Convicted.
Bankman-Fried’s been fried.
Gift link
That was…very fast.
I guess he didn’t succeed in sowing much doubt with his testimony.
Given the ample time to prepare terrible puns for this outcome, I expected better.
Well, it’s not like Sam Bankman-Fried was going to be freed. And you can bank on that, man…
On the bright side, he probably has a better chance of getting vegan meals when he’s ensconced in his forever home?
Thank you. I don’t have access to WSJ, so it’s nice to get their take on this case.
Larry David gets the last word
Elizabeth Lopatto’s article on the verdict.
Now the question becomes (since we have nearly 5 months to wait) how much time will he serve? No one seems to be buying any sort of remorse out of him, and his earlier efforts to interfere (the ones that ended up with him back in jail) are also going to probably preclude much sympathy. But he’s probably (?) a first time offender, and they’ll likely stick to “misled by those he trusted” story. Arguably, he’s better off than Elizabeth Holmes, whose product never did any of what it claimed, and she got less than 11 years.
Yes, SBF was convicted on more charges, but historically they’re served simultaneously rather than consecutively. At least, based on most cases I’ve seen, although Madoff (who he’s been compared too before) got 150 years, so there’s hope at least.
So, what’s the over / under? 7ish? Although I certainly hope, if the evidence supports, that others who were involved, such as his parents, are also brought to justice through the courts.
But right now, as the joy fades, I can still see a future where in say, half a decade, he’s back out, touring, writing a book, still a pretty young man, with solid prospects of financial security due to his parents. And those who likely lost more than they can afford (along with plenty of other speculators) sitting on nothing but losses.
I took a little risk
Send lawyers, guns and money
Dad, get me out of this
Missed my edit window of course, less than 12 years, but over 11.
OTOH, Holmes defrauded mostly early investors, who - it could be argued - should have done a little more diligence about the speculative claims she made to them.
SBF defrauded the general public - his customers, who had a lot less ways to check up on him. People sent him money with the understanding it was going to be their money, able to be converted into various cryptocurrencies, not lent out to his speculative investment vehicle. The jury found the witnesses against SBF to be credible, and him to not be credible, and since they said he was intimately involved in the decisions to misuse customer deposits, he’ll probably have little luck blaming others in the penalty phase.
I don’t think he’s in very good shape.
He needs to serve at least 20. His lying on the stand and lack of remorse will haunt him.
Holmes put the public’s health at risk. Although perhaps she wasn’t found guilty of that aspect, I can’t remember? In any event, I think she should have gone for 20, and I think SBF will probably go for about the same.
Another masterpiece. I actually felt a little sympathy for the kid. It seems like his parents still believed in him until they themselves saw all of the evidence. For 30 years they thought that they had a special little star child and now they know that they raised a sociopath.
I mocked the law, and the law won.
The wheel keeps turning, as they say. So at this low point, maybe time to revisit the breathless nonsense spoken of SBF at his peak by revisiting this profile of him by Sequoia, not just for the inevitable giggles but also as an illustration of how badly people fell for his nonsense.
The piece is littered with gems - you might think “sultry wood nymph” would be the highlight, but it keeps getting better - but I particularly like this bit, in which the author, a Sequoia employee, finds out from an ETF employee that SBF was playing some dumb online game while asking Sequoia to invest in ETF, and both of them treat it like evidence of genius instead of a massive fucking red flag.
Suddenly, the chat window on Sequoia’s side of the Zoom lights up with partners freaking out.
“I LOVE THIS FOUNDER,” typed one partner.
“I am a 10 out of 10,” pinged another.
“YES!!!” exclaimed a third.
What Sequoia was reacting to was the scale of SBF’s vision. It wasn’t a story about how we might use fintech in the future, or crypto, or a new kind of bank. It was a vision about the future of money itself—with a total addressable market of every person on the entire planet.
