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This is flogging the FTX crash horse, which if not expired yet is certainly not in the best of health, but I'm currently reading the Chapter 11 declaration by the guy put in charge of putting Humpty Dumpty back together again, and it is prime entertainment.
He is not impressed with how FTX and its web of companies was run, and he makes no bones about it. The recurring refrain all through is "However, because this balance sheet was produced while the Debtors were controlled by Mr. Bankman-Fried, I do not have confidence in it, and the information therein may not be correct as of the date stated" for all the balance sheets he's quoting. He was the guy put in to handle Enron when it was wound up, and he says (reading between the lines and you don't need to do much of that) that the FTX mess is even worse than that:
He throws shade everywhere:
(Translation: Bankman-Fried is a lying liar)
Ouch. As if Zuckerberg didn't have enough problems with the Metaverse already. Is this really the kind of PR he wants associated with it? 😁
What really interested me in all this, though, was the interview/transcript of a Twitter conversation with Bankman-Fried that Kelsey Piper published in Vox the other day. I have no idea what Bankman-Fried is trying to achieve here, but it's pretty plain that he is in a state of denial and is not accepting any responsibility for the eventual outcome. He admits he fucked up, but then shifts into blaming others, including his co-founders, and everyone who advised him to file for bankruptcy. Reading Ray's declaration, it sounds less like "I was advised" and more like "I was told do this or else", but whatever; now he is spinning a story (and I don't know if he believes this himself or was just trying it out on Piper) that if he had toughed it out and refused to file for bankruptcy he would have been able to cover most of the debts and settle up within a month or two:
Considering, according to the filing, that amongst the lawyers he consulted about that, one of them was his dad - ouch again. Sorry Dad, Sonny-boy is lumping you in with the bad advisors who led him astray. But he is in a state of delusion that he could have fixed this, or can fix it. He still can't admit he messed up because he was too greedy and not as smart as he thought he was, and all that rationalist woo about risk and utility maximisation was only a cover for bad decisions and fraud.
I would definitely recommend reading this document to get a picture of what was going on. There is no way, unless he's trying to set up for an insanity plea or operating under impairment due to drugs/mental health problems, that Bankman-Fried can deny it was all down to him. He pretty much owned or controlled every entity that was going on, it was him and literally about three others who made all the decisions, and they seem to have treated the interlocking parts as their own private piggy-bank (e.g. "three loans by Alameda Research Ltd.: one to Mr. Bankman-Fried, of $1 billion; one to Mr. Singh, of $543 million; and one to Ryan Salame, of $55 million"). Then read the Vox article to see how he is admitting all his EA/altruism talk was basically telling them what they wanted to hear so he'd be popular and well-liked and they'd trust him, because getting people to like you is winning and winning is all that counts.
And this set-up was having billions of dollars in investment funding thrown at it, and it was less well-organised than a school bake sale when it came to handling and keeping track of what money was coming in and where it was going.
I had always wondered what would happen if you hooked up 4chan boys with tumblr girls. It turns out that it creates an autism singularity with the power to destroy global financial markets. Allegedly there’s a sex tape set to be released tomorrow. A week ago I would have dismissed this as utter horseshit, but at this point I wouldn’t be surprised. We know their cybersecurity was godawful, so if a sex tape exists, it’s getting leaked.
I precommit not to watch the sex tape, nor discuss Bankman's intimate life, beyond what has been said, unless it has clear relation to the central issue.
Bankman's actions, for all their clown world texture, have been serious and highly damaging to a large proportion of people I care about, and he (together with Kelsey Piper and other do-gooders) keeps doing damage and saving the face of the project I believe has largely motivated his actions, which is to say, EA-directed centralized «global governance». It may be that he'll be deemed a hero in the timeline where they succeed. And even if this accusation is unfounded, he is not a kid but a major scoundrel.
I refuse to let this devolve into a parasocial relationship with wacky awkward «polyamorous» autistic microblogging celebrities.
Was the relationship between Justinian and Theodora irrelevant? Of course it’s relevant. The top two figures responsible for this whole fiasco were in a sexual relationship with one another (and possibly others). That matters. It affects incentives. It affects decision making. One of the criticisms of EA is that it’s just a front for nerds to get laid. The fact that the people involved may in fact have been nerds just trying to get laid is a factor that must be taken into account for a proper analysis.
Theodora was a hell of a lot more competent (and allegedly more attractive) than what this lot got up to. I don't think Caroline Ellison actually did much more than "Okay Sam, you want me to sign off on the billion dollar 'loan' to you? Sure thing!" since the bankruptcy filing by John J. Ray is clear that Bankman-Fried was the guy in ultimate control of everything (and boy is Mr. Ray not one bit impressed by Bankman-Fried's comments as reported in Vox):
I don't imagine Theodora did a lot of "Oh Justinian, whatever you want is fine with me" in ruling the empire.
Everyone seems to be dismissing the idea that Caroline had any influence on Sam. Is it because people think she’s ugly? No one wants to admit it, but she is in fact “nerd hot”. I don’t want to start unironic normies-will-never-understand-the-thrill-of-pinning-the-weaselposting, but I will if I have to.
I am ashamed to say I understand that reference.
Whatever influence she had on Sam, it does not seem to have extended to stopping him from doing what he was doing, or objecting to it, or leaving the entire project. We don't know all the facts, and what part Ellison and others played is going to be very important. But she was, in name at least, CEO of Alameda Research. She seems to have gone along with being a catspaw for him:
While Bankman-Fried exercised ultimate control and only a few people were permitted to do things along with him, that still leaves a lot of "Why did you do things this way? Why didn't you have structures in place? Did you know what was going on? How could you not know, given the tight links between your firm and FTX?" for her to answer.
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