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Notes -
I Accidentally Got SBF To Admit to Fraud
So...SBF is simply a moron. I've been trying to resist that conclusion, but now I'm asking myself why I bothered.
In the link above Youtuber Coffeezilla drops into a call with SBF (a second time! Why is he still taking calls??) and proceeds to basically get him to admit that funds were comingled.
Coffeezilla noted that SBF always deflects the issue by arguing that some accounts were trading on margin and so were deliberately open to being used by Alameda, unlike regular accounts. So literally all he does - and all any journalist needed to do - was just keep drilling down on whether the FTX only customers who weren't doing that could still get their funds. SBF obviously has no answer. Even worse, he basically screws himself by admitting that they had one withdrawal process which was him admitting to comingling funds.
So...the guy is just a moron. He doesn't have some grand legal plan to plead negligence or ignorance. He has a half-baked plan based on the idea that everyone is dumber than him (despite multiple counterexamples) and he falls apart the minute anyone puts any thought into his answers.
The entire video is actually a good look at how a journalist should view someone like SBF and his word games and deflections and how they should strategize to defeat them (and the end has the sort of pure joy at skewering the target that I bet all journalists feel but are too dignified to admit when picking up their Pulitzer). And this is coming from someone who thought the idea of people like Coffeezilla being "journalists" laughable.
But he has legitimately done the best job of questioning SBF out of everyone (Stefanopoulos was the close second)
The Stefanopoulos interview (~8 minutes long) was so bad. I have my biases as a lawyer but a good interview should absolutely feel like a cross-examination, and Stefanopoulos did a great job at repeatedly hammering the same questions SBF kept evading. You can see the dude's gears working in the video as he keeps stumbling into pincer attacks.
The thing that gets me about the whole situation is how boring and predictable the whole thing is. It's a pretty straightforward situation that's done in many an attorney or financial advisor or any other position that involves having custody of other people's money—taking loans you shouldn't be taking. So FTX or one of its associated companies had a lot of its own funds invested in crypto and when crypto tanked they didn't have enough cash to meet their debt obligations so they "borrowed" money from people who invested with them and when that wasn't enough, and they didn't have enough new money coming in, they still couldn't meet their obligations and the chickens came home to roost and now a ton of people are out a lot of money.
And in a company as large as FTX there's simply no excuse. No, he wasn't a Bernie Madoff intentionally running a pyramid scheme, but that would have at least made more sense. Instead he decided to loan customer funds to Alameda Research, which is bad even if the money is paid back with interest, but is catastrophic if the whole company goes under in the meantime. 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.
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:
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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