This article has some really great stuff in it but I wish the author would cut the flowery bullshit and most importantly stop trying to make the piece about themselves. I do not care about how much YOU cringed, about the "holy fucking shit" you wrote on YOUR notes, etc. So many journalists nowadays think THEY are the story. Stick to the real story, keep yourself out of it.
It’s strange how the writer seems to excuse themselves the cliche of saying “like a hot knife through butter” by jazzing it up. “A hot buzzsaw through a butter cow” would just make a huge mess everywhere, not get to the heart of the issue quickly. Mixing metaphors isn’t good writing, and getting them wrong makes for very poor style, but the writer (even though I enjoyed this article) seems to consider themselves a great stylist despite not thinking about the implications of this metaphoric language.
Surely there’s a lot of competition and rush to publish news on this trial. Changing around the metaphors might not be the highest priority of any editors.
Don't see an issue with that here, she was present in the courtroom so the personal narrative is warranted, and I don't see that got in the way at all. Adds a human element. With that being said, you can copy and paste the article in ChatGPT and have it render the way you want. What a time to be alive!
There are very few direct quotes from SBF in the piece. In fact there are very few direct quotes from the prosecutor, the author preferring to summarise them and leaving us to guess as to how close they got.
For example,
> To each of those questions, Bankman-Fried replied, “No, but I might have.”
> And then Sassoon played a clip from FTX’s official podcast. You are never going to guess what he said on the pod.
I'm not here to guess. Give us a direct quote. (The questions were also not quoted, so they don't provide a direct quote either).
The author clearly hates SBF, which is fair, but got in the way of the facts. I don't care that they personally dislike him and it takes away from the story but more importantly makes the piece much less trustworthy.
> Still, he hadn’t made any of those statements under legal oath, had he? Well… that remained true until we reached his Congressional testimony. Bankman-Fried read aloud testimony he’d submitted to Congress: that trading platforms’ obligations included maintaining sufficient liquid assets that customers could withdraw on request. That platforms should ensure appropriate bookkeeping to prevent misuse of customer assets. Ensuring appropriate management of risks. Avoiding conflicts of interest.
> Sassoon immediately followed this with direct messages Bankman-Fried had sent to Kelsey Piper, in which he said this was all just public relations, and “fuck regulators.”
> At this point, my notes simply read “Jesus fucking Christ” in all caps.
New Journalism has been around since the 1960s at least, with Norman Mailer's work. The term originates from Tom Wolfe, around 1972/1973 https://nymag.com/article/tom-wolfe-birth-of-new-journalism-..., but Pulitzer Prize winning journalist Jimmy Breslin said there was nothing "new" about the style, that story-telling had been around as long as language.
I get it: it's not to everyone's taste. That doesn't mean it's not a legitimate and respected form of journalism. There are plenty of sources out there that stick to the "just the facts" form of writing. Whether or not that's more "real story" is debatable.
I'd say that it's rather used as a device for underscoring how important the previous passage was, skimming an article it breaks up the monotonity of recounting so that the reader gets a slight pause to reflect on why the break is there and connect it to the obvious lie just presented before.
Flowery #millenial bullshit is the verges style, and for the not-so-flowery bullshit that SBF and friends did with other peoples money, the snark is welcome.
“I found myself reflecting on how smart the average person is. Maybe they don’t know calculus. Maybe they’ll never read Ulysses. Maybe they can’t code. But they definitely know how to identify bullshit when they see it.”
How could anyone believe this? “Average” people fall for bullshit all the time.
