Sam Bankman-Fried

Number Go Up: Inside Crypto's Wild Rise and Staggering Fall
by Zeke Faux
Published 11 Sep 2023

Department of Justice scrutinized: Katanga Johnson, Lydia Beyoud, Allyson Versprille, and Annie Massa, “Sam Bankman-Fried Facing Possible Trip to US for Questioning,” Bloomberg, November 15, 2022. GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT “So the ethics stuff, mostly a front?”: Kelsey Piper, “Sam Bankman-Fried Tries to Explain Himself,” Vox, November 16, 2022. GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT “If we named our company”: SBF. Interview. Empire podcast, “How Sam Bankman-Fried Made $10 Billion by the Age of 28,” April 1, 2021. GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT “As an individual”: Robert Wiblin, “Sam Bankman-Fried on Taking a High-Risk Approach to Crypto and Doing Good,” 80,000 Hours podcast, April 14, 2022.

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GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT Epilogue he got a call from his lawyer: Steven Ehrlich, “Sam Bankman-Fried Recalls His Hellish Week in a Caribbean Prison,” Forbes, January 26, 2023. GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT His opening line: Gillian Tan and Max Chafkin, “Sam Bankman-Fried’s Written Testimony Is Called ‘Absolutely Insulting’ at House Hearing,” Bloomberg, December 13, 2022. GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT Around 6:00 p.m.: Theodore Schleifer, “The Only Living Boy in Palo Alto,” Puck, January 10, 2023. GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT “It’s not fit for humanity”: Lee Brown, “Sam Bankman-Fried’s Bahamas Jail Infested by Rats and Maggots: ‘Not Fit for Humanity,’ ” New York Post, December 14, 2022.

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GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT His ankle restraints clanking: Jacob Shamsian and Sindhu Sundar, “Sam Bankman-Fried to Be Released on $250 Million Bail and Will Be Required to Stay with Parents Ahead of FTX Trial,” Business Insider, December 22, 2022. GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT hunched over: Benjamin Weiser, Matthew Goldstein, and David Yaffe-Bellany, “Sam Bankman-Fried Released on $250 Million Bond with Restrictions,” New York Times, December 22, 2022. GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT The Bankman-Frieds purchased: Ehrlich, “Sam Bankman-Fried Recalls His Hellish Week in a Caribbean Prison.” GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT They hired armed guards: Selim Algar, “Sam Bankman-Fried’s Family Pays $10K a Week for Armed Security, Sources Say,” New York Post, December 27, 2022.

Easy Money: Cryptocurrency, Casino Capitalism, and the Golden Age of Fraud
by Ben McKenzie and Jacob Silverman
Published 17 Jul 2023

CHAPTER 12: CHAPTER 11 217 the FDIC issued a cease-and-desist order: Ashley Capoot, “Crypto firm FTX gets warning from FDIC to stop ‘misleading’ consumers about deposit protection,” CNBC, Aug. 19, 2022, https://www.cnbc.com/2022/08/19/crypto-firm-ftx-receives-cease-and-desist-from-fdic-about-insurance.html. 218 He slid into my DMs: Direct Messages between Ben McKenzie and Sam Bankman-Fried. 220 Alameda’s balance sheet: Ian Allison, “Divisions in Sam Bankman-Fried’s Crypto Empire Blur on His Trading Titan Alameda’s Balance Sheet,” Coin-Desk, November 2, 2022, https://www.coindesk.com/business/2022/11/02/divisions-in-sam-bankman-frieds-crypto-empire-blur-on-his-trading-titan-alamedas-balance-sheet/. 220 an ominously titled post: James Block, “Is Alameda Research Insolvent?,” Dirty Bubble Media, November 4, 2022, https://dirtybubblemedia.substack.com/p/is-alameda-research-insolvent. 223 Sam signed over control: MacKenzie Sigalos, “Sam Bankman-Fried steps down as FTX CEO as his crypto exchange files for bankruptcy,” CNBC, November 11, 2022, https://www.cnbc.com/2022/11/11/sam-bankman-frieds-cryptocurrency-exchange-ftx-files-for-bankruptcy.html. 228 “ ‘God Mode’ to short coins . . .”: Alex Mashinsky (@Mashinsky), Twitter, December 3, 2022, https://twitter.com/mashinsky/with_replies. 229 the Blockchain Eight: David Dayen, “Congressmembers Tried to Stop the SEC’s Inquiry Into FTX,” The American Prospect, November 23, 2022, https://prospect.org/power/congressmembers-tried-to-stop-secs-inquiry-into-ftx/. 229 the year before: Tom Emmer (@GOPMajorityWhip), Twitter, December 8, 2021, https://twitter.com/GOPMajorityWhip/status/1468698269391880192. 230 a former general counsel: Jarod Facundo, “Sen.

