7 ms·

People will keep focusing on the individual here but surely they should be questioning the system? In particular the VC's as most of this was actually instituti

People will keep focusing on the individual here but surely they should be questioning the system? In particular the VC's as most of this was actually institutional money. How on earth did he get £16Billion? Well turns out he went to Stanford same class as Theranos and his Girlfriend whom he made head of the trading arm also went there. She's the daughter of an MIT Econ Professor. It's quite clear FTX only got started because of political connections and back door deals. Sadly this won't be the wake up call that we need to bring back some sort of meritocracy to American society.

waihtis 4y ago
Son of influential political fundraisers, surely fundraising is in the genes for this guy. (partial /s)
- tbrownaw 4y ago
  It's a long and time-honored tradition to teach the kids the family trade.
dragontamer 4y ago
> Sadly this won't be the wake up call that we need to bring back some sort of meritocracy to American society. People "investing" into a cryptocoin because "value goes up" weren't being part of a meritocracy what so ever. There was never any true value to FTT. Hell, there's barely any value to BTC or ETH as it is and its been 14 years of looking for a valid use case. The little value it has is in black market, and perpetuating fraudsters like SBF. Sitting around with $100,000, doing nothing, and hoping to get $200,000 or more later isn't really a meritocracy at all.
- itsoktocry 4y ago
  What about all of the other number-goes-up (until recently) companies? Crypto isn't the only one, lots of easy-money beneficiaries will come unglued.
  - dragontamer 4y ago
    > Crypto isn't the only one, lots of easy-money beneficiaries will come unglued. I hope so. The past 10 years have been absurd IMO. I am of the opinion that returning the Fed Rate back to "more than zero" has begun to unravel a lot of these "money goes up" schemes. Now that money actually costs money to borrow (up from 0% to 3.75%), you can't just keep borrowing for infinite amounts of time and hoping for the best. You actually have to be doing something substantial with the money: building factories or buying servers or using R&D funds to hire programmers to make new things. "Line goes up therefore I buy" is one of the _LEAST_ "meritocracy" things I've ever seen in my life. Be it crappy stock from some companies, or cryptocoin. ---------- I want cryptocoins to return to the days about solving financial problems in new innovative ways. Can we go back to talking about how to use 3-out-of-5 bitcoin wallets to implement new protocols of exchange and/or escrow? When did we become so focused on "number goes up" and "inflation hedge" and "have fun staying poor" ?? When the damn coin can do something that physical money can't do, and when people build businesses on top of that trick, that's when we move forward as a society. Not just this weird hype-fest, buying out of stadiums (Miami Stadium / others), or buying out Superbowl ads.
    - spacemadness 4y ago
      I’ve never been a proponent of crypto, but my mostly outsider take is that speculators have pretty much buried any hidden potential if it exists due to greed. My sense is the public is sick of crypto and does not trust it.
      - codehalo 4y ago
        Crypto holders are moving their crypto off of exchanges, not selling. The majority of sellers are speculators. The fast buck they were expecting hasn't materialized. They will be back when the space matures further, and more uniformed but well connected tradFi hustlers and VCs show up, hoping to replicate their success bullshitting the public. Meanwhile, those who understand the benefits of cryptocurrencies will carry on.
    - this_user 4y ago
- lrhegeba 4y ago
  would add: * ransomware * cross-border money transfer, in particular from/to authoritarian regimes like china
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
nz 4y ago
> Sadly this won't be the wake up call that we need to bring back some sort of meritocracy to American society. Genuine question: are we 100% sure that this society was ever meritocratic? How would we measure `meritocracy` so that we can compare year-to-year and decade-to-decade?
- throwup 4y ago
  I don't know why this is downvoted. Meritocracy is a notoriously hard thing to measure, but that doesn't mean we shouldn't try.
- mc32 4y ago
  Of course not. It’s impossible. Take the presidency. Let’s say a very meritocratic person gets elected. There would be a hundred equally meritorious people who do not hold that office. Same for many things. Meritocracy is a measure and some sort of idealized concept used for comparisons.
- wesapien 4y ago
  that's a utopian vision. we don't need a perfect meritocracy. majority of parents would do anything to put their kids ahead of others. i would help people I know and have relationships with first. it doesn't work out all the time.
_jayhack_ 4y ago
He went to MIT, actually. His parents are employed by Stanford.
ldjkfkdsjnv 4y ago
A lot of very wealthy people put money into the FTX financing. If there wasn't a major downturn, probably FTX never would have gone under. Us plebeians get a rare view into how business success commonly happens (a network of people force it to happen). Its similar to the epstein scandal, a rare view into another world far removed from the common worker. Meritocracy isn't a full on illusion, but we also don't have enough data and transparency into modern power structures.
- dragontamer 4y ago
  > If there wasn't a major downturn There was no downturn when Theranos collapsed. These schemes all eventually break down and tumble upon their lies. Worldcom also collapsed in 2002. I don't think it was related to the Tech Bubble if I'm remembering history correctly.
  - jjeaff 4y ago