My own intuition is that there are people who call bullshit often enough that they are often wrong and falsely accuse others, and there are people who always assume the best intentions and good faith on other actors but often miss being bullshitted, but that overall the accuracy of both groups in sensing and correctly identifying bullshit or non-bullshit is commonly, universally poor, and accurate bullshit-detection is a skill that is held by a minority. And further, that someone like the author who would assess an average person as being good at detecting bullshit is likely the type that thinks everyone is bullshitting all the time (and so is in fact able to evade being bullshitted with some frequency) but also commonly falsely accuses others of bullshitting when the other is operating honestly (not to say the other might not be stupid, or selfish, or naive, or have different values, etc, but not bullshitting). If you accuse everyone of being full of shit all the time, you might avoid signing up for a predatory loan but you'll probably also burn some bridges socially that if you'd known the truth you would have mended.
> “Average” people fall for bullshit all the time.
Average people fall for bullshit all the time when the charismatic bullshit artist is able to control the whole setting, facts, and narrative.
The rules around a criminal trial are designed in such a way to give prosecutors plenty of opportunity to shut that down. And prosecutors are very, very experienced at playing in that arena - far moreso than even a serial bullshitter is.
Also, even if these defense measures weren't in place, there's a lot of selection bias that goes into being a victim of fraud. It's true that some kind of fraud will work on just about anybody, but no particular kind of fraud is guaranteed to work on a particular person. Jury selection is semi-random, it's not pulled from the pool of 'all people who respond affirmatively to Nigerian Prince spam-emails'.
If we're derailing the discussion anyway, 'knowing' calculus and reading Ulysses is more of a matter of interest than intelligence, and being able to code covers a wide spectrum of skill.
Not really interest more so than opportunity or need. i’m willing to bet more so people know calculus because they had to (for a degree) then they wanted to
It's some gross arrogance to assume that smart people, for whatever the author thinks that even means, won't be tricked by a scam at some point in their lives.
It's one thing to fall for bullshit under the right conditions (like, you want to believe) and another thing to be unable to see the bullshit when a smart prosecutor lays it out for you in detail.
Molly White has been at the court and livestreaming her notes about the trial each evening. Her commentary has been really fun to watch: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w6ZR0rgWB_8
"I research and write critically about the cryptocurrency industry, blockchains, the idea known as "web3", and the tech industry more broadly. I'm a fellow at the Harvard Library Innovation Lab, and an affiliate of the Berkman-Klein Center for Internet & Society.
I run the website Web3 is Going Just Great , where I highlight examples of how cryptocurrencies, web3 projects, and the industry surrounding them are failing to live up to their promises. I also publish a regular newsletter, and have written a series of essays about blockchains."
This is the worst case for a bullshitter - on trial, in a criminal court, under oath, being cross-examined, in front of a jury, with a competent prosecutor who has plenty of evidence.
I think that the defense (and SBF) must have concluded that they were looking at 40 years before he took the stand, and if it ends in him getting 80 does that really make a difference? Maybe, just maybe, he could have swung it - but it looks like he hasn't.
It does make a difference, because the length of your sentence is one of the factors used to determine when you're eligible for parole. That's why you sometimes see people handed ridiculous sentences, like 100+ years.
He thought he could walk away. I suspect his legal team knew that was not happening and the best outcome was damage control and a relative slap on the wrist. The case is too big and public for him to walk.
It's worse than that. He probably could have pled guilty and cut a deal for 10 years of prison time or so. Maybe less, if he cooperated with prosecutors in getting some of the money back. But denying everything, going to trial, trying to evade all responsibility although he was in charge, and blaming everybody else does not go over well with juries.
SBF was never offered a deal. Why would the prosecution help him? They cut deals with his co-conspirators so that they could pin all the blame on SBF. The money is long gone.
All indications are that the DA offered no plea agreement, so the options were to plead guilty and hope to get the lower end of the sentencing range, or take it to trial.
What is amazing is that nobody infiltrated their structure and ran off with the money. There are sophisticated criminal organisations out there that go to much, much more effort to obtain funding. Just to take Hezbollah since it's all over the news recently: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Funding_of_Hezbollah#Latin_Ame...
> What is amazing is that nobody infiltrated their structure and ran off with the money.