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His counterintuitive investment strategy will either build him an empire—or end in disaster,” Fortune, August 1, 2022. 150 a billion to bail out crypto: Alexander Osipovich, “The 30-Year-Old Spending $1 Billion to Save Crypto,” Wall Street Journal, August 23, 2022. 150 plans to give away his enormous fortune: Zeke Faux, “A 30-Year-Old Crypto Billionaire Wants to Give His Fortune Away,” Bloomberg, April 3, 2022. 150 “north of $100 million”: MacKenzie Sigalos, “FTX’s Sam Bankman-Fried backs down from ‘dumb quote’ about giving $1 billion to political races,” CNBC, October 14, 2022, www.cnbc.com/2022/10/14/sam-bankman-fried-backtracks-from-1-billion-political-donation.html. 150 He was everywhere . . . I dug in: Various articles from Reuters, Bloomberg, the New York Times, Forbes, and others. 152 Sequoia was blown away . . . during a Zoom call: Sequoia Capital, profile on Sam Bankman-Fried from Sequoiacap.com (since removed), September 22, 2022. 156 We began: Ben McKenzie interview with Sam Bankman-Fried, 1 Hotel Central Park (New York, NY), July 2022. CHAPTER 10: WHO’S IN CHARGE HERE? 180 Elon Musk . . . promoted Dogecoin: Eric Deggans, “Elon Musk Takes An Awkward Turn As ‘Saturday Night Live’ Host,” NPR, May 9, 2021. 181 President Biden . . . executive order: White House, “Executive Order on Ensuring Responsible Development of Digital Assets,” March 9, 2022, https://www.whitehouse.gov/briefing-room/presidential-actions/2022/03/09/executive-order-on-ensuring-responsible-development-of-digital-assets/. 181 The statistics cited by the FTC: Emma Fletcher, “Reports show scammers cashing in on crypto craze,” FTC, June 3, 2022, https://www.ftc.gov/news-events/data-visualizations/data-spotlight/2022/06/reports-show-scammers-cashing-crypto-craze. 182 The revolving door kept spinning: Tech Transparency Project, “Crypto Industry Amasses Washington Insiders as Lobbying Blitz Intensifies,” https://www.techtransparencyproject.org/articles/crypto-industry-amasses-washington-insiders-lobbying-blitz-intensifies. 186 Mark Hays: Ben McKenzie interview with Mark Hays, Summer 2022. 188 The United States of America is unique: Conversations with Lee Reiners (policy director at the Duke Financial Economics Center and a lecturing fellow at Duke Law), Summer 2022. 193 John Reed Stark: Ben McKenzie interview with John Reed Stark, Maryland, August 2022. 198 Two weeks later, Kim Kardashian: press release, “SEC Charges Kim Kardashian for Unlawfully Touting Crypto Security,” U.S.

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He always had an excuse handy, or at least a way of deflecting blame elsewhere. But that still left the first part: the need. Why in the world would Sam Bankman-Fried need to commit fraud? He was a genius, a guaranteed moneymaker, a sure thing. No way he would have to do anything illegal. He could make money in the time-honored (if unseemly) tradition of Wall Street and its capitalist antecedents, using his supposedly brilliant mind to arbitrage small discrepancies in price. But then a more disturbing thought flashed through my head. Sam Bankman-Fried loved playing games; he was addicted to them. He played them not just compulsively, but simultaneously, and not always well.

On the Edge: The Art of Risking Everything
by Nate Silver
Published 12 Aug 2024

GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT Chapter 6: Illusion once $32 billion: Jamie Redman, “From a $32 Billion Valuation to Financial Troubles: An In-Depth Look at the Rise and Fall of FTX,” Bitcoin News, November 10, 2022, news.bitcoin.com/from-a-32-billion-valuation-to-financial-troubles-an-in-depth-look-at-the-rise-and-fall-of-ftx. GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT FTX had defrauded: Nikhilesh De and Sam Kessler, “Sam Bankman-Fried Guilty on All 7 Counts in FTX Fraud Trial,” November 2, 2023, coindesk.com/policy/2023/11/02/sam-bankman-fried-guilty-on-all-7-counts-in-ftx-fraud-trial. GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT worth $26.5 billion: “Sam Bankman-Fried,” Forbes, forbes.com/profile/sam-bankman-fried. GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT the Met Gala: Michael Lewis, Going Infinite: The Rise and Fall of a New Tycoon, Kindle ed. (New York: W.