    Many investment style schemes will continue on until a recession exposes everything. Much like the Madoff ponzi. It went on for decades until a once in a lifetime financial industry blow up exposed it.
    - mannykannot 4y ago
      Things that cannot go on for ever don't. The end will likely be occur during some sort of a downturn as that's when there's an increase in the number of people needing to make use of their assets, but the end is inevitable regardless.
      - rakkhi 4y ago
        A rising tide floats all boats….. only when the tide goes out do you discover who's been swimming naked." This is Warren Buffett's addendum to the famous 'rising tide' quote.
  - deltree7 4y ago
    Worldcom was 100% related to Tech Bubble. It was the quintessential poster boy (along with pets.com and Webvan).
akudha 4y ago
In a financial services firm I worked for, I had to help this intern (maybe 19, 20 years old). She was well dressed, well spoken etc, but didn't seem too keen on doing any actual work. Later I found out that she was the kid of a VP who also worked there. Must be nice to have well-connected parents
- _fat_santa 4y ago
  Objectively it would be nice to have someone help you get ahead like that. But I often wonder to myself, if your parents are well connected and get you job, does it ever bother those people that it's not who they are that got them hired but rather who their parents are. I'd love to say I wouldn't take help from my family if they were super influential but I honestly don't know.
  - itronitron 4y ago
    If they're not doing the work then I doubt they care about what got them hired. Ultimately each person should be judged on their own merits, I wouldn't hold a relation against someone if they still do their job. Another question to ask... Is the person where they are because of their parents or in spite of them?
    - fbdab103 4y ago
      If a less qualified, young candidate walks into a higher position, and happens to have well connected parents. Yeah, I am going to default that they got the position because of their parents. If the children of Jeff Bezos, Bill Gates, etc happen to materialize on an elevated position right out of college, are we to assume that they got their purely out of spite? Maybe they truly are brilliant and deserve the position, but they will always have had a leg up on the competition.
      - ryandrake 4y ago
        Your company will hire two people out of a candidate pool of 1,000. You're told that Well-connected Walter is one of those 1,000 and is guaranteed a job. Your hiring team is going to go through and interview the remaining 999 and find you the top candidate. After a month of interviewing, you are presented with your two new hires: Well-connected Walter and Meritocracy Mary. What are the chances that these two are actually the best two hires, rather than the best hire and a mediocre hire?
vinaygaba 4y ago
> How on earth did he get £16Billion I think this tweet really explains how he was able to raise a ridiculous amount of capital so easily - https://twitter.com/vinaygaba/status/1591822398894247946 https://twitter.com/vinaygaba/status/1591822398894247946
_jal 4y ago
> FTX only got started because of political connections You can say this about many, many companies. > Sadly this won't be the wake up call that we need to bring back some sort of meritocracy What date range are you pointing to here for these good-ole'-days, when meritocracy was real and class, race and connections didn't matter?
- jjeaff 4y ago
  Exactly, the distinction is the good 'ol days, when there were only 3 news channels so there was no way to cover all the specific cases of non-meritocracy going on, and today, where there are many ways to communicate the long tail of all these cases.
peter422 4y ago
I don't think being an econ professor is quite the position of power you think it is. Source: I have many friends who are professors including econ professors. The Wikipedia pages of all of these people only relates to their relationship to FTX, they aren't running US fiscal policy.
- bmitc 4y ago
  He isn’t just an economics professor but is connected politically to several people.
- atdrummond 4y ago
  Her dad used to be Gary Gensler’s boss. That’s a conflict of interest given what FTX was requesting from the government (a “no-action” finding).
- caminante 4y ago
  > I don't think being an econ professor is quite the position of power you think it is. Source: I have many friends who are professors including econ professors. I'm baffled you'd pick this hill. AFAIK, her dad is the chair of the #1 economics department in the world![0] [0] https://economics.mit.edu/people/faculty/glenn-ellison https://economics.mit.edu/people/faculty/glenn-ellison Edit: And her mom (?) is also in the same department [1] with industry connections in pharma/ecommerce. [1] https://economics.mit.edu/people/faculty/sara-fisher-ellison https://economics.mit.edu/people/faculty/sara-fisher-ellison
  - peter422 4y ago
    And the customers who signed up for FTX did so because the girlfriend of the owner is an top econ professor? And you think SBF will escape accountability due to his connections? He won't If you think those connections helped him get VC funding, I can assure you they help a lot of people and most do not become multi billion dollar frauds. The fact that he is an upper class white guy is the important part, the rest is you just reading way too much into this.
    - 4y ago
mbesto 4y ago
Based on an interview with SBF, he made a ton (billions?) early on in the crypto days by arbitraging BTC/USD exchanges (e.g. one exchange was selling BTC at $200 and another was selling BTC at $210, so he took the difference). It's easier to throw £16B at someone who had already built the algo that got them personally to, say, $1B (in a very short amount of time).
- MrMan 4y ago
