Patrick Boyle's three-part (so far) Youtube series on FTX is already a pretty good miniseries on the subject. Since it's running in real-time, not everything is going to hold up, i.e. does SBF / FTX actually have $100 million in Twitter? See ongoing froth:
The scale of political giving and media donating involved is certainly curious, worthy of more exposure. Somehow I doubt that's an angle Amazon is interested in exploring, i.e. Bezos seems to do a lot of that kind of thing as well, but who knows?
SBF will next week speak at New York Time conference, together with Mark Zuckerberg, Volodymyr Zelenskyy, Mike Pence, Benjamin Netanyahu, Ben Affleck, Eric Adams, and others. And yeah he is apparently still coming.
Related: Apple is reportedly nearing a deal for the rights to Michael Lewis’ upcoming book on Sam Bankman-Fried and FTX.[^1] Lewis is the author of The Big Short and Moneyball.
Are you seriously suggesting that it’s a coincedence and not deliberate action on the side of Lewis? It’s not like there has been a shortage of people being perplexed by FTX/Alameda’s ability to seemingly print money, and it’s not like he wouldn’t be able to smell a potentially great story ahead of time.
That’s a good point, but a movie doesn’t have to be a blockbuster to be good or even successful. Plenty of movies have tackled similar niche areas. It’s not like Flash Boys would need a massive budget and probably couldn’t even successfully use big name actors.
There have been repeated attempts to get a movie out of it so I assume there must be some good reason for the repeated failure.
Of course they are, when you or I steal 1000$ we go to prison, when a Bankman steals billions of dollars they make a series to tell you how it was a mistake and he only had good intentions and the fact he donated tens of millions to the president's campaign and even donated to those investigating him right now, is purely a coincidence and has nothing to do with him not going to prison.
Cases are not built in a week. Especially white collar cases where they have to prove intent and they can't just use drugs they found on their person. They have to prove beyond a reasonable doubt that SBF devised any scheme or artifice to defraud, or for obtaining money or property by means of false or fraudulent pretenses, representations, or promises, transmits or causes to be transmitted by means of wire, radio, or television communication in interstate or foreign commerce, any writings, signs, signals, pictures, or sounds for the purpose of executing such scheme or artifice. Plus they probably need records in the Bahamas and international legal cooperation is very slow. Literally any prosecutor would beg to take this case because it would be very good for their career.
For some reason a lot of people think SBF had super connections that will let him get away with crimes. A lot of it reads as very politically partisan (he gave money to Democrats therefor they won't prosecute) and not based in reality.
Epstein has been investigated for 20 years, during one of his trials the judge's son was killed by a pizza delivery guy, assassinated after opening the door, Epstein was only caught in 2019.
In the 2008 crisis only one guy went to prison, and he was an Egyptian.
In the HSBC carter money laundering investigations, no one went to prison.
Kerpeles (Mt Gox) didn't go to prison, Michinsky (Celsius) didn't go to prison, and they didn't donate to the current president or members of the board investigating them.
On the other hand both Do Kwon and Kumbhani are fugitives (Terra and Bitconnect).
Now look at who are SBF's and Ellison's parents and who they worked with, and look at who took donations from SBF's mom before FTX and who took money from SBF, and look at what the media are writing about SBF and how they never seem to mention the words fraud or crime or any of these, and if you don't want to put 2 and 2 together after this, then well... there are people who believe in ghosts and others who believe in UFO's and vampires and Santa, so you don't have it that bad, but please realize that your inability to see the truth when it stands 2 inches in front of your face (I assume blindness so I won't call you a shill), does not mean that the truth is not standing 2 inches in front of your face (as I said we're all humans and some believe in gremlins and fairies so it happens to anyone).
>politically partisan
French so I really don't care about American democrats or republicans, and SBF and his guys donated to both so..
Epstein clearly had some kind of blackmail or leverage. He should have gone to jail earlier.
I'm not sure why you think people should have gone to jail in 2008. It was people doing a shitty job. That's not illegal. Similarly, MtGox was hacked. And, IIRC, people loaned Celsius money they then lost, not embezzled.
HSBC seems horrible, but I'm not sure they were able to identify individuals who violated the law beyond a shadow of doubt. It was one of those "everyone can point the finger at someone else" things. But, more importantly, they were still a financially large/successful company. So they could pay a fine and continue operating with new rules in place. Part of paying that fine is an agreement protecting the executives. I agree that happens too often.
I don't see how SBF fits into those. He doesn't seem to have blackmail material. It's not like everyone at FTX can claim it was someone else who did it (he's admitting it to reporters!) because it's a giant enterprise. It's not like FTX cannot be shut down because it's too big to fail/too big to jail.
But, yeah, the news doesn't report people are accused of crimes before formal indictments. Formal indictments wait until the charges are in place. Right now, they are still reconstructing just how much money SBF stole.
But I'll put my money where my mouth is. I'll totally bet that he goes to jail.
I'm sure many people did illegal things in 2008, in HSBC, in MtGox, etc. and I'm also sure SBF will not go to jail.
As I said before that, we will be given by the media a good enough reason why he didn't do anything wrong.