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GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT surreptitiously in the latter case: Bankman-Fried confirmed this to me, but it’s also been reported elsewhere; see, for example: Brian Schwartz, “Sam Bankman-Fried, FTX Allies Secretly Poured $50 Million into ‘Dark Money’ Groups, Evidence Shows,” CNBC, October 20, 2023, cnbc.com/2023/10/20/sam-bankman-fried-ftx-allies-donated-millions-in-dark-money.html. GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT played video games: David Gura, “What to Know About Sam Bankman-Fried and FTX Before His Crypto Financial Fraud Trial,” NPR, October 2, 2023, sec. Business, npr.org/2023/10/02/1203097238/what-to-know-about-sam-bankman-fried-and-ftx-before-his-crypto-financial-fraud-t. GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT a flight risk: Rohan Goswami, “Sam Bankman-Fried Denied Bail in Bahamas on FTX Fraud Charges, Judge Cites Flight Risk,” CNBC, December 13, 2022, cnbc.com/2022/12/13/sam-bankman-fried-denied-bail-in-bahamas-on-ftx-fraud-charges-judge-cites-flight-risk.html.

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GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT a flight risk: Rohan Goswami, “Sam Bankman-Fried Denied Bail in Bahamas on FTX Fraud Charges, Judge Cites Flight Risk,” CNBC, December 13, 2022, cnbc.com/2022/12/13/sam-bankman-fried-denied-bail-in-bahamas-on-ftx-fraud-charges-judge-cites-flight-risk.html. GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT veteran of Enron: Richard Lawler, “FTX Files for Chapter 11 Bankruptcy as CEO Sam Bankman-Fried Resigns,” The Verge, November 11, 2022, theverge.com/2022/11/11/23453164/ftx-bankruptcy-filing-sam-bankman-fried-resigns. GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT with Kevin O’Leary: Sam Reynolds, “TV’s Kevin O’Leary: ‘All the Crypto Cowboys Are Going to Be Gone Soon,’ ” October 3, 2023, coindesk.com/business/2023/10/03/tvs-kevin-oleary-all-the-crypto-cowboys-are-going-to-be-gone-soon.

Going Infinite: The Rise and Fall of a New Tycoon
by Michael Lewis
Published 2 Oct 2023

On the other hand, on subjects other than himself he was refreshingly unguarded: he seemed willing to answer any question I could think to ask about the crypto industry or his business. His ambition was grandiose, but he wasn’t. By the end of this walk I was totally sold. I called my friend and said something like: Go for it! Swap shares with Sam Bankman-­Fried! Do whatever he wants to do! What could possibly go wrong? It was only later that I realized I hadn’t even begun to answer his original question: Who was this guy? ACT I 1 YUP Most of the people who went to work for Sam Bankman-­Fried ended up in jobs for which they were not obviously qualified, and Natalie Tien was no exception. She’d been raised in Taiwan by middle-­class parents whose only real hope for her was that she’d find a rich husband.

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Moments earlier, a small crowd—­Albany officials, CSI-­looking people, one very large Bahamian police officer—­had stepped off the elevator and into the penthouse. There was a long hallway from the elevator to the living room. Coming down it, the big policeman asked, “Is Mister Sam Bankman-­Fried here?” He was reading from a paper in his hand—­apparently a warrant. When George stood up from his chair in the living room, the policeman approached him and asked, “Are you Sam Bankman-­Fried?” At first no one could find Sam. As it turned out, he was tapping into his phone in Gary’s bathroom. Less than an hour earlier, his lawyers had called to say that the US government was giving him an hour to decide whether to return to the United States or face arrest in the Bahamas.

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—­maybe one day it will be. But if Serum was a token to be taken seriously, Sam Bankman-­Fried and the world he created needed to be viewed in a different light. At Serum’s peak price, the stated market value of Sam’s stash of it was $67 billion. On November 7, 2022, Sam’s pile of mostly locked Serum was still “worth” billions of dollars. If even locked Serum had that kind of value, FTX was solvent right up to the moment it collapsed. And John Ray would have no grounds for clawing back money from any of the many lucky people on whom Sam Bankman-­Fried had showered it. Six months into the Easter egg hunt, there was a decent argument to be made that FTX was solvent right up to the moment it collapsed, even if Sam’s Serum was worthless.