  I think he made a couple hundred million on this trade and half a billion moe in alameda when things were going well then took investment funds denominated in either coins or USD and invested those into FTX expansion and more levered long crypto pump and dumps and then took those proceeds and did more pump and dumps and direct investments in things like robin hood and other shitcoins. I think most of their "market making" was probably using connections to do pump and dumps of various coins. activities like this made huge gains but since the BTC peak a lot of the same activities have been burning a lot of capital and then you end up needing recapitalization
- dfghbbjiiugb 4y ago
  Not sure why this is downvoted, it's accurate. Sam made a lot of money in crypto from 2017 to 2019 before founding FTX. He also went to MIT, not Stanford, and I think is a good example of someone who had privilege (via being born into an upper middle class family to intelligent faculty parents) but still went through meritocratic routes.
- oldgradstudent 4y ago
  > Based on an interview with SBF, he made a ton (billions?) early on in the crypto days by arbitraging BTC/USD exchanges (e.g. one exchange was selling BTC at $200 and another was selling BTC at $210, so he took the difference). If you interview me, I can tell you I made a ton of money selling used condoms to developing countries. It won't make it true. We now know he has, how shall I say it, a complicated relationship with the truth. Hopefully, an enterprising investigative reporter or two will spend some time researching the topic.
misiti3780 4y ago
He went to MIT, what are you talking about?
spicymaki 4y ago
> Sadly this won't be the wake up call that we need to bring back some sort of meritocracy to American society. Please someone define meritocracy and describe how that will save us. Here is a definition I googled: "a ruling or influential class of educated or skilled people." SBF seems to fulfill the requirements. He went to MIT and studied physics and was a quant at Jane street (He was literally born on Stanford Campus to two Stanford professors). Logic being that if you score high on tests and go to a good school then you are up for the task. There are even papers that state that the higher your IQ the more moral you are. If you work yourself to death than you have earned the merit (he even claims to have slept in his office). He is even a vegan and a committed altruist. You could not get much better on paper. All of these criminals have merit. Liz Truss and Boris Johnson all read at Oxford. The supreme court of the US are mostly from Yale and Harvard. Trump went to UPenn. Many of the people scamming us today work really long hours and have gone to really good schools.
- boppo1 4y ago
  Eliminate legacy admissions. Keep test score based admissions.
spicyusername 4y ago
> Bring back Are you sure we ever had one?
theCrowing 4y ago
Why only the system? In every fraud there are thousands of people working in these same companies and afterwards we only hear "We didn't know anything.". The CEO takes a deal and everyone walks.
chrisgd 4y ago
I don’t believe a lot of this was institutional money.
boppo1 4y ago
>should be questioning the system? >In particular the VC's... Let's go a step up the ladder and blame ZIRP/LIRP for forcing liquidity into a market with nowhere for it to find a real return.
parenthesis 4y ago
The institutional investors should have put some people of their collective choosing on the board. These people should have had (non-racy) financial backgrounds. (The board of Theranos, notoriously, contained `great and good' people, but not with the right backgrounds to scrutinise what was (not) going on.)
jahewson 4y ago
This is a really low-effort take.
adrr 4y ago
Issue isn’t that he got billions in investment. He didn’t raise money from public markets so he stole money from the rich who had the means to actually due diligence but never did. Still blows my mind that he was caught playing league of legends on a pitch call and Sequoia still invested money in him. That was a clear view into his maturity level and seriousness. Would you hire someone who was gaming during the interview? If I was an LP, I would be asking a lot of questions and demanding accountability. The biggest issue is that he stole money from his customers. Not people who had the means to due real diligence.
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
oldgradstudent 4y ago
> How on earth did he get £16Billion? He never had $16B. That was just bad reporting. He owns a large stake of FTX, which turned out to be worth zero, and he owns a large state of Alameda Research, which turned out to be worth zero as well. He has some other assets, but according to reports, he also has a lot of debt. His real net worth could easily be negative. That is lower than that homeless guy living under the bridge.
- NickRandom 4y ago
  I think the intent of the question was - How was x Billions invested in his company. Perhaps you misread?
- lofatdairy 4y ago
  That's an important clarification, yeah. However, SBF did seem to receive $1.8 Billion in funding[^1]. Obviously that's an order of magnitude lower, but still an enormous sum and worth investigating in the autopsy. [^1]: https://www.bloomberg.com/news/newsletters/2022-11-10/sam-bankman-fried-sbf-was-seen-by-vcs-as-a-model-founder-at-ftx https://www.bloomberg.com/news/newsletters/2022-11-10/sam-ba...
- Bubble_Pop_22 4y ago
  > His real net worth could easily be negative. That is lower than that homeless guy living under the bridge. Oh puh-lease. Trump's net worth was supposedly -8 billions in the 90s. He used to say that "the homeless living across Trump Tower is richer than me". It's BS that people blurt out. This guy will never be a homeless living under the bridge
  - deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
faangiq 4y ago
I eagerly await the lawsuits against Sequoia. Oh wait …
jimmydddd 4y ago
Doesn't change your main point, but I think he went to MIT and his parents were law professors at Stanford.

