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FTX used corporate funds to purchase employee homes, new filing shows

cnbc.com

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Re: FTX used corporate funds to purchase employee homes, new filing shows

#341

Post by mikeyouse »

reddog wrote: post #259
tibbydudeza wrote: post #198

SBF is a fraudster and criminal - he "loaned" 3.3 bullion from Almeda Research. It makes Enron seem like side show.

No, the Enron scandal was much, much bigger. In 2000 Enron had a market cap of over $60 billion and was "reporting" $100 billion in revenue. It ended up losing it's sharholders $74 billion and all 20,000 employees their jobs. At the time it's bankrupcy was the largest in history. The scandal also drove Enron's accounting firm, Aurthur Anderson, out of business costing all 85,000 their employess their jobs.

Right. All of these "bigger than Enron" or "bigger than Madoff" claims are so dumb. Much of the money lost on FTX was in the form of magic bean tokens that people pretended were worth billions of dollars - they weren't actually worth billions of dollars.

Re: FTX used corporate funds to purchase employee homes, new filing shows

#342

Post by fisherjeff »

boh wrote: post #114

In a separate article Ray also said: “Never in my career have I seen such a complete failure of corporate controls and such a complete absence of trustworthy financial information as occurred here,” And this is the same man who oversaw the liquidation of Enron. "Ray said he had found at FTX international, FTX US and Bankman-Fried’s Alameda Research trading company “compromised systems integrity”, “faulty regulatory o…

What is also wild is that none of their investors obviously ever asked for even, like, a single account reconciliation, because obviously there were none!

Until the Chapter 11 filing, I assumed the books were pretty much normal until Alameda started to tank and then shady stuff started happening, but it turns out they were always just guesstimates in Excel. Which is apparently fine when raising ~$2B.

Re: FTX used corporate funds to purchase employee homes, new filing shows

#343

Post by coryrc »

Cupertino95014 wrote: post #305
tootie wrote: post #165

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The guy who says regulations are dumb has no idea what he spent his money on or even how many employees he has. This guy is almost worse than Elizabeth Holmes.

I'm the last person to defend Holmes, but at least she was trying to produce something. SBF's prison sentence should be at least five times what Holmes gets.

She put people at risk of undetected cancer. SBF accepted money from suckers.

Re: FTX used corporate funds to purchase employee homes, new filing shows

#344

Post by mikeyouse »

frankjr wrote: post #318
55555 wrote: post #4

The new CEO of FTX states that FTX had no accounting department. lol. > “The Debtors do not have an accounting department,” Ray wrote, stating he expected it would be “some time” before reliable financial statements could be prepared.

I wonder how that could have possibly worked. I mean they had more than a hundred companies in various countries - somebody must have occasionally filed documents / reports with the local authorities, right?

They haven't named the firm, but the same paragraph goes on to say that they used an external accounting partner for their books.

Re: FTX used corporate funds to purchase employee homes, new filing shows

#346

Post by vkou »

ShamelessC wrote: post #326
w23j wrote: post #74

Those are some candid remarks by the new CEO. "I have over 40 years of legal and restructuring experience. [...] Never in my career have I seen such a complete failure of corporate controls and such a complete absence of trustworthy financial information as occurred here. From compromised systems integrity and faulty regulatory oversight abroad, to the concentration of control in the hands of a very small group of in…

Not from finance - what is meant here by “potentially compromised”? Is that just as vague in context?

It means that after looking at the books for a week, he thinks that key employees at the firm may have been crooks, as opposed to idiots.

Re: FTX used corporate funds to purchase employee homes, new filing shows

#347

Post by c22 »

andrekandre wrote: post #327
datavirtue wrote: post #222

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The banking, finance, and corporate accounting world and their practices would shock most devs to the core. Most people just assume that certain controls are being enacted with precision. Things like: customer account reconciliation, bank account reconciliation, etc. Most of the time people just aggregate values and never inspect the detail. They record those aggregates in the GL and move on. I have never seen granul…

> They record those aggregates in the GL and move on. what is gl?

Perhaps general ledger?

Re: FTX used corporate funds to purchase employee homes, new filing shows

#348

Post by ilrwbwrkhv »

boh wrote: post #114

In a separate article Ray also said: “Never in my career have I seen such a complete failure of corporate controls and such a complete absence of trustworthy financial information as occurred here,” And this is the same man who oversaw the liquidation of Enron. "Ray said he had found at FTX international, FTX US and Bankman-Fried’s Alameda Research trading company “compromised systems integrity”, “faulty regulatory o…

A lot of people will fake surprise now ;). Oh what a surprise. Thanks for the millions under the table though.

Re: FTX used corporate funds to purchase employee homes, new filing shows

#349

Post by [deleted] »

itsoktocry wrote: post #111
moneycantbuy wrote: post #28

how did ftx successfully raise so much vc money recently? do these top vc firms do no due diligence?

Dead simple: Many VC's aren't very smart and/or ethical. How many major Silicon Valley scandals are VCs involved in? 100%. And for the most part they get a pass. This end of the era of easy money is going to reveal that many of the "geniuses of our time" are nothing of the like.

[deleted]

Re: FTX used corporate funds to purchase employee homes, new filing shows

#350

Post by nwiswell »

gruez wrote: post #147
skinnymuch wrote: post #128

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Using Wikipedia as a barometer doesn’t always works. In this case it probably wouldn’t work even if SBF was much bigger than he was with EA. There’s a middle ground. He wasn’t a prophet but he wasn’t nobody either. He was a leading non-academic figure/celeb of EA that didn’t get too much pushback.

>There’s a middle ground. He wasn’t a prophet but he wasn’t nobody either. He was a leading non-academic figure/celeb of EA that didn’t get too much pushback. That's the non-controversial opinion, but where does this leave OP's comment? Should we push back more on billionaires in movements? Should we assume that everyone who's in movements is in it for cynical reasons? Or maybe only billionaires? A new yorker article…

> Should we assume that everyone who's in movements is in it for cynical reasons?

This is an all-or-nothing fallacy.

Perhaps we should view facially "altruistic" movements much more skeptically. Indeed in hindsight it seems like membership is much more advantageous for virtue signaling than for being more "effective" with your altruism (is it really so hard to figure out who will do the most good with your money?)

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