The Price of Life: In Search of What We're Worth and Who Decides
by Jenny Kleeman
Published 13 Mar 2024

sh=1e557ffb4e09 around $10 billion a year The Chronicle of Philanthropy, ‘A list of America’s top 50 donors of 2020’, AP News (10 February 2021). https://apnews.com/article/technology-amazoncom-inc-michael-bloomberg-jeff-bezos-philanthropy-43ff7817a0c8b7babfd2ab9bb67d3b5e $1 billion a year ‘We aim to cost-effectively direct around $1 billion annually by 2025’, GiveWell (22 November 2021). https://blog.givewell.org/2021/11/22/we-aim-to-cost-effectively-direct-around-1-billion-annually-by-2025/ $2,000–3,000 per life saved You can see their working for this here: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1CuIwrlm OchJMRojhKLiuitDXTnT0XJQVs0qAdX6Hi4E/edit#gid=1350747058 anywhere else in the US Fortson, Danny, ‘American nightmare: the homelessness crisis in San Francisco’, The Times (29 August 2021). https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/san-francisco-homelessness-crisis-tent-cities-bclgk20s5 chronic medical conditions Hepler, Lauren and Knight, Heather, ‘S.F. homeless deaths more than doubled during the pandemic’s first year ‒ but not because of COVID’, San Francisco Chronicle (10 March 2022). https://www.sfchronicle.com/sf/article/San-Francisco-homeless-deaths-more-than-doubled-16990683.php ‘More permissive policy’ ‘We seek to reduce the harms caused by excessively restrictive local land use regulations’, Open Philanthropy. https://www.openphilanthropy.org/focus/land-use-reform/ $26.5 billion ‘Sam Bankman-Fried’, Forbes. https://www.forbes.com/profile/sam-bankman-fried/?sh=455ed2984449 effective causes Lewis-Kraus, Gideon, ‘The Reluctant Prophet of Effective Altruism’, The New Yorker (8 August 2022). https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2022/08/15/the-reluctant-prophet-of-effective-altruism a blog post ‘Why Is It So Expensive to Save Lives?’, GiveWell (December 2021). https://www.givewell.org/cost-to-save-a-life ‘Sam Bankman-Fried perpetrated ‘Sam Bankman-Fried found guilty on all seven criminal fraud counts’, CNBC, 2 November 2023. https://www.cnbc.com/2023/11/02/sam-bankman-fried-found-guilty-on-all-seven-criminal-fraud-counts.html from Bankman-Fried As explained in this Twitter thread: https://twitter.com/willmacaskill/status/1591218014707671040?

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‘We generally expect the cost to save a life to increase over time,’ they explain in a blog post indignantly entitled ‘Why Is It So Expensive To Save Lives?’. Sam Bankman-Fried’s crypto empire came crashing down in November 2022, and $8 billion in customer funds evaporated overnight – along with all his philanthropic promises. A year later, he was found guilty of wire fraud, conspiracy to commit securities fraud, conspiracy to commit commodities fraud and conspiracy to commit money laundering. ‘Sam Bankman-Fried perpetrated one of the biggest financial frauds in American history,’ said Damian Williams, US attorney for the Southern District of New York, after the verdicts were read.

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One of the ideas it promotes is called ‘earning to give’, which argues that, if you have an appropriate skill set, you will do more good if you choose a career in finance rather than the charity sector, because an investment banker who gives 50 per cent of his or her salary away can cover the cost of several charity workers. Will tells me dozens of people have been inspired by his advice to do exactly this. As we sit here together today, the most striking example is Sam Bankman-Fried, who met Will in 2012. Back then, Sam was a geeky undergraduate majoring in physics at MIT, and Will convinced him that he could have the greatest impact if he made a fortune in finance and gave his money away. Sam went on to become one of the richest people in cryptocurrency. By the time he was twenty-nine, Forbes estimated his net worth to be $26.5 billion, with nearly all of it earmarked to go to effective causes.

The Bill Gates Problem: Reckoning With the Myth of the Good Billionaire
by Tim Schwab
Published 13 Nov 2023

Chuck Feeney: “Chuck Feeney: The Billionaire Who Is Trying to Go Broke,” Forbes, September 18, 2012, https://www.forbes.com/sites/stevenbertoni/2012/09/18/chuck-feeney-the-billionaire-who-is-trying-to-go-broke/?sh=3a9b8ea9291c. facing federal fraud charges: Sam Reynolds, “Team Behind Sam Bankman-Fried’s Charity FTX Future Fund Have Quit over Possible ‘Deception or Dishonesty,’” Fortune, November 11, 2022, https://fortune.com/2022/11/11/team-behind-sam-bankman-fried-charity-ftx-future-fund-have-quit-over-possible-deception-or-dishonesty/; Zeke Faux, “A 30-Year-Old Crypto Billionaire Wants to Give His Fortune Away,” Bloomberg, April 3, 2022, https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2022-04-03/sam-bankman-fried-ftx-s-crypto-billionaire-who-wants-to-give-his-fortune-away. teachers’ pension plan in Ontario: David Yaffe-Bellany, Matthew Goldstein, Lauren Hirsch, and Erin Griffith, “FTX Crypto Exchange Boss Says He Is Trying to Raise More Money,” New York Times, November 10, 2022, https://www.nytimes.com/2022/11/10/technology/ftx-crypto-exchange.html.