waihtis 4y ago

Son of influential political fundraisers, surely fundraising is in the genes for this guy. (partial /s)

tbrownaw 4y ago
It's a long and time-honored tradition to teach the kids the family trade.

dragontamer 4y ago

> Sadly this won't be the wake up call that we need to bring back some sort of meritocracy to American society. People "investing" into a cryptocoin because "value goes up" weren't being part of a meritocracy what so ever. There was never any true value to FTT. Hell, there's barely any value to BTC or ETH as it is and its been 14 years of looking for a valid use case. The little value it has is in black market, and perpetuating fraudsters like SBF. Sitting around with $100,000, doing nothing, and hoping to get $200,000 or more later isn't really a meritocracy at all.

itsoktocry 4y ago
What about all of the other number-goes-up (until recently) companies? Crypto isn't the only one, lots of easy-money beneficiaries will come unglued.
- dragontamer 4y ago
  > Crypto isn't the only one, lots of easy-money beneficiaries will come unglued. I hope so. The past 10 years have been absurd IMO. I am of the opinion that returning the Fed Rate back to "more than zero" has begun to unravel a lot of these "money goes up" schemes. Now that money actually costs money to borrow (up from 0% to 3.75%), you can't just keep borrowing for infinite amounts of time and hoping for the best. You actually have to be doing something substantial with the money: building factories or buying servers or using R&D funds to hire programmers to make new things. "Line goes up therefore I buy" is one of the _LEAST_ "meritocracy" things I've ever seen in my life. Be it crappy stock from some companies, or cryptocoin. ---------- I want cryptocoins to return to the days about solving financial problems in new innovative ways. Can we go back to talking about how to use 3-out-of-5 bitcoin wallets to implement new protocols of exchange and/or escrow? When did we become so focused on "number goes up" and "inflation hedge" and "have fun staying poor" ?? When the damn coin can do something that physical money can't do, and when people build businesses on top of that trick, that's when we move forward as a society. Not just this weird hype-fest, buying out of stadiums (Miami Stadium / others), or buying out Superbowl ads.
  - spacemadness 4y ago
    I’ve never been a proponent of crypto, but my mostly outsider take is that speculators have pretty much buried any hidden potential if it exists due to greed. My sense is the public is sick of crypto and does not trust it.
    - codehalo 4y ago
      Crypto holders are moving their crypto off of exchanges, not selling. The majority of sellers are speculators. The fast buck they were expecting hasn't materialized. They will be back when the space matures further, and more uniformed but well connected tradFi hustlers and VCs show up, hoping to replicate their success bullshitting the public. Meanwhile, those who understand the benefits of cryptocurrencies will carry on.
  - this_user 4y ago
lrhegeba 4y ago
would add: * ransomware * cross-border money transfer, in particular from/to authoritarian regimes like china
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]

