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I don't know enough to know if he was a grifter, or at least started out as one. What this whole mess has done is to reinforce my prejudices around:
Fortunes that are electronic in nature, not hard money. Be that stock shares, valuations of how much your company is worth, crypto or the like. One day this guy was worth billions (allegedly), the very next day that has all gone "poof" and nobody knows where. I don't think Bezos, Musk, etc. are really billionaires as it's all based on notional worth. Yeah, Amazon is valued at X whatever, but as everyone admits, try selling those shares and the price will plummet so the X whatever becomes Y, and then Z.
Crypto in general. It's all fairy gold that turns to leaves in the morning. Now it looks like a lot of people sank real money into this guy's playset bank/trading firm, which he then used to try and shore up the holes in the dike, and it's all gone missing and nobody knows where but you ain't getting your life savings back ever, dude.
EA in general, but I've bitched and moaned about them several times over several years before. Short version: when you think you are smarter than everyone else who tried doing charity over the course of human history and this time you are going to do it right, then that old saw about pride going before a fall applies. And now you've had your name blackened by association with this débacle.
The whole rationalist/rationalist-adjacent community setup, where Bankman-Fried and his friends/colleagues/employees arose or were associated with. They were very young, they considered themselves very smart, and hot diggity if you don't want to sound like a cult, then maybe you shouldn't be doing shit that can be mistaken for a cult. Too much money, too much intellectual vanity, and belief in the new bright shiny stuff like crypto because it was so modern and involved computers and high-level maths, not enough experience or old dumb dinosaurs on board to go "wait a minute now, what are we doing again?" so when it all started to go down the plughole, he panicked, did dumb shit to try and cover it, didn't tell anyone, and seems to have hoped that magically someone would pull a rabbit out of the hat to save the whole edifice. (Whoever this Chinese guy is, he seems to have played the whole game perfectly to take out a competitor). Naturally, because they all thought they were Really Smart, they acted like gamblers throwing good money after bad just like ordinary swindlers and embezzlers: if I move the money from this account to that account to cover the hole, I'll make it all back and can replace the missing funds before anyone knows. No, they couldn't.
Holy crap, guys, I do mean it about the cult stuff. Or a Ponzi scheme. This wasn't a house of cards, this was an entire real estate development project of cards.
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