Alameda lost tens of millions because of a fat fingering mistake

Maybe it's just because I'm too young to have seen much of Steve Jobs prior to his death, but my impression of coverage surrounding him was that while he did have certain behaviors he insisted on and were often talked about like his turtlenecks, it didn't really fit the stereotype of a tech nerd of the time.

Back then "nerd" seemed to have a much more negative connotation and seemed to describe people who were closer to "gross" than "quirky", like the trope of them constantly having a runny nose or sneezing everywhere due to allergies. Steve on the other hand came off as very clean and insistent on dressing nicely, even if in his own style.

I feel like Zuck was/is similarly seen as a sham for his entire robotic persona. Perhaps not as a scam, but he certainly never seemed to be all that liked by people.

I don't know anything about Newsom to comment on that one. But one other example where I was telling people it was probably a scam beforehand was Nikola. I don't recall what about his behavior did it for me, but something was just off about him in the way SBF was that just screamed deception.

So, it's a bit different. In the simplest case, a company pays 1bn dividends every year, so if 5% is considered a good rate of return currently, and there's no reason to expect the company's profitability changes much, then the value of that company is $20bn. Now, obviously, there's a lot of complexity layered on top of this. Many companies don't do dividends, preferring stock buybacks, for various reasons. Some companies are valued on _assumed future profits_, not current (ie valued on potential). And then there's speculation. But ultimately, if half of the $20bn company is suddenly sold, well, the price, in a rational market, shouldn't actually move much, unless the future value of money has also shifted. The company could be taken private by someone who had $20bn and thought $1bn/year was a good return.

Bitcoin's really pretty different; the value is ~entirely speculation driven. It does not, and cannot, pay dividends, or buy back its own 'shares', or anything like that. No-one would ever consider buying all the bitcoins (in the same way they might take the $20bn company private); the sole value of bitcoin is in other people wanting to buy bitcoin.

my dude, my paycheck is $10k a month, and I still clip coupons. Why? Because something I learned from poker. Winning is as simple as never losing money you don't have to lose.

SBF may have been "worth billions," but he sure didn't have enough escape cash on hand when he needed it.

Your division, project managers, VPs may throw around 9-figures worth of investment capital on loss leaders, party on the Riviera and give everyone Christmas bonuses, but all that means squat to someone like SBF once he's under indictment.

A cold hard $10 million in pocket, off the books, earned illegally, that can't be tracked back is worth a lot more than controlling a billion dollar budget or even getting a $100 million paycheck.

The very fact that it's considered a rounding error would work to the benefit of whoever had set up the scam. The real scam is setting up a corporation where you can pass off a rounding error large enough to let you escape federal custody, and that's where he fell short.

I'm pointing out why it would have been a worthwhile scam for him from my own experience of launching the first serious Bitcoin casino and coming to the rational, purely cost-based determination that there was no way to make enough money from opening it to Americans to let me avoid the likely consequences of that if the feds decided to treat Bitcoin as currency and go for me, which I now know they would have. I determined I could probably pull $10M in a year, but it wouldn't be nearly enough. I'd need to have at least $50M to have a chance. But this is the thought process you can probably project upon SBF running a flash crash, not the "too small to worry about" idea. $10M of misplaced money is right in the ballpark for someone a little stupid who's considering running for the islands.