nz 4y ago

> Sadly this won't be the wake up call that we need to bring back some sort of meritocracy to American society. Genuine question: are we 100% sure that this society was ever meritocratic? How would we measure `meritocracy` so that we can compare year-to-year and decade-to-decade?

throwup 4y ago
I don't know why this is downvoted. Meritocracy is a notoriously hard thing to measure, but that doesn't mean we shouldn't try.
mc32 4y ago
Of course not. It’s impossible. Take the presidency. Let’s say a very meritocratic person gets elected. There would be a hundred equally meritorious people who do not hold that office. Same for many things. Meritocracy is a measure and some sort of idealized concept used for comparisons.
wesapien 4y ago
that's a utopian vision. we don't need a perfect meritocracy. majority of parents would do anything to put their kids ahead of others. i would help people I know and have relationships with first. it doesn't work out all the time.

_jayhack_ 4y ago

He went to MIT, actually. His parents are employed by Stanford.

ldjkfkdsjnv 4y ago

A lot of very wealthy people put money into the FTX financing. If there wasn't a major downturn, probably FTX never would have gone under. Us plebeians get a rare view into how business success commonly happens (a network of people force it to happen). Its similar to the epstein scandal, a rare view into another world far removed from the common worker. Meritocracy isn't a full on illusion, but we also don't have enough data and transparency into modern power structures.

dragontamer 4y ago
> If there wasn't a major downturn There was no downturn when Theranos collapsed. These schemes all eventually break down and tumble upon their lies. Worldcom also collapsed in 2002. I don't think it was related to the Tech Bubble if I'm remembering history correctly.
- jjeaff 4y ago
  Many investment style schemes will continue on until a recession exposes everything. Much like the Madoff ponzi. It went on for decades until a once in a lifetime financial industry blow up exposed it.
  - mannykannot 4y ago
    Things that cannot go on for ever don't. The end will likely be occur during some sort of a downturn as that's when there's an increase in the number of people needing to make use of their assets, but the end is inevitable regardless.
    - rakkhi 4y ago
      A rising tide floats all boats….. only when the tide goes out do you discover who's been swimming naked." This is Warren Buffett's addendum to the famous 'rising tide' quote.
- deltree7 4y ago
  Worldcom was 100% related to Tech Bubble. It was the quintessential poster boy (along with pets.com and Webvan).

akudha 4y ago

In a financial services firm I worked for, I had to help this intern (maybe 19, 20 years old). She was well dressed, well spoken etc, but didn't seem too keen on doing any actual work. Later I found out that she was the kid of a VP who also worked there. Must be nice to have well-connected parents