How do you know that, on top of whatever SBF, etc., ran off with, embezzled, misdirected, and stole, someone else didn't?
AFAIK, there is clear accounting of misuse of some amount of the funds, but it there's no complete balanced accounting overall, and the whole structure of the FTX network of conpanies was designed to make that impossible.
Security exploitations are oversold in the tech community. Probably out of a desire to be cool and hacker-like. If you wanted hundreds of millions it was there for the taking.
I've only followed the situation casually but I really didn't get this impression. Enormous mess of corporate structure and accounting and no exit plan?
All it took to get almost a million dollars from a customer of a previous employer was to penetrate the e-mail server, collect a list of high-value accounts and a sample billing statement, then to send an e-mail with "updated" banking credentials for a large payment which was coming due.
You also need knowledge and craft to get people in other countries' militaries to spy for you against their home country, yet this is done every day around the world. Compared to that (or compared to pretty much anything) FTX was a joke of an organization.
I'm guessing this is largely just an ass-covering strategy to avoid giving the opposing side an upper hand. If you say "yes" to anything you might give them verbal grounds to convict you of more than they can directly find and show external evidence for.
>
I'm guessing this is largely just an ass-covering strategy to avoid giving the opposing side an upper hand. I
It is, but it looks really, really bad to the jury.
The government needs to convince the jury of a particular version of events, in order to convict you. If you plead the fifth, and just poke holes at that version of events, you might convince the jury that the government failed to meet the standard of conviction.
If you talk and talk, and spin your own version of events (thus giving the prosecution an opportunity to poke holes in it, and show you a liar), but as soon as you're asked about something damaging to you, you clam up, it's not exactly a ringing endorsement of your innocence.
In his case, his guilt is a foregone conclusion, we have him dead to rights. His best bet is just fishing for sympathy to turn a life-time sentence into a 25-year one. His parents' best bet is to have the money that they stole from FTX not get clawed back from them.
I really don't understand what the big deal is with "Do you remember saying 'these precise words'?" - "No, but it sounds like something I could have said." Given how human memory works, that should be the honest answer for everything anyone ever said more than 5 minutes ago. Why does the article turn this into a major gotcha?
Saying that it sounds like something you could have said opens the floodgates to why you could have said it. In this case, "Yeah, I could have admitted to a crime" is a quick way to go to jail.
So is saying you don't recall. Which is why people don't take the stand in their own defense. But scammers like SBF make their living off of being in front of people in hopeless situations, and finding a way to convince them. So of course they want to roll the dice. Which he did.
Unfortunately for scammers like SBF, courtrooms and lawyers are well-equipped to handle most of the tricks that scammers use. So the result of their testifying is like a street tough entering a BJJ gym and learning the hard way that chokeholds actually work.
You don't recall anything you said more than 5 minutes ago? Even from prepared statements in court, or in rehearsed public speaking situations, or in one-off conversations with celebrity podcast hosts? I would suggest you see a doctor because that's not normal at all.
SBF did hundreds of celebrity podcast interviews. It is in no way surprising to not remember quotes from them. That doesn't mean it's true, but it easily could be.
Yes, not a lawyer so maybe theres some nuance here but..
I don't get taking the stand voluntarily to just say "I don't recall" endlessly?
At some point does the judge tell you to GTFO and strike all your testimony? Can they instruct the jury in some manner harmful to you as a result of your obvious malign intent? Etc..
If SBF doesn't go down & spend time behind bars, its going to open the gates to a lot more fraud.
SBF did things that would make even the worst Wall St actors from the GFC blush. No arcane accounting/valuation rules, risk models, capital requirement arb, regulatory capture, misaligned incentives, loose prop trading rules.. letter of law vs spirit of law stuff, etc.
SBF committed the most open, direct, simple to understand version of all the fraud people imagined behind the GFC. Primarily he moved a substantial portion of customer deposits into prop trading accounts and then lost the money by trading poorly.
