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FTX’s Sam Bankman-Fried cashed out $300M during funding spree

wsj.com

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Re: FTX’s Sam Bankman-Fried cashed out $300M during funding spree

#51

Post by rib3ye »

kevin_thibedeau wrote: post #40
slap_shot wrote: post #5

> the concentration of control in the hands of a very small group of inexperienced, unsophisticated and potentially compromised individuals. The most fascinating part of this whole story to me is just how few checks and balances there were in this company. Even without a board, did major investors not get his quarterly financials? If the leaked balance sheet was any indication of their level financial engineering cap…

Zero interest rates make the rich desperate to find a new money printer.

This is the MOST underrated statement in all the threads on this whole fiasco.

Government and Wall St. (but _especially_ government bare at least some responsibility for letting the pot get too big.

Re: FTX’s Sam Bankman-Fried cashed out $300M during funding spree

#52

Post by spywaregorilla »

wmf wrote: post #49
Tenoke wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How was he not doing EA? He was lying AND donating to causes. I'm very pro-EA but that's a weird claim.

Prominent EAers like McAskill have said (before this scandal) that EA is only valid if the money is earned honestly. They say that they never intended EA to be "steal to give".

Those concepts seem obviously separate to me.

Re: FTX’s Sam Bankman-Fried cashed out $300M during funding spree

#53

Post by vngzs »

kieselguhr_kid wrote: post #6

I don't know if it will happen, but a potentially good outcome here would be some regulation on the business practices of sufficiently large private companies in order to ensure they meet some basic level of corporate governance. Maybe they don't need the same level of scrutiny publicly traded companies have, but establishing minimum standards of conduct would help avert crises like this that can spread across entire…

In Europe there are rules that work out to: if you have 50 employees or assets over EUR ~5 million, you must disclose audited financial statements publicly (this is not strictly true, but it is true to a first order approximation).

It wouldn't be crazy sounding to require that companies worth over $10 billion USD disclose financial statements audited by reputable firms.

Re: FTX’s Sam Bankman-Fried cashed out $300M during funding spree

#54

Post by jeffskiling »

anticrisis wrote: post #27
kjs3 wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I thought that was the whole point: unregulated (or at least extremely minimally regulated, preferably in a jurisdiction that has a looooong history of looking the other way and in a perfect world with no extradition treaties), decentralized, anonymous financial systems. It doesn't surprise me in the least that these clowns were running across the high wire without a net using other peoples money. The fascinating par…

The whole circus is a mass delusion. I would really like to see some academic studies on the phenomenon.

Gustave Le Bon's The Crowd is pretty comic when things like this happen. Can find things straight out of the headlines but from 1895.

Re: FTX’s Sam Bankman-Fried cashed out $300M during funding spree

#55

Post by adrr »

leet_thow wrote: post #9
twelve40 wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

if the investors are willing to buy your shares from you, then why not? I've done secondary sales as early as seed. Unless you hide it from the board somehow, or you are explicitly prohibited from doing this, it's just a business transaction.

Not an ethics question of why or why not, I'm just curious.

So execs don't bounce. I left a company because they didn't offer a secondary and i was 3/4 vested with no exit in sight. I had a job offer to another company that promised an IPO in a year. If i would have been paid, i would have stayed but its hard to turning down a "guaranteed" 7 figure pay out. It's a numbers game, 1 out 10 startups will have an exit that makes people money.

Re: FTX’s Sam Bankman-Fried cashed out $300M during funding spree

#56

Post by kieselguhr_kid »

vngzs wrote: post #53
kieselguhr_kid wrote: post #6

I don't know if it will happen, but a potentially good outcome here would be some regulation on the business practices of sufficiently large private companies in order to ensure they meet some basic level of corporate governance. Maybe they don't need the same level of scrutiny publicly traded companies have, but establishing minimum standards of conduct would help avert crises like this that can spread across entire…

In Europe there are rules that work out to: if you have 50 employees or assets over EUR ~5 million, you must disclose audited financial statements publicly (this is not strictly true, but it is true to a first order approximation). It wouldn't be crazy sounding to require that companies worth over $10 billion USD disclose financial statements audited by reputable firms.

Some version of this would make sense to me.

Re: FTX’s Sam Bankman-Fried cashed out $300M during funding spree

#57

Post by kjs3 »

sillysaurusx wrote: post #38
wmf wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Does this mean that Sam was the one who sold Binance the FTT which Binance subsequently used to cause FTT to collapse? Yes exactly. Binance triggered FTX's downfall by dumping FTT I don't know if they actually dumped; they just announced it. It doesn't matter now.

It matters! Because that'd be hilarious. Is that really true that an announcement of a pending large sale (but no actual sale) was enough delta to topple the house of cards? Fascinating.

Well, of course it's true. How could it be otherwise. If you see an 'announcement' and you wait for consummation, you've already missed any market move you could have taken advantage of.

Re: FTX’s Sam Bankman-Fried cashed out $300M during funding spree

#59

Post by sarahowen62 »

icedchai wrote: post #41
slap_shot wrote: post #5

> the concentration of control in the hands of a very small group of inexperienced, unsophisticated and potentially compromised individuals. The most fascinating part of this whole story to me is just how few checks and balances there were in this company. Even without a board, did major investors not get his quarterly financials? If the leaked balance sheet was any indication of their level financial engineering cap…

How would that help? Anyone can lie on a spreadsheet or deck.

No post body was provided.

Re: FTX’s Sam Bankman-Fried cashed out $300M during funding spree

#60

Post by p0pcult »

knorker wrote: post #50
thepasswordis wrote: post #42

Just a general statement on people commenting on this saga: Sam wasn't doing effective altruism. He was lying about doing effective altruism. It's weird to me that people talk about this as an indictment of EA...but this rings similar to me as claiming that this is an indictment of DeFi or cryptocurrency generally. Sam/Caroline weren't doing DeFi, and neither were they really doing anything related to cryptocurrency.…

It wouldn't be an indictment of DeFi/cryptocurrencies if it weren't for... you know... this being basically the main pattern used in all of DeFi/cryptocurrencies. https://web3isgoinggreat.com/

You're conflating coin count with their relative size.

This is not the main pattern in either BTC or ETH.

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