Given his reported intense desires for entertainment/stimulation (not equipped to evaluate if it rises to the level of an addiction or diagnosable disorder) I’m worried in the polite sense that he’ll become self-destructive. Not politely worried enough to deny the justice of the sentence, and maybe he’s learned patience with the time served, but once the appeals are over and the length of the sentence sinks in… worried.
NOTE - not wishing harm, or self-harm on the individual, but trying to honestly extrapolate his future risk based on personality and behaviors to date.
I’m curious what the guy is like. I get a pot-head/gamer-dude vibe from the guy, rather than a sadist or sociopath. Because what was going on at FTX was obvious to a lot of insiders, some of whom were happy to look the other way for an extended period of time. I’m ruling our a Moriarty scenario because Ponzi schemes are unsustainable. There’s a certain level of delusion or short-sightedness needed to organize them.
But I don’t have any personal knowledge of the guy, even indirect. The preceding is uninformed speculation: dismiss it. So… what was SBF like in college?
A good friend of mine went to high school with him. He was a very expensive private school with a graduating class of around 30 people. They weren’t friends at all so didn’t hang out a lot. He wasn’t a pot head. According to my friend he was a very withdrawn weido who seems to be on the spectrum. Everyone was stunned that he ended up being a criminal mastermind.
He’s not a pothead/gamer. I’ve seen many videos about him since I’m a fan/supporter of Coffeezilla, one of the online journalists investigating and reporting on him prior to the charges and conviction.
He’s almost the opposite. Think more along the lines of a person who doesn’t understand how other people think or feel, almost like an AI. I never got the impression that he was a sadist but he just didn’t care about other people (at least on an individual level, he cared about “people” in the abstract as an idea). Like, he wouldn’t intentionally and happily harm someone but if getting what he wanted led to harming someone, oh well. Maybe somewhat of a sociopath in that sense.
I do think that in some way, SBF wanted to do good, or at least was motivated by it. He knew he was up to bad stuff but he hoped that it would ultimately work and he could reform banking and become the leader of a new kind of economy that would improve the world. The problem is that his methods boiled down to nothing more than a classic Ponzi scheme and as always those things are guaranteed to fail. Here is an article about his attempts at “effective altruism”:
One quote I recall, and this is from memory so it’s not verbatim. But he said that if he had the chance to flip a coin, and it came up heads and made the world a utopia, and came up tails and meant the world would be destroyed, he’d not hesitate to do it. That should tell you a lot about his mindset and what kind of person he was.
It might also explain his lack of remorse. In his mind he flipped the coin and it came up tails, so he understands the consequences, but still think he was correct to try.
I never met him, I’ve just heard about him second hand.
Definitely not a pothead. He liked playing board games, and some video games. He did his share of the communal work of running his independent housing unit. (Think “frat that was thrown out of the national organization for electing a woman as their local president”. The group owns a large house that’s a long walk or a short drive from MIT, and maybe a dozen students live there at once.) He seems to have been fairly easy to live with.
Michael Lewis fell in love with Sam Bankman-Fried, and his book isn’t very good if you want to understand what went wrong with FTX. But it’s a decent perspective of what was he like in person.
I just meant he had different ideas of risk-taking than the average person, and wasn’t your typical conman that you’d expect to create the scheme that he had. And he wasn’t seeming to be in it just to get rich (though he never seemed to mind that either). He’s like the opposite of someone like Jordan Belfort in so many ways, and yet the end result was pretty much the same.
Why was the judge so lenient in the sentencing?
Only 21 years., not the 50 yrs which the prosecution asked for.
In the linked article (post #377), the judge states that Bankman carried out one of the worst frauds in history, AND that Bankman remains a very real danger of doing so again.
Bankman will be about 50 years old when he gets released…So that leaves him plenty of time to commit more white collar crimes.
The prosecutors asked for 40-50, arguing (among other things) that he was a threat to reoffend. The defense asked for 6 1/2, arguing (among other things) that he was unlikely to reoffend. The judge decided that (among other things, including the apparent lack of appropriate remorse) there was a risk of him reoffending and split the difference - in his own words “for the purpose of disabling him to the extent that can appropriately be done for a significant period of time.”
Realistically, though… While he might (almost certainly) be inclined to attempt to re-offend, after this, how much of an idiot would a person have to be to invest any money with Bankman-Fried? Just his notoriety will make reoffending much more difficult.
Plus, if he gets out in 20+ years, he essentially won’t have tech skills. Who knows what the technology will look like by then? We can say with pretty near certainty that it will be much different, based on the changes in the past 20 years and looking forward (eg AI), and it will all have passed him by. Twenty years is likely enough to prevent him from reoffending.
There are plenty of people (Michael Lewis at the top of the list) who still believe that Sam is some kind of genius who just got caught up in regulations that are not as advanced as his ideas, and who would be more than happy to participate in his next big venture.
And as someone with a special interest in financial fraud, I can tell you that many fraudsters have run multiple scams, even when they’ve previously been caught, and even when people are aware of their past misconduct. They’re just that convincing, and people are just that gullible.
My favorite Verge contributor, Elizabeth Lopatto, weighs in on SBF’s performance at his sentencing.
Pretty savage and deeply perceptive. SBF still doesn’t understand he lost, still regrets nothing, and continues to play the same stupid game regardless of the stupid prizes he racks up.
Someone on X was griping about how 25 years was way too harsh and an indication of gross over-sentencing in America.
I saw an analysis noting that if he was on his best behavior and got all the possible good time, he could be out in 12 1/2 years, which would make him 44 years old. Plenty of time to reinvent himself, though finding eager investors might be a bit tricky.*
*he could get together with Elizabeth Holmes to develop a sensational new startup.
Speaking as an outsider, it does strike me as high for a non-violent crime. In Canada, only murder in the first degree and dangerous offenders get jailed for 25 years. (Some second degree may come close to 25, but very rare.) So I understand why the X’er took that position.
I think for a long time white-collar crime has gotten soft glove treatment, even when the scale of who was affected was vastly larger than a single violent crime. I’m delighted to see him going to jail for a very long time.
I think financial crimes of this scale are far more dangerous than armed robbery and arguably cause more harm to society than even single acts of murder. 25 years seems appropriate.
I’m in agreement here, plus there’s the scale of the crime, the repeated acts where SBF was caught committing perjury, the general feeling that his claims for remorse are unconvincing (to us, the prosecution and the judge), the repeated attempts to tamper with witnesses, and 25 years sounds more than fair to me.
Plus, for non-American posters like @Northern_Piper - IMHO American courts seem to lean very heavily into prison as punishment, not just segregation of an individual from society due to risk, or god forbid any effort at rehabilitation.
Give all of the above, I might have considered it excessive if he got the 40-50 years prosecutors were asking for, but 25 seems very fair by the standards as they are currently applied. If we ever (Press ‘X’ to Doubt considering the “for profit” basis of most of our prisons) get to the point where the US starts looking at prison terms for the safety of all or for rehabilitation, like a more enlightened nation, then hopefully ALL crimes will see a reduction in duration.
