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I know I keep on about this, but what in the ever-lovin' heck is Bankman-Fried doing? All those jokes about meth aren't looking like jokes anymore.
First, he claims he donated as much to the Republicans as he did to the Democrats. Okay, I knew that FTX donated to both sides, but (1) I thought it was Ryan Salame who did it and (2) the donations to the Democrats were larger. I realise that political donations are a matter of self-interest, and he/they/it supported Republicans who were crypto-friendly or working on regulation of that industry:
(He also donated to Beto O'Rourke which, with backing Carrick Flynn's campaign, just demonstrates he has no instincts for no-hopers in a race).
But he's really going mask-off if he were just lying/spoofing/being a con man all along:
He is also running his mouth off to every reporter who rings him up, doesn't he have lawyers telling him to shut the hell up? Or is he trying to muddy the waters even further, claiming (relative) poverty and remorse? I have no idea at this stage if he has any coherent plan in place or is just doing stream-of-consciousness rambling. I sort of get the impression, though, that he's beginning to like his infamy; after all, if you can't win at being the best, being the worst is a sort of victory instead. Not just any common fraud, he's a really big deal. Maybe this is why he's talking about how all the EA and Democrat supporting stuff was a sham, what you 'have' to say to get people to listen to you; he's painting himself as this larger-than-life rogue and scoundrel.
Says he's down to his last $100,000.
Says he has no idea what happened to the Twitter shares Alameda Research bought.
Yeah, I'm leaning more into my "force of habit" theory since apparently him being less restrained with a journalist wasn't a fluke: the guy's entire business model was crafting a good story. He legitimately may not be able to stop or, given that he really has nothing else coming to him, may not even want to.
But, of course, now he doesn't get to be the wunderkind so he's trying different faces, including the "super blunt guy who lays it out as it is, even if it sucks" (even though he actually doesn't and is probably still lying). When the chips are down the narcissist will take negative attention if they can't have adoration.
To steal a line from The Shield about a similar situation: "It's pathetic. How typical you are. As soon as you're caught, you try to be special". Except he had a head start on that.
Because I honestly can't model the reasoning that got him to this place otherwise.
Yeah. His parents are lawyers, he has (or had) legal representation, somebody surely told him "Shut your yap until you see the inside of a court, and let us try to make sure that never happens".
To me, it's beginning to look as if the motivating reason for the big philanthropy and making billions was simple attention-seeking. The dithyrambs about how he was raised utilitarian never impressed me (rather the opposite) and it may well be that paging Herr Doktor Freud is what we need. That he grew up with a need for parental approval (due to the whole goddamn "how are you making the world better?" utilitarianism dinned into him at the dinner table) and that meeting or being steered towards MacAskill was the impetus towards "Hey, I can change the world by doing Big Important Philanthropy! (And then Mommy and Daddy will love and respect me finally)". But in order to do that, he had to make lots of money. And in order to do that, he had to find some way of getting rich quick (because the slow slog of "work until you make a ton of money" wasn't fast enough or big enough; he wasn't some tech mogul with a start-up that could make a fast fortune), so he jumped aboard crypto and found a way of getting quick returns from arbitrage.
But when that dried up, what was he to do? And here we are today, after he decided that playing handball with funding was how to do it. And here he is, still attention-seeking, still craving notice, by giving interviews to every hog, dog and divil when the sensible thing would be to shut up and keep shutting up.
Yup, when you are in a hole, stop digging is such a terrible advice ...
TBF, if you've already dug your own grave, "stop digging" just means "lay down and die". Sometimes all you can do is keep going and hope to reach Australia.
Calling BS on this one. He stole 3 Billion dollars. That is more than enough for buying a whole new identity and living the good life under it. Also he should have prepared it like years ago.
I never understood the bernie madoffs of the world. The moment you steal fuck you money - choose favorite color of women you like, and build an escape route to where they are aplenty in the third world under new identity.
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Where are you coming from if it's more deadly than Australia?!?
The banking industry after you just lost rich people a lot of money is more deadly than any giant spider riding a kangaroo lol.
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