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teachers’ pension plan in Ontario: David Yaffe-Bellany, Matthew Goldstein, Lauren Hirsch, and Erin Griffith, “FTX Crypto Exchange Boss Says He Is Trying to Raise More Money,” New York Times, November 10, 2022, https://www.nytimes.com/2022/11/10/technology/ftx-crypto-exchange.html. FTX Future Fund: Reynolds, “Team Behind Sam Bankman-Fried’s Charity FTX Future Fund Have Quit over Possible ‘Deception or Dishonesty”; Tracy Wang, “Sam Bankman-Fried’s Crypto Empire ‘Was Run by a Gang of Kids in the Bahamas,’” Fortune, November 11, 2022, https://fortune.com/2022/11/11/sam-bankman-fried-crypto-empire-ftx-alameda-run-gang-kids-bahamas-who-all-dated-each-other/. Bernie Sanders’s proposal: Thomas Kaplan, “Bernie Sanders Proposes a Wealth Tax: ‘I Don’t Think That Billionaires Should Exist,’” New York Times, September 24, 2019, https://www.nytimes.com/2019/09/24/us/politics/bernie-sanders-wealth-tax.html.

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Billionaire Chuck Feeney deserves credit for reportedly making good on his promise to give away almost all his fortune, much of it anonymously, yet he carefully organized his wealth creation around tax avoidance—and the sale of products damaging to human health, like the cigarettes and booze sold in his duty-free shops. Sam Bankman-Fried, the cryptocurrency billionaire facing federal fraud charges (as of early 2023), asked the world to celebrate his rapid acquisition of wealth, promising that he would donate 99 percent of it to charity. In late 2022, Bankman-Fried’s crypto empire came crashing down, and a teachers’ pension plan in Ontario was among the big losers, seeing losses of nearly one hundred million dollars.

The Quiet Coup: Neoliberalism and the Looting of America
by Mehrsa Baradaran
Published 7 May 2024

To step out of it, we must be innovative enough to challenge our basic ideas about genius and worth. To see the value hierarchy hidden at the core of our modern economy, we must look at its fruits. To see what a system values, we must look at what it values in dollars and cents—or who it trusts with abundant credit. One need look no further than Sam Bankman-Fried and FTX. Frustrated that, as a conventional quantitative trader in the mid-2010s, he could only ever achieve 1 percent spreads at most, Bankman-Fried began to explore cryptocurrencies, specifically bitcoin, in search of higher yield. He quickly discovered that he could make much more spread in a day trading in the Asian crypto market than he could make in years of high-frequency trading.

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Market mayhem—and likely increased boredom during the pandemic—led to incredible rates of trading on the platform, and, in turn, skyrocketing revenues. In 2020 and 2021, FTX earned $85 million in trading fees; revenue grew by over 800 percent within a year. In 2021, the site reached a daily average trading volume of $993 million, a peak that surpassed prior peaks in derivatives trading. Sam Bankman-Fried had created another merry-go-round of risky bets even more abstract and socially useless than the derivatives empire that blew up the economy, and the market crowned him their king. At its peak in October 2021, and before Bankman-Fried was convicted on several counts of fraud, FTX had a valuation of $32 billion, and the net worth of Bankman-Fried was $25 billion plus.

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Or is it even efficient to keep plying money to the likes of Bankman-Fried, Adam Neumann, and Elizabeth Holmes, or would it be more efficient—not to mention just—to invest in creativity and smarts that are not born from privilege? I would wager that there are twenty-year-old women in Africa whose intelligence rivals if not surpasses Bankman-Fried’s and who could fix the malaria net issue and much more if given $30 billion of market trust. Sam Bankman-Fried is very good with numbers and figured out an ingenious way of finding loopholes around the corroded legal maze of financial regulation to make trades across borders. That skill is incredibly valuable indeed in a market that no longer works, but he is no more a genius than the clever Black kid who figures out how to make a profit selling drugs while evading the random enforcement of drug laws.

