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Culture War Roundup for the week of January 9, 2023

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He wasn't given soft media coverage in general "elsewhere", as argued here. Even from the NYT, from the dealbook summit

SORKIN: there are two ways to view what has happened at FTX. ... the generous view is that you are a young man who made a series of terrible, terrible, very, very bad decisions. The less generous view is that you have committed a massive fraud. That this is a Ponzi scheme, a manipulation of the system.

SORKIN: One of the letters I got, I want to read to you, Sam ... The subject line is “Sam Bankman-Fried stole $2 million from me.” He says: “Andrew, can you please ask S.B.F. why he decided to steal my life savings and the $10 billion more from customers to give to his hedge fund, Alameda? Can you ask him why his hedge fund was leveraging long all of these S coins?” ... “Please ask him if he thinks what happened was fraud.” ... What do you tell this — this man?

And the interviewer asked many pointed questions, letting him talk a lot, incriminating himself even more.

SORKIN: What are your lawyers telling you right now? Are they suggesting this is a good idea for you to be speaking? BANKMAN-FRIED: No. They are very much not.

SORKIN: How concerned are you about criminal liability at this point? BANKMAN-FRIED: I don’t think that — obviously, I don’t personally think that I have — I think the real answer is it’s not — it sounds weird to say it, but I think the real answer is it’s not what I’m focusing on.

whoops!

he's playing the crowd. had he asked softballs he probably would have been booed

I think he honestly has convinced himself that he has or had A Plan to save the day, but he was rushed and coerced and bullied into agreeing to file for bankruptcy and hand over to John Jay etc. Therefore it's not his fault things went south, he would have fixed it all given enough time. So he's not a criminal, so why should he think of himself as a criminal?

Ignoring all the legal advice to shut the frick up and giving interviews to everyone who asks and starting up a Substack is him trying to justify himself to the public. If he just talks enough, he'll explain how it was all bad luck and terrible mistakes, but he can still salvage it if they just give control back to him. (That's never gonna happen, but he's living in the spacious lands of Denial).