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naraburns  nihil supernum  1yr ago (text post)   30433 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of November 21, 2022

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Author, journalist Andrew Ross Sorkin plans to interview SBF on Nov. 30th

https://twitter.com/andrewrsorkin/status/1595517635441090565

SBF confirms

https://twitter.com/SBF_FTX/status/1595512579417378837

Even though SBF limited his replies to only people he follows, he is still getting trashed in his comments. Others are livid as well.

Does SBF deserve a platform despite being presumably a major fugitive? Is this ethical on the part of Sorkin?

Why is SBF still free or at least not in trouble?

Regarding the second item, I am guessing the feds are still in the evidence gathering stage. The feds cannot just issue an arrest unless they have enough evidence to build a case that with a near 100% certainty will lead to a conviction or a plea. Kenneth Lay of Enron for example was indicted in June 2004, nearly 3 years after Enron's bankruptcy.

Insane to me that SBF is speaking as publicly as he has been. I get criminal law is different if you are rich (formally), but I thought rule #1 was don’t talk to anyone.

Seemingly he doesn't listen to his own lawyers, so there's no shutting him up and stopping him from digging the hole deeper. He also seems to be trying to rescue his reputation, so he's still maintaining he could have sorted it all out, except... people jumped ship, persuaded him to apply for bankruptcy, didn't keep him informed, pulled the rug out from under FTX, etc. etc. etc.

He never did anything wrong, except maybe be a bit careless with paperwork, and he could have made it all work because there were billions in investment due to come in and if only that pesky run hadn't started, so on and so forth.

I do think he's at least half a fraudster and swindler, but he also seems to be half delusional; believing so firmly in his own genius and talent, and good intentions, that while he may say "I fucked up", deep down he doesn't believe it.

He got too many arse-licking interviews and articles, like that Sequoia one, praising how he was this philanthropic genius who was going to make crypto the currency everyone used, and infinite profits forever and ever amen, that he can't face reality: he wasn't that smart, some of it was down to pure luck, and he is a swindler.

The guy was used to lapping up crap like this as his due, of course he can't accept that it's all nonsense:

In 2017, when he was merely 25, SBF collapsed the so-called kimchi premium, an anomalous delta between the price of Bitcoin in much of Asia and its price in the rest of the world. It was a daring feat of arbitrage—SBF is the only trader known to have pulled this off in any meaningful way—one which quickly made him a billionaire and achieved the status of legend.

Among Wall Street’s financial elite, SBF’s Bitcoin arb is mentioned in the same hushed tones as Paul Tudor Jones’s 1987 shorting of the entire American economy, or George Soros’s 1992 raid on the Bank of England, or John Paulson’s 2008 bet against subprime mortgages.

SBF learned to trade at Jane Street, an under-the-radar high-frequency trading shop in New York’s financial district. The firm recruits from the smartest students in math and physics at MIT. SBF, a physics major at MIT, had interned at Jane Street in the summer of 2013 and was one of the few such recruits invited back for a full-time job. He was put to work as a market maker trading global ETFs—more difficult than simply making a market for a single stock, in the same way Tri-Dimensional Chess is more difficult than the bog-standard variety.

Dear God in Heaven, no wonder the guy thought he was the Messiah, given a steady diet of this sort of flattery.

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