Left Behind
by Paul Collier
Published 6 Aug 2024

See ‘A philosopher’s philosopher’, by Sarah Richmond, Times Literary Supplement, 6266, (2023) and the powerful critique of ‘small world’ reductionism by Nancy Cartwright, A Philosopher Looks at Science, (2023). Other notable Utilitarian philosophers are Peter Singer and Joshua Greene. The philosophy’s reductio ad absurdum was Sam Bankman-Fried. vi In that it complements a key benefit of RCTs: both force economists into fieldwork on local contexts – an important benefit that Nobel laureate Michael Kremer noted for RCTs. vii See G. E. Valliant, Triumphs of Experience: The Men of the Harvard Grant Study (2012). viii Readers alert to footnotes will have already spotted it in Chapter 10. 12.

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—Rebecca Henderson, John and Natty McArthur University Professor, Harvard University Notes Chapter 1 1 Moral worthiness depended only on the intended consequences of individual actions. Its flaws were exemplified by the crypto-disaster of 2022 in which a million desperate people in left-behind places faced ruin, having been lured by Sam Bankman-Fried’s promise of easy money. Instead of feeling shame and guilt, sheltered by his explicitly Utilitarian philosophy, he merely felt embarrassed over the mass misery due to his Ponzi scheme. As I finished Left Behind, he was convicted of massive fraud by an American jury. Chapter 2 1 Tim Besley and I jointly developed the concept within a research programme which we co-led within the International Growth Centre, funded by the British Academy.

Nobody's Fool: Why We Get Taken in and What We Can Do About It
by Daniel Simons and Christopher Chabris
Published 10 Jul 2023

Salmon, “FTX’s Terms-of-Service Forbid Trading with Customer Funds,” Axios, November 13, 2022 [https://www.axios.com/2022/11/12/ftx-terms-service-trading-customer-funds]. The events of FTX’s implosion are summarized here: A. Osipovich et al., “They Lived Together, Worked Together and Lost Billions Together: Inside Sam Bankman-Fried’s Doomed FTX Empire,” Wall Street Journal, November 19, 2022 [https://www.wsj.com/articles/sam-bankman-fried-ftx-alameda-bankruptcy-collapse-11668824201]. 22. Ironies abound in the study of deception. For example, the noted accounting firm Ernst & Young paid a $100 million fine because its auditors cheated on an ethics test: K. Gibson, “Ernst & Young Hit with $100 Million Fine After Auditors Cheat on Ethics Exam,” CBS News, June 28, 2022 [https://www.cbsnews.com/news/sec-fines-ernst-young-100-million-auditors-cheat-on-ethics-exam/].

Billionaire, Nerd, Savior, King: Bill Gates and His Quest to Shape Our World
by Anupreeta Das
Published 12 Aug 2024

Dozens of commentators have remarked that Holmes, a Stanford dropout who was sentenced to eleven years in prison in late 2022 for defrauding investors in her blood-testing start-up, adopted Steve Jobs’s uniform of black turtlenecks and spoke in a deep voice to establish her authority. When Channing Robertson, a professor at Stanford University, met Holmes, he realized that he “could have just as well been looking into the eyes of a Steve Jobs or a Bill Gates.”25 Once the nerd-philosopher-genius-king of the cryptocurrency industry before his nosedive into disgrace, Sam Bankman-Fried, the founder of crypto exchange FTX, grew his empire rapidly on the back of $2 billion raised from investors; at its peak, the start-up was valued at $32 billion. He was as notable for the breathless rise of his crypto exchange as for his shock of unkempt hair and cargo shorts, prompting The New York Times to call him a “studiously disheveled billionaire.”

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Green, who made his fortune in digital advertising and has an estimated net worth of more than $4 billion, calls his approach to giving “Dataphilanthropy,” seeking to fund and assess programs, the success of which can be verified by data. One of the biggest philanthropic ideas to take hold in the Valley in recent years, especially among younger billionaires, is “effective altruism,” which uses metrics and evidence to determine where a dollar will do the maximum good. Before his downfall, Sam Bankman-Fried, the founder of cryptocurrency exchange FTX, was one of the more high-profile so-called effective altruists, talking about his philosophy often in public and using his philanthropic activities to build FTX’s reputation. The movement, which owes its origin to the philosopher Peter Singer, takes an unsentimental, utilitarian approach to charitable giving—essentially applying quantitative standards to subjective goals.

