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Sam Bankman-Fried Convicted

nytimes.com

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Re: Sam Bankman-Fried Convicted

#601
post #120

Interestingly, FTX made a $500 million USD investment in Anthropic; supposedly, this was made while Anthropic was valued at $4.6 billion (unconfirmed). Now, Anthropic is nearing $30 billion. Anyone know the latest on this? Is FTX going to sell that stake off to pay back the debts? [1] https://www.businessinsider.com/sam-bankman-frieds-anthropic...

They're going through normal bankruptcy stuff and may liquidate the Anthropic stake. It looks at this point like there's likely going to be money enough to pay all creditors, which is just hilarious.

Smart investor that Sam! I guess the new bubble pays off the old one.

Re: Sam Bankman-Fried Convicted

#602
post #393

> You’d think this MIT graduate would wise up, but he never did. The MIT campus has a major public road running through the middle of it, one of the busiest surface streets in the area. You don't have to stand there very long to see a crowd of students almost get hit by a car because they didn't look before they crossed the street. Point is, the old cliche is true, there really is such a thing as a person with a lot…

> there really is such a thing as a person with a lot of book-learning but less common sense than a sea slug I don't even think SBF had the book-learning, just intellectual arrogance. "I don’t want to say no book is ever worth reading, but I actually do believe something pretty close to that. I think, if you wrote a book, you f---ed up, and it should have been a six-paragraph blog post."

I had to search to check that the quote was real, that is some spectacular hubris!

Re: Sam Bankman-Fried Convicted

#603

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In practice, I don't think it matters. Here is why: 1. The donations to candidates are usually pretty small (think $2,900/candidate). The candidates can return the money but getting all of the money back will not do much for the creditors. 2. Some PACs got a LOT of money (think millions of dollars). The problem is they probably already spent it. You can probably sue them to try to get back the money but the PACs will…

Except there are 5M, 200k, 300k donations Still small compared to all the stolen money

Those are to political action committees, not politicians. The probably spent most or all of it during the last election cycle. If they raise more money, you can go after that but what are you going to do if they don’t raise more money?

Re: Sam Bankman-Fried Convicted

#604
post #349

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah, I’ve heard that a bunch - about the press being uninformed or lazy. I’d offer that they are neither, but if they are restricting themselves to reporting facts and not prognostications and opinions, the statutory maximum is a reasonable thing to report.

A statement like "but it is often true that statutory maximums far exceed actual sentences" wouldn't be a prediction nor an opinion. This isn't the place to be sticking up for journalism. They really are both uninformed and lazy.

It is almost logical. They would not be maximums but prescribed sentences if they always use the max.

Re: Sam Bankman-Fried Convicted

#606

What was the exact moment the fraud began? What should he have done instead?

You don't have to pick an exact moment, but there are several clear moments of fraud. The biggest moment of fraud was whenever alameda's FTX account was allowed to have a riskier position than a normal account, including holding a negative balance. This is something FTX specifically allowed and publicly lied about (SBF on twitter said they were treated as a regular account, which we now know is false). This fraud bec…

Hold your horses! What startups are lying about what they do? I don’t get the impression this is the case at all. MVP and move fast tactics are not fraud. Saying your SOC2 compliant or something when you are not probably is.

Re: Sam Bankman-Fried Convicted

#609
post #393

> You’d think this MIT graduate would wise up, but he never did. The MIT campus has a major public road running through the middle of it, one of the busiest surface streets in the area. You don't have to stand there very long to see a crowd of students almost get hit by a car because they didn't look before they crossed the street. Point is, the old cliche is true, there really is such a thing as a person with a lot…

That's been my impression of SBF since FTX collapsed. Quite book smart, but zero experience in building a major service that custodies billions in other peoples' money. Raw intelligence is not enough in that context. Ideally you want to have apprenticed for at least a few years at a real exchange or custodial service. Somewhere you learn all the engineering details about how to architect it with proper financial cont…

He was a Jane Street trader, he's not new to high finance.
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