>the news doesn't report people are accused of crimes before formal indictments
Did you seriously just say this? The media spent years saying false things about multiple politicians with 0 evidence.
Like come on at this point if you can't see the corruption then you never will but it's become so obvious it's like they're not even trying to hide it.
I agree someone broke the law at HSBC, although I doubt they could identify who. I doubt anyone broke any law in the economic collapse of 2008 where such law breaking was a major contributor to the collapse (Im sure some people used the chaos to steal money for instance). Other than the hackers, im not sure what law you think anyone involved in MtGox broke.
I'm willing to bet money SBF ends up in prison.
I've never heard the NEWSmedia accuse a politician of violating a specific law with zero evidence. Any examples of it done flagrantly? (I'm sure some reasonable errors slipped through). But even then, it's purposefully much harder for political actors to prove libel or slander suits.
I agree that Epstein should have been stopped sooner and the fact he wasn’t is pure corruption, but he apparently had blackmail material on people in high places. Note that the judge’s son was killed after Epstein died, so if it was related to that case, it was not to protect Epstein himself.
I haven’t heard any claims that SBF has blackmail material. The donations he made are now embarrassing for their recipients and he has no capacity to make future donations. I think he’s going to jail, it will just take some time for justice to work.
The wheels of the law grind slowly. Look at Elizabeth Holmes. The WSJ article that started her downfall came out in 2015. And she's still walking around free (for now).
Holmes is an interesting case because she got the opposite treatment as SBF: the press started running negative stories almost immediately while the tech industry was still neutral-to-defensive.
There were a lot of softball fluff pieces on her after the allegations. There was ongoing boosterism from the "lean in" crowd who never understood the impossibility of a sophomore dropout having expertise in biology, engineering, and business administration.
Once Bad Blood was published. It took a few years for the dam to break, but once it did the rest of the media piled on quick.
The FTX dam broke a few weeks ago and so far the media generally seems unenthusiastic about covering the story. Most people I've mentioned it to haven't heard of it yet; that's the media's fault.
> I don't think most people would recognize Elizabeth Holmes or Theranos.
I tend to agree. I've never spoke of theranos or EH with friends or more specifically my wife. The other day she brings it up...
"What do you know about Elizabeth Holmes? She just had a baby and is going to jail for 15 years"
The pregnancy / child / jail is what made my wife interested. I told her that I didn't have much information on the subject other than the company said they could do x, pulled in a ton of cash, and couldn't do x. She then proceeded to watch every documentary / book / article she could find on EH and Theranos.
It was the pregnancy topic that made my wife interested. Not the amount of money or fraud, pregnancy which is something she can relate to.
> SBF is walking around freely and giving interviews.
If I were the prosecutors, I would let him keep hanging himself with on the record interviews for as long as possible. Everything he says seems to make the case easier to win.
In general, we don't put people in jail before they are convicted unless we think they will pose a further danger or flee. We wait until after they have been proven guilty to lock people up to punish them.
He's already being prevented from leaving the country (note, the country is the Bahamas where he had been living for years). He doesn't have access to FTX's accounts. It seems like it's harmless to leave him out until proven guilty.
The FBI and the Bahamanian government are still trying to figure out how to timeshare who interviews him when. The prosecutors are still working on understanding the full scope of damage done. Heck, there are lawsuits moving forward on where the primary forum for FTX's bankruptcy is, let alone who gets to throw him in jail first.
Keep in mind that the CEO brought in to clean up after Enron was also brought in to clean up FTX and try to organize the bankruptcy. The first thing he said to the court was he needed more time because this has the worst books he's ever seen and he doesn't even know what FTX owns. Like, he cannot find the paperwork and is trying to reconstruct some of their ownership from "third-party materials".
At least in the US, there are laws against multiple prosecutions. So if the prosecutors came at him with an easy case, they could accidentally give him immunity from the other related cases. So they have to build a big one before they actually prosecute. Imagine the uproar if he was prosecuted and punished for stealing $10MM and that kept him from being prosecuted for the rest of everything. Or if the prosecutors hinged everything on his cryptographic signed orders and it turns out the keys were taped to his monitor and, boom, reasonable doubt, so he walks.
It takes time. That's frustrating. But that little bit more time now had better be enjoyed. He's not getting out of jail for decades once he goes in.
> In general, we don't put people in jail before they are convicted unless we think they will pose a further danger or flee. We wait until after they have been proven guilty to lock people up to punish them.
We publicly crucify people all the time, even when no crime has been committed. Just look at the treatment of Elon Musk versus SBF. SBF commits likely crime, gets almost no negative press. Elon Musk buys a company and people go onto national news and declare that he needs to be investigated for every crime under the sun.
If people were consistent I'd be more okay with how SBF is being treated, but they're clearly not. As SBF donated heavily to media organizations it's obvious that they're treating him with kid gloves because of those donations.
Let's hope he physically shows up at the New York Times dealbook summit [0] in person out of sheer stupidity and hubris and makes the job easy for the feds.
I hope they ditch any attempt at making it serious or realistic. Just have it Silicon Valley style and every episode starts with some wacky attempt at making a big scoring trade which ultimately fails and the episode ends with someone going. Don’t worry, we only lost 200mil, but we’ve gotten 400mil user deposits in the same time, all we need is one great trade and we can cover the whole!