“I sit ten feet from him, and I walked over, thinking, Oh, shit, that was really good,” remembers Arora [ETF employee]. “And it turns out that that fucker was playing League of Legends through the entire meeting.”
“We were incredibly impressed,” Bailhe [Sequoia] says. “It was one of those your-hair-is-blown-back type of meetings.”
Not only that, Arora says, but League of Legends is the kind of multiplayer online battle arena video game where every four minutes or so of tactical maneuvering is punctuated by ten seconds of action known as a gank—gamer slang for “gang killing”—where you and your team gang up on an enemy. “There’s a fight that happens, basically,” says Arora, who was watching over SBF’s shoulder as he answered that final question from Sequoia, “and I’m like, This guy is fucking in a gank!”
This is… not the behaviour you want to see in someone you’re trusting with large sums of money?
Then we have this little gem:
“I’m very skeptical of books. I don’t want to say no book is ever worth reading, but I actually do believe something pretty close to that,” explains SBF. “I think, if you wrote a book, you fucked up, and it should have been a six-paragraph blog post.”
Truly, a towering intellect. But obviously a charismatic one, because the author is so completely suckered in:
It’s hard to see SBF in a clear light. The glitter of the self-made billions are blinding. His intellect is as awesome as it is intimidating.
Who is SBF? And what is he made of?
Those are the questions that brought me to the Bahamas. And meeting him in person only deepened the mystery.
What makes him so different from anyone else I’ve ever met?
And, since SBF is obviously a genius, I should simply assume that, compared with me, SBF will always be playing at level N+1.
It’s like the brain of Spock has been transplanted into the shambolic body of Fozzie Bear. He’s a bit of both: instantly lovable—with the guilelessness, kindness, and openness of a Muppet—and so abstract that he seems more like a super-advanced AI than flesh and blood.
A delusion which allows the author to write first this:
In spending everything he has on others, SBF spends nothing, it would seem, pursuing his own pleasure.
and then a few paragraphs later, this:
The penthouse atop Orchid—Apartment V—is likely the most expensive condo in all of the Bahamas, and it’s the home of Sam Bankman-Fried. He lives there* with nine roommates: fellow travelers in the EA movement. It’s a dorm situation—but, to paraphrase Scott Fitzgerald, a billionaire’s dorm is different from the ones familiar to you and me. V is palatial—11,500 square feet—with six bedrooms and spectacular views out every window. Two elevators service the apartment, opening directly into the space. Every bedroom has an en suite bath and opens directly onto the veranda. The common areas include the lobby, media room, dining room and a party room at the tip of the building: Curved glass walls slide away, opening up the entire space to the world outside.
After the sun sinks below the horizon, Apartment V lights up. Dramatic wash lighting bathes the veranda in blues and purples. The wraparound porch becomes a rainbow, a beacon. A party is under way, and the entire penthouse glimmers.
I mean, come the fuck on. Do you have eyes.
Finally, this bit partly for teh wood nymph but mainly because it tells you everything you need to know about SBFs need for adoration and ability to resist instant gratification:
“So,” Ellison asked after joining SBF at a table, “what have you been up to in the last few months?” Ellison, it should be noted, was dressed as a sultry wood nymph—she was on her way to a LARP (Live Action Role Play) party.
“Oh,” SBF responded cryptically, “I can’t tell you. It’s a secret.”
“Okay, that’s fine,” Ellison said, sipping her tea.
Uncomfortable silence.
“Well, I guess I could tell you if you really want…” SBF offered after a moment.
“Nope. It’s okay.” Sip.
An awkward beat later, SBF broke, slayed by the silent force of Ellison’s four-eyed gaze.
“I’ll just tell you,” he said.
When cryptocurrency first reared its ugly head and somehow became part of our world, it raised all kinds of red flags in my head. I’ve never had even the slightest twinge of an urge to actually invest in it. I think time is proving that my initial instinctive reaction was sound.