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naraburns  nihil supernum  2yr ago (text post)   32352 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of December 5, 2022

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Had he not done that Alameda probably would have gone bankrupt, and that probably would have accelerated FTX's bankruptcy, but companies go bankrupt all the time. Now he's looking at prison time, and doesn't seem to be doing himself any favors with respect to avoiding it.

yes, he could have just stopped 2 years ago and still made a lot of money. exchanges are very profitable business due to fees.

he could have just stopped 2 years ago and still made a lot of money

Except he couldn't, because that wouldn't have fit the narrative he constructed. I do think, and this is just personal opinion, that he very badly wants validation from Mommy and Daddy. So having to quit the big huge money-printing operation he put together because it was unsustainable would be admitting failure, he wouldn't get the same praise that he was getting from everyone about being a genius whiz-kid and world saviour, and Mommy and Daddy would have been so disappointed (once again?).

I do think there is a ton of ego involved; he seems to have been the stereotypical Smart Kid who was expected to go on to bigger and better things, but ended up with a finance job like just another schlub with an MBA and not all those Big Brain MIT graduates:

Highly mathletic, SBF breezed through Crystal Springs Uplands, an elite prep school in Hillsborough, California. Though he earned top marks, he kept to himself, spending most of his free time playing computer games (StarCraft, League of Legends) and a trading card game, Magic: The Gathering. But at MIT he found his tribe: fellow pledges at Epsilon Theta, a coed fraternity of supergeeks similarly interested in Magic, and video games. Thetans are fond of debating math, physics, computer science, linguistics, philosophy and logic problems—for fun—at alcohol-free parties.

...After SBF quit Jane Street, he moved back home to the Bay Area, where Will MacAskill had offered him a job as director of business development at the Centre for Effective Altruism. He rented a modest apartment near CEA HQ in Berkeley, he still had a couple of weeks to just explore before his job started. This was his first vacation in, well, ever. In the years working at Jane, SBF had never taken any significant time off.

He spent his vacation just soaking everything in: It was his first time in the Bay Area as an adult, and he found his home turf unexpectedly thrilling. It was where all the new technology was. It was where all the startups were. It was where the bulk of the EA community was starting to congregate. SBF ended up hanging out a lot with his younger brother Gabe, who was living in an EA commune on nearby Stuart Street.

I do wonder about his brother Gabe, was he the Favourite Child and Sam was always trying to out-do his younger brother? But that is wandering into the territory of armchair psychology, and I don't even have a first aid certificate 😀

If you want a look at where the FTX money was going (including all that Guarding Against Pandemics charity work), take a gander at this. Oh yeah: hosting cocktail parties for both political parties, which Carrick Flynn would probably have attended had he been voted in, that's really effective charity in action right there and not just one more lobbying outfit as I prognosticated EA efforts would become if they shifted to political meddling!

EDIT: If that last reads as unkind, well EA has come a long way from its Drowning Child guilt-tripping days; now you don't worry about replacing your expensive suit, you buy a $3 million dollar DC townhouse to host cocktail parties instead of frittering donations away on malaria nets.

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