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What Happened at Alameda Research

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Re: What Happened at Alameda Research

#311

Post by cma »

boh wrote: post #291
DebtDeflation wrote: post #120

> Most news accounts seem to portray the scale of the bankruptcy as relatively small. This is a key point. They lost $16B in customer deposits. LTCM lost $4.6B in investor funds. Enron lost $11B in shareholder capital. Interestingly, while Madoff is widely quoted as having lost $65B, that was almost all fabricated paper wealth, actual losses were around $18B and $14.4B of that was recovered and returned. All of these…

The financial news (WSJ, FT, Bloomberg) is definitely less blasé about it. There's definitely a sense that a scam is slowly being unearthed. I don't know if it's SBF previous political connections that are making most media outlets hesitant to delve into the details, but the scale of the failure is going to be unavoidable as more details emerge. Too many institutional investors got burned and they will no doubt be ea…

> I don't know if it's SBF previous political connections that are making most media outlets hesitant to delve into the details, but the scale of the failure is going to be unavoidable as more details emerge.

The Ryan Salame part of it may be making both parties not want to look into it too much.

Re: What Happened at Alameda Research

#312

Post by joenot443 »

nova22033 wrote: post #136
gadders wrote: post #130

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I can't think of any possible reason. https://fortune.com/2022/11/10/sam-bankman-fried-ftx-joe-bid...

Ryan Salame, the co-CEO, donated heavily to the GOP.

As I've explained to others here before, there's a difference in magnitude which is relevant here. SBF pledged to donate _$1 billion_ to the Democrat party. The only person to spend more money on the Democrats this cycle was the dear George Soros.

Who knows what's in store for SBF, but it's important to look at the facts here and acknowledge that this operation was heavily invested in the success of the Democratic party.

Re: What Happened at Alameda Research

#313

Post by isthisthingon99 »

DebtDeflation wrote: post #277
isthisthingon99 wrote: post #156

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Correct. Arrogance is not illegal (yet).

Taking customer money and using it for something else is absolutely a crime. And it has nothing to do with the regulatory status (or lack thereof) for crypto. If a car dealership takes customer down payments on cars and instead of ordering the cars they gamble the money away in Vegas, they don't get to just declare bankruptcy and say "too bad so sad", they go to jail.

To be clear, SBF/FTX total fraud.

The PhD guys from LTCM, not so much. Just arrogant.

Re: What Happened at Alameda Research

#315

Post by abkolan »

choeger wrote: post #29

A $3M monthly AWS bill. that's a nugget here. What that means is that amazon, Microsoft, and google are essentially selling shovels during a gold rush. On a subscription basis. In a form that makes it tedious and costly to actually figure out how many shovels your business has, what they do and who uses them regularly. Essentially, when there's a digital market hype, the big cloud providers collect their share on the…

It was 3M yearly.

Re: What Happened at Alameda Research

#316

Post by spaceman_2020 »

jasonwatkinspdx wrote: post #289
spaceman_2020 wrote: post #171

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm amazed that a man can build a company that literally created a reusable rocket and people will still call him a "bullshit artist". Also incredible how everyone on the left turned on Musk so quickly because he...tweeted some bad jokes? Strange reality we live in where your actions seem to matter so much less than your words. I thought it was the other way around.

Just to explain as someone that was initially a fan of Musk but now highly critical of him: SpaceX owes a great deal of it's success to the people around Elon, particularly Shotwell, minimizing his bad behaviors. Compare this to Tesla and now Twitter, where Elon has unilateral power. At the first he managed to get in trouble with the SEC in the dumbest way possible, as well as continues the Fully Self Driving saga th…

The EV industry as well as the spacetech industry would have none of the momentum they currently have if there was no messianic figure like Musk leading the pack.

Industries need charismatic evangelists to attract capital. Musk made investing in serious hardware ventures cool.

Now all the billionaires have their own space companies just to compete with Musk.

All in, a net positive. Otherwise Bezos billions might have gone into yet another superyacht.