He literally lied about things like having insurance, seemingly didn't keep any true books & records (and asked for 7 variations of a balance sheet to find one that looked least bad).
You have emails where his dad that he hired as legal is approving transfers of customers money for uses like buying his parents a condo, lol.
I remember an answer from Quora about how lawyers handle such a witness on cross-examination: They say, “well, we have this evidence from the time saying you did/said XYZ. So you’re saying you can’t think of anything that would contradict that account?”
>I don't get taking the stand voluntarily to just say "I don't recall" endlessly?
He's taking the stand (which is a risk) because his lawyer asks him questions that are favorable to him. The risk comes in because the prosecutor gets to cross examine the witness, which is where all this recall stuff came from.
But isn't it "too smart by half" kind of move?
Clearly the prosecution is quite good, and clearly SBF is quite guilty.
He is going to get dragged through the mud having to respond "I dont recall" to a litany of embarrassing questions.. both because the lawyer is good and because he did lots of embarrassing things, openly..
I haven't been following this specific case, so take that for what it's worth.
>He is going to get dragged through the mud having to respond "I dont recall" to a litany of embarrassing questions..
Yes, but he isn't admitting to anything, confirming anything for the prosecution, or saying anything incriminating either and that's the trap of the cross examination when taking the stand.
I agree that agreeing to be questioned and then saying you don't recall endlessly is mostly absurd.
However, you know he has gone through hours of very recent prep with his defense lawyers about the specific questions he'll be asked by the team. So, it's not exactly fair to accuse him of having perfect recall for his defense lawyer's questions and not as much for the prosecution.
Surely the defense team would game theory the case and prepare for likely prosecution questions. Those are the hardest ones for which you need to prepare.
But memory is unreliable, specially if you're under pressure. This is seen for example when taking exams, some people might just completely forget what they were just studying
Yes. If you don’t want to answer because it might be incriminating, then you have to assert your fifth amendment privileges; you can’t lie and say that you don’t remember.
SBF seems like the kind of big mouthed overconfidently stupid smart person to walk right into that. He certainly has a lot of content out there on the public record for them to cross check his recollections against!
Do people get prosecuted for perjury after getting a guilty sentence like that? I imagined the most important consequence of saying "I don't remember" is whether the jury finds you credible.
If he simply doesn't want to talk about something, isn't he entitled to take the 5th and just refuse to answer? Saying he doesn't recall is a gambit because it's an obvious lie but I think he's hoping it's one we're so used to hearing that it sounds less incriminating than refusing to answer.
> you have to answer all of the opposing side's questions truthfully
What if you don't know the answer, are only probabilistically sure of the answer, or the answer isn't a simple yes or no?
I see lots of courtroom videos and congress videos where the idiot keeps pressing for a "yes or no" but the reality of the universe is that lots of things are more nuisanced than just a yes or no.
Not a lawyer, but I am not sure that is entirely true.
Theoretically, if on the stand they asked SBF if he stole candy from the baby next door, I think he could take the fifth with regards to that questioning because it is for a different crime?
I wonder if he's going through amphetamine withdrawal? That could certainly make your recall and precision bad. Still doesn't mean he isn't a massive liar
MIT has had a bunch of con artists and scammers walk through it's doors. It's amazing how often it happens. A whole lotta con artists and grifters. Why?
> Behind all the finance sheets and code bases, the fall of FTX was in a way incredibly childish: a nerd posse running away with a bunch of other people’s money in the stupidest and simplest way possible.
And yet our bimodal justice system spends huge amount of resources giving this 31yo fraudster every possible chance to escape the consequences, simply because he is a member of the elite.
The fact that there's a significant chance that he can get away with totally inept, broad daylight theft of billions of dollars is a major motivation for such crimes.
Millions of Americans aren't afforded such luxuries; they can't afford adequate legal resources, maybe they get manipulated into a bad plea deal. Hence we have a clearly bimodal justice system.