Elon Musk
by Walter Isaacson
Published 11 Sep 2023

In fact, he could not remember his Twitter password, so Musk had to personally get it reset for him. But he believed that Twitter was important. “It’s a real-time news service, and there’s nothing really like it,” he told me. “If you agree it’s important for a democracy, then I thought it was worth making an investment in it.” One person who was eager to be in the deal was Sam Bankman-Fried, the soon-to-be-disgraced founder of the cryptocurrency exchange FTX, who believed that Twitter could be rebuilt on the blockchain. He claimed to be a supporter of effective altruism, and the founder of that movement, William MacAskill, texted Musk to try to arrange a meeting. So did Michael Grimes, Musk’s primary banker at Morgan Stanley, who was working to put together the financing.

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Text messages, https://www.documentcloud.org/documents/23112929-elon-musk-text-exhibits-twitter-v-musk; Rob Copeland, Georgia Wells, Rebecca Elliott, and Liz Hoffman, “The Shadow Crew Who Encouraged Elon Musk’s Twitter Takeover,” Wall Street Journal, Apr. 29, 2022; Mike Isaac, Lauren Hirsch, and Anupreeta Das, “Inside Elon Musk’s Big Plans for Twitter,” New York Times, May 6, 2022. 74. Hot and Cold: Author’s interviews with Elon Musk, Larry Ellison, Kimbal Musk, Robert Steel, Leslie Berland, Jared Birchall. Liz Hoffman, “Sam Bankman-Fried, Elon Musk, and a Secret Text,” Semafor, Nov. 23, 2022; Twitter town hall, June 16, 2022. 75. Father’s Day: Author’s interviews with Elon Musk, Maye Musk, Justine Musk, Kimbal Musk, Errol Musk, Jared Birchall, Talulah Riley, Griffin Musk, Christiana Musk, Claire Boucher (Grimes), Omead Afshar, Shivon Zilis.

The Capitalist Manifesto
by Johan Norberg
Published 14 Jun 2023

It is precisely because we cannot count on their goodwill that we need to control them with free competition and consumer choice, as well as an independent legal system and free media. Capitalism is our way to keep capitalists under our control. That does not stop us from regularly discovering scandals in the business world, such as Volkswagen’s manipulated emissions tests, Theranos’ fraudulent blood tests or the collapse of Sam Bankman-Fried’s crypto exchange FTX. At the same time, such scams are getting so much attention, and causing such a strong market reaction, because they are exceptions. There is a built-in protection against crooks in the market: businesses are voluntary collaborations based on trust; no one wants to collaborate with someone who does not inspire trust.

Breaking Twitter: Elon Musk and the Most Controversial Corporate Takeover in History
by Ben Mezrich
Published 6 Nov 2023

Looking at the awkward panda of a kid on the other end of the video chat, his untucked, oversized T-shirt billowing in the tropical breeze, it was hard to believe that mop of curly hair was sitting on a $24 billion fortune. Even for Silicon Valley, the vision on the screen seemed unkempt; as the panda started talking, his words coming so fast they were nearly slamming into each other, the alarm bells began to ring. Elon was no stranger to the mythology that had grown up around the kid: Sam Bankman-Fried, or SBF as he was generally known in the tech press, was considered one of the most brilliant young entrepreneurs of the past decade. After first making a name for himself at Jane Street Capital, then starting his own quantitative trading firm, called Alameda Research, at thirty, SBF had founded FTX, one of the fastest-growing crypto exchanges in the world.

Chaos Kings: How Wall Street Traders Make Billions in the New Age of Crisis
by Scott Patterson
Published 5 Jun 2023

After tumbling in the Covid-pandemic crash, bitcoin rallied in 2021, hitting an all-time high of $67,801 in November. But in 2022, as the Fed began to crank rates higher, it and other cryptocurrencies collapsed, wiping roughly $2 trillion from the broader crypto market. As bitcoin plunged, one crypto billionaire was marshaling his forces—and his billions—to salvage it. Sam Bankman-Fried, the thirty-year-old titan of a sprawling crypto empire, started snapping up struggling crypto exchanges from Canada to Japan. Seeking to boost popular interest in crypto, the mercurial CEO of cryptocurrency exchange FTX Trading appeared in magazine ads alongside supermodel Gisele Bündchen and shelled out millions for a pro-crypto commercial featuring Larry David during the 2022 Super Bowl.