_fat_santa 4y ago
Objectively it would be nice to have someone help you get ahead like that. But I often wonder to myself, if your parents are well connected and get you job, does it ever bother those people that it's not who they are that got them hired but rather who their parents are. I'd love to say I wouldn't take help from my family if they were super influential but I honestly don't know.
- itronitron 4y ago
  If they're not doing the work then I doubt they care about what got them hired. Ultimately each person should be judged on their own merits, I wouldn't hold a relation against someone if they still do their job. Another question to ask... Is the person where they are because of their parents or in spite of them?
  - fbdab103 4y ago
    If a less qualified, young candidate walks into a higher position, and happens to have well connected parents. Yeah, I am going to default that they got the position because of their parents. If the children of Jeff Bezos, Bill Gates, etc happen to materialize on an elevated position right out of college, are we to assume that they got their purely out of spite? Maybe they truly are brilliant and deserve the position, but they will always have had a leg up on the competition.
    - ryandrake 4y ago
      Your company will hire two people out of a candidate pool of 1,000. You're told that Well-connected Walter is one of those 1,000 and is guaranteed a job. Your hiring team is going to go through and interview the remaining 999 and find you the top candidate. After a month of interviewing, you are presented with your two new hires: Well-connected Walter and Meritocracy Mary. What are the chances that these two are actually the best two hires, rather than the best hire and a mediocre hire?

vinaygaba 4y ago

> How on earth did he get £16Billion I think this tweet really explains how he was able to raise a ridiculous amount of capital so easily - https://twitter.com/vinaygaba/status/1591822398894247946 https://twitter.com/vinaygaba/status/1591822398894247946

_jal 4y ago

> FTX only got started because of political connections You can say this about many, many companies. > Sadly this won't be the wake up call that we need to bring back some sort of meritocracy What date range are you pointing to here for these good-ole'-days, when meritocracy was real and class, race and connections didn't matter?

jjeaff 4y ago
Exactly, the distinction is the good 'ol days, when there were only 3 news channels so there was no way to cover all the specific cases of non-meritocracy going on, and today, where there are many ways to communicate the long tail of all these cases.

peter422 4y ago

I don't think being an econ professor is quite the position of power you think it is. Source: I have many friends who are professors including econ professors. The Wikipedia pages of all of these people only relates to their relationship to FTX, they aren't running US fiscal policy.

bmitc 4y ago
He isn’t just an economics professor but is connected politically to several people.
atdrummond 4y ago
Her dad used to be Gary Gensler’s boss. That’s a conflict of interest given what FTX was requesting from the government (a “no-action” finding).
caminante 4y ago
> I don't think being an econ professor is quite the position of power you think it is. Source: I have many friends who are professors including econ professors. I'm baffled you'd pick this hill. AFAIK, her dad is the chair of the #1 economics department in the world![0] [0] https://economics.mit.edu/people/faculty/glenn-ellison https://economics.mit.edu/people/faculty/glenn-ellison Edit: And her mom (?) is also in the same department [1] with industry connections in pharma/ecommerce. [1] https://economics.mit.edu/people/faculty/sara-fisher-ellison https://economics.mit.edu/people/faculty/sara-fisher-ellison
- peter422 4y ago
  And the customers who signed up for FTX did so because the girlfriend of the owner is an top econ professor? And you think SBF will escape accountability due to his connections? He won't If you think those connections helped him get VC funding, I can assure you they help a lot of people and most do not become multi billion dollar frauds. The fact that he is an upper class white guy is the important part, the rest is you just reading way too much into this.
  - 4y ago

mbesto 4y ago

Based on an interview with SBF, he made a ton (billions?) early on in the crypto days by arbitraging BTC/USD exchanges (e.g. one exchange was selling BTC at $200 and another was selling BTC at $210, so he took the difference). It's easier to throw £16B at someone who had already built the algo that got them personally to, say, $1B (in a very short amount of time).

MrMan 4y ago
I think he made a couple hundred million on this trade and half a billion moe in alameda when things were going well then took investment funds denominated in either coins or USD and invested those into FTX expansion and more levered long crypto pump and dumps and then took those proceeds and did more pump and dumps and direct investments in things like robin hood and other shitcoins. I think most of their "market making" was probably using connections to do pump and dumps of various coins. activities like this made huge gains but since the BTC peak a lot of the same activities have been burning a lot of capital and then you end up needing recapitalization
dfghbbjiiugb 4y ago
Not sure why this is downvoted, it's accurate. Sam made a lot of money in crypto from 2017 to 2019 before founding FTX. He also went to MIT, not Stanford, and I think is a good example of someone who had privilege (via being born into an upper middle class family to intelligent faculty parents) but still went through meritocratic routes.
oldgradstudent 4y ago
> Based on an interview with SBF, he made a ton (billions?) early on in the crypto days by arbitraging BTC/USD exchanges (e.g. one exchange was selling BTC at $200 and another was selling BTC at $210, so he took the difference). If you interview me, I can tell you I made a ton of money selling used condoms to developing countries. It won't make it true. We now know he has, how shall I say it, a complicated relationship with the truth. Hopefully, an enterprising investigative reporter or two will spend some time researching the topic.

