing sanctions, is the “single greatest threat” to the United States losing its superpower status, he said. Even the Food and Drug Administration can’t help, he argued. After the Vox article was published, Bankman-Fried said: twitter“It’s *really* hard to be a regulator. They have an impossible task: to regulate an entire industry that grows faster than their mission allows,” he wrote. “And they often end up ideally incapable of policing … Yet there are regulators whose knowledge and thoughtfulness I am deeply impressed with.”
4. He seems to be playing a semantic game about how FTX used customer deposits.
Before the epic meltdown, the world watched Bankman-Fried Removed A tweet claiming that customer funds are “no problem” and that FTX “does not invest in customer assets.” It was later revealed that FTX effectively bailed out Alameda Research. Alameda Research is a trading company also co-founded by Bankman-Fried but operating with a riskier business model.Because Alameda was under his broader corporate umbrella, he backed up his comments to Vox, claiming they were “factually accurate”. I got itIn an interview Wednesday, Bankman-Fried said he “didn’t mean to do anything sketchy”. “, and partly blamed shoddy accounting for the confusion. “Each decision seemed to work and we didn’t realize how big their sum was until the end,” he added.
5. FTX had an “in-house performance coach” who is horrified by the company’s demise.
and interview When new york times, psychiatrist George K. Lerner said he coached FTX employees on careers and mental health. He said he had a hard time accepting the idea that Bankman-Fried was a “criminal mastermind.” Lerner also spoke out against recent conspiracies for romantic interactions among FTX employees, including his executives: “They were overworked,” he said. “The upper echelon mostly played chess and board games. There were no parties. If anything, they were undersexed.”
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