If you get an abrasive personality with it, that’s a decent bargain.

Re: What Happened at Alameda Research

#317

Post by joenot443 »

jrochkind1 wrote: post #221

A side issue, but I found it distracting that the text consistently refers to Caroline Ellison by her first name alone, rather than last name or both names or initials like all other people discussed (and like is generally done for public figures covered in news articles etc). But I'm not in the "community", I don't read a lot of this inside baseball stuff. Is this the way she is usually referred to? It looks like he…

Sometimes peoples' first name ends up being what they're known as by the general public, usually because using just the last name might be ambiguous. Nobody called him "West" before the name change, it was always "Kanye". Similarly, one might not immediately know who "Winfrey" is, but everyone knows "Oprah".

Presumably, since Larry Ellison is also a figure in the high-net-worth tech world, one might unintentionally mislead the reader by just using Caroline's last name, so in this case I see people just using her first. I don't think there's much more to it than that.

Re: What Happened at Alameda Research

#318

Post by spaceman_2020 »

Yizahi wrote: post #285
spaceman_2020 wrote: post #171

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm amazed that a man can build a company that literally created a reusable rocket and people will still call him a "bullshit artist". Also incredible how everyone on the left turned on Musk so quickly because he...tweeted some bad jokes? Strange reality we live in where your actions seem to matter so much less than your words. I thought it was the other way around.

People are acting towards him like that exactly because they praised him before and were holding him at high esteem. I certainly did. Now he started to disappoint people, multiple times. Nobody cares (much) about CEO of Comcast, or BP, or Electronic Arts. They have bad reputation and when they do something bad again, people just shrug and move on. While people with good reputation doing same things are discussed a lo…

Founding multiple big successful companies in nascent industries that had been starved of capital before is a unique AND big achievement.

Nobody cheers on Bezos because of Blue Origin. They praise him for building Amazon when e-commerce was still new (or when dot coms had gone out of favor).

Same with Musk. There are multiple major private space ventures now. Ever car company has a heavily funded EV division. When Musk started, EVs were considered a joke and private space tech had little to no capital.

Musk is unique because he put his money into industries no big money would touch before him.

Re: What Happened at Alameda Research

#319

Post by DebtDeflation »

joenot443 wrote: post #312
nova22033 wrote: post #136

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ryan Salame, the co-CEO, donated heavily to the GOP.

As I've explained to others here before, there's a difference in magnitude which is relevant here. SBF pledged to donate _$1 billion_ to the Democrat party. The only person to spend more money on the Democrats this cycle was the dear George Soros. Who knows what's in store for SBF, but it's important to look at the facts here and acknowledge that this operation was heavily invested in the success of the Democratic pa…

There's an even bigger difference between donating and pledging to donate.

Salame donated $26.4M to individual GOP politicians and another $2-3M to GOP political organization.

SBF donated $39.8M to Democratic politicians and organizations.

Not all that different.

The $1B pledge was realistically never going to happen, just as his offer to loan Musk $3B to buy Twitter was never going to happen. Even in the best of times he never would have been able to extract that kind of real money from his operation within a short time.

Re: What Happened at Alameda Research

#320

Post by spaceman_2020 »

memish wrote: post #298
spaceman_2020 wrote: post #171

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm amazed that a man can build a company that literally created a reusable rocket and people will still call him a "bullshit artist". Also incredible how everyone on the left turned on Musk so quickly because he...tweeted some bad jokes? Strange reality we live in where your actions seem to matter so much less than your words. I thought it was the other way around.

You get a lot of internet points and clicks for jumping on the hate bandwagon and cynically tearing people down. Maybe if they weren't so focused on a manufactured villain, and people and the media had put even a tiny fraction of this scrutiny on SBF, an actual fraud might have been mitigated. But no, let's go after the guy putting rockets in space and producing millions of electric cars in the real world. He's the r…

Just surprised that HN has been flooded with the same low tier takes on Musk and tech culture in general. This audience usually understands nuance better
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