Boom: Bubbles and the End of Stagnation
by Byrne Hobart and Tobias Huber
Published 29 Oct 2024

Or, as the 19th-century writer and historian Thomas Carlyle put it, “Every new opinion, at its starting, is precisely in a minority of one.” 331 But instead of a phase of hallucinatory frenzy that culminates in a temporarily stabilizing sacrifice, it results in a crash—the burst of the bubble—which can be similarly cathartic. It is unsurprising that in the aftermath of almost every failed speculative mania, a scapegoat needs to be sacrificed for the collective sins of exuberance. From railway stock promoters in the British railway mania of the 1840s to Bernie Madoff, Elizabeth Holmes, Sam Bankman-Fried, and other various and sundry crypto scam artists today, the history of bubbles and crashes is littered with the symbolic bodies of investors, speculators, and fraudsters that society needed to sacrifice in order to recover from the destabilizing effects of financial manias. Therefore, bubbles are not only effective vehicles for parallelization and coordination, they are also spontaneous mechanisms of autoregulation that convert and channel conflictual mimetic desires to productive use.

The Missing Billionaires: A Guide to Better Financial Decisions
by Victor Haghani and James White
Published 27 Aug 2023

We're excluding professional gamblers who can move the odds slightly in their favor through card‐counting or other aids that will get you thrown out of casinos. c. We do know of one individual who publicly said he would make decisions in that way, and who seems to have done so. In our November 2022 article, “A Missing Piece of the SBF Puzzle,” we explored Sam Bankman‐Fried's professed risk‐neutrality and how it may have contributed to the collapse of his businesses and wealth. d. So profitable that many countries impose strong regulations on allowable odds to limit their profitability. e. The certainty‐equivalent gain of the 80/20 gamble to win $4,000 or $0 is $3,175, so $175 better than the $3,000 certain payoff, and the certainty‐equivalent loss of the 80/20 gamble to lose $4,000 or $0 is a loss of $3,226, so $226 worse than the certain loss of $3,000, for an individual with $100,000 of wealth, and CRRA utility with risk‐aversion of 2.

Billionaires' Row: Tycoons, High Rollers, and the Epic Race to Build the World's Most Exclusive Skyscrapers
by Katherine Clarke
Published 13 Jun 2023

And the boom in alternative money minted a new class of billionaires. They included known entities like the Winklevoss twins, best known as Mark Zuckerberg’s college nemeses, as well as newcomers like Brian Armstrong and Fred Ehrsam, who had founded the cryptocurrency exchange Coinbase, and Sam Bankman-Fried, the now disgraced creator of the competing exchange FTX. At 111 West 57th Street, there was a contest between two wealthy buyers for one of the building’s most expensive units, a 7,130-square-foot aerie on the 72nd floor asking $66 million. The developers had already accepted an offer on the unit when they got a second offer from Gavin Wood, one of the founders of Ethereum, the blockchain-based computer network.

Blood in the Machine: The Origins of the Rebellion Against Big Tech
by Brian Merchant
Published 25 Sep 2023

Amazon warehouse workers continue to organize around the long shadow of Jeff Bezos’s brutal and machinistic work policies. Opinion polling from Gallup has shown that Mark Zuckerberg is disliked more than the company he runs. A growing number of billionaire founders have become engulfed in scandal, accused of fraud and malfeasance: FTX’s Sam Bankman-Fried. Theranos’s Elizabeth Holmes. The list goes on. There is an animosity toward specific Silicon Valley elites that has only intensified in tandem with the expansion of their power. When managers use technology to embark on the widespread destruction of status and the pathways to upward mobility.

Nexus: A Brief History of Information Networks From the Stone Age to AI
by Yuval Noah Harari
Published 9 Sep 2024

Emily Washburn, “What to Know About Effective Altruism—Championed by Musk, Bankman-Fried, and Silicon Valley Giants,” Forbes, March 8, 2023, www.forbes.com/sites/emilywashburn/2023/03/08/what-to-know-about-effective-altruism-championed-by-musk-bankman-fried-and-silicon-valley-giants/; Alana Semuels, “How Silicon Valley Has Disrupted Philanthropy,” Atlantic, July 25, 2018, www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2018/07/how-silicon-valley-has-disrupted-philanthropy/565997/; Timnit Gebru, “Effective Altruism Is Pushing a Dangerous Brand of ‘AI Safety,’ ” Wired, Nov. 30, 2022, www.wired.com/story/effective-altruism-artificial-intelligence-sam-bankman-fried/; Gideon Lewis-Kraus, “The Reluctant Prophet of Effective Altruism,” New Yorker, Aug. 8, 2022, www.newyorker.com/magazine/2022/08/15/the-reluctant-prophet-of-effective-altruism. 39. Alan Soble, “Kant and Sexual Perversion,” Monist 86, no. 1 (2003): 55–89, www.jstor.org/stable/27903806. See also Matthew C.