misiti3780 4y ago

He went to MIT, what are you talking about?

spicymaki 4y ago

> Sadly this won't be the wake up call that we need to bring back some sort of meritocracy to American society. Please someone define meritocracy and describe how that will save us. Here is a definition I googled: "a ruling or influential class of educated or skilled people." SBF seems to fulfill the requirements. He went to MIT and studied physics and was a quant at Jane street (He was literally born on Stanford Campus to two Stanford professors). Logic being that if you score high on tests and go to a good school then you are up for the task. There are even papers that state that the higher your IQ the more moral you are. If you work yourself to death than you have earned the merit (he even claims to have slept in his office). He is even a vegan and a committed altruist. You could not get much better on paper. All of these criminals have merit. Liz Truss and Boris Johnson all read at Oxford. The supreme court of the US are mostly from Yale and Harvard. Trump went to UPenn. Many of the people scamming us today work really long hours and have gone to really good schools.

boppo1 4y ago
Eliminate legacy admissions. Keep test score based admissions.

spicyusername 4y ago

> Bring back Are you sure we ever had one?

theCrowing 4y ago

Why only the system? In every fraud there are thousands of people working in these same companies and afterwards we only hear "We didn't know anything.". The CEO takes a deal and everyone walks.

chrisgd 4y ago

I don’t believe a lot of this was institutional money.

boppo1 4y ago

>should be questioning the system? >In particular the VC's... Let's go a step up the ladder and blame ZIRP/LIRP for forcing liquidity into a market with nowhere for it to find a real return.

parenthesis 4y ago

The institutional investors should have put some people of their collective choosing on the board. These people should have had (non-racy) financial backgrounds. (The board of Theranos, notoriously, contained `great and good' people, but not with the right backgrounds to scrutinise what was (not) going on.)

jahewson 4y ago

This is a really low-effort take.

adrr 4y ago

Issue isn’t that he got billions in investment. He didn’t raise money from public markets so he stole money from the rich who had the means to actually due diligence but never did. Still blows my mind that he was caught playing league of legends on a pitch call and Sequoia still invested money in him. That was a clear view into his maturity level and seriousness. Would you hire someone who was gaming during the interview? If I was an LP, I would be asking a lot of questions and demanding accountability. The biggest issue is that he stole money from his customers. Not people who had the means to due real diligence.

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oldgradstudent 4y ago

> How on earth did he get £16Billion? He never had $16B. That was just bad reporting. He owns a large stake of FTX, which turned out to be worth zero, and he owns a large state of Alameda Research, which turned out to be worth zero as well. He has some other assets, but according to reports, he also has a lot of debt. His real net worth could easily be negative. That is lower than that homeless guy living under the bridge.

NickRandom 4y ago
I think the intent of the question was - How was x Billions invested in his company. Perhaps you misread?
lofatdairy 4y ago
That's an important clarification, yeah. However, SBF did seem to receive $1.8 Billion in funding[^1]. Obviously that's an order of magnitude lower, but still an enormous sum and worth investigating in the autopsy. [^1]: https://www.bloomberg.com/news/newsletters/2022-11-10/sam-bankman-fried-sbf-was-seen-by-vcs-as-a-model-founder-at-ftx https://www.bloomberg.com/news/newsletters/2022-11-10/sam-ba...
Bubble_Pop_22 4y ago
> His real net worth could easily be negative. That is lower than that homeless guy living under the bridge. Oh puh-lease. Trump's net worth was supposedly -8 billions in the 90s. He used to say that "the homeless living across Trump Tower is richer than me". It's BS that people blurt out. This guy will never be a homeless living under the bridge
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faangiq 4y ago

I eagerly await the lawsuits against Sequoia. Oh wait …

jimmydddd 4y ago

Doesn't change your main point, but I think he went to MIT and his parents were law professors at Stanford.