Repeat and rinse for every new episode, until people get tired of the series and they cancel it, which then leads to the final episode where it all blows up, SBF sits down looking defeated, says sorry and then some financier goes, that’s alright, honest mistake, here’s 300mil let’s start up FTX2 fade to black.
I thought it was pretty crazy while ago when people were discussing that Tschernobyl series as if it were real life and not a fictional(ized) tv show. Much rather have a documentary than this situation where the fact that it's fiction gives the producers enough plausible deniability about inaccuracies/lies/biases while still being basically real in many people's minds.
So this isn’t really a big story yet, is it? I’m staying at my parents’ house for thanksgiving and when I asked them about it they both had no idea what I was talking about. My mom faintly remembered something about some crypto guy or something, but “FTX” didn’t ring a bell. This was very surprising to me because they are older and watch the news on television every day. I think their schedule is fox news from 5-6, then local news, then ABC world news (then jeopardy).
Oh well. I guess an international ponzi scheme involving politicians and journalists just isn’t newsworthy.
> an international ponzi scheme involving politicians and journalists
We have no evidence any politicians or journalists were compromised. (Journalists at no-name outlets writing puff pieces is unfortunately banal.) That makes this a crypto story, and one whose victims are particularly unsympathetic at that. Those have a niche. But they aren’t mainstream.
> Politicians were involved through donations. Whether to call that "compromised" is left as an exercise to the reader.
Plenty of people hopelessly throw money at politicians. Most get no remuneration. Again, there is a paranoid subculture that assumes every donation brings legislative power, and for them, this is a relevant story. Most do not because, in most cases, it does not.
> there is a paranoid subculture that assumes every donation brings legislative power
And there is a certain class of people so naive that they think any individual would give hundreds of millions to a politician with nothing but just good intentions, and that any politician would warrant such a donation purely through being outstanding and Jo able politicians.
> any individual would give hundreds of millions to a politician with nothing but just good intentions
Of course I don’t. They’re just raised outside power. They think money buys influence through donations. It doesn’t. They’re being played, and there will eternally be a joker in their seat.
> people throw tens or hundreds of dollars. Not tens of millions of dollars. Big difference
Nope. I’ve been close to New York, California and Wyoming federal politics for a short bit. There is always someone throwing big money in a bill market. They get suave dinners and photo shoots. But nobody takes what they’re saying seriously. Enough is done, in private, to keep the dollars rolling. But for powerful incumbents, there are more big donors than swing senators. (The non-swing guys can’t push the margin. But they still get dollars, because the point is the photo shoot.)
So, you think the second largest donor isn't going to get favorable treatment? This is after we know that multiple congressmen already tried to block the SEC from looking into FTX too closely? And after FTX was allowed to acquire a stake in a FDIC member bank at a inflated valuation?
It's not a big story yet because the contagion is confined to crypto and there are no convictions yet.
But SBF should be thankful for Musk. Twitter's upheaval is more important to most people, and that seems to be sucking up most of the "look at this business" attention. And Musk was a bigger deal beforehand. (I mean, Musk is still a bigger deal. But I just meant in terms of as a multiplier on the underlying story.)
I would say 100% of my engineering circles, 50% of my non-engineering-but-I-work-in-tech circles, and 30% of my other circles are familiar with the story. Incredibly anecdotal of course and I imagine less than 10% of the general population has been exposed at this point.
As someone who doesn't really follow all this closely, it comes off as yet another case of crypto people scamming eachother. Most people don't really care what happens in the crypto world.
It'll be interesting to see the angle they take. The media portrayal of FTX, thus far, seems to be very biased. With suspicion of fraud from huge well respected entities being all but buried.
Can’t wait for the final episode in the FTX serious where out of nowhere SBF suddenly stabs Carolina Ellison and her pet iguana decides to take out its rage by destroying her office chair.
> we don't even know 10% of what's likely to come out
There are narrative solutions to this. For example, telling the tale from the perspective of a fictional low-level employee. They start out with the narrative we were all fed. And then gradually discover the truth. (Whether they get corrupted or turn whistleblower would be a stylistic choice, though it’s telling no FTX employee blew any whistles.)
People sometimes ask me "so are you writing a book on Twitter?" No one's yet asked the same thing about FTX, but I'm sure that's coming.
This is something every agent and every producer is on top of like flies on shit. The chance for someone with no big-name access or connections of getting anywhere with it is about zero.
How about filming a billion dollar TV series about FTX (plus some teasers about future Bitfinex crash) and a parallel reality show about filming FTX TV series and where those money will go :)
My guess is that it's a reference to the stories about polyamory and the dating merry-go-round that was reported amongst SBF's inner circle that lived in the Bahamas penthouse.
https://www.businessinsider.com/sam-bankman-fried-100-millio...
The scale of political giving and media donating involved is certainly curious, worthy of more exposure. Somehow I doubt that's an angle Amazon is interested in exploring, i.e. Bezos seems to do a lot of that kind of thing as well, but who knows?