> While the accounting situation at FTX appears to have been a disaster, it just doesn't seem out of the ordinary for a 2 year old company FTX is 3.5 years old

> While the accounting situation at FTX appears to have been a disaster, it just doesn't seem out of the ordinary for a 2 year old company FTX is 3.5 years old, and Alameda is 5 years old. > What does negative $8 billion mean in the context of double entry? "We're supposed to have $8 billion in this account but we don't." Combining various sources of information and reading between the lines, the most likely explanation is that this is the Alameda account that FTX customers were depositing money into, which then got gambled away by Alameda instead of transferred to FTX. I've never worked at a startup but I strongly question the idea that "Whoops we had customers send $8 billion to the wrong company and gambled it away instead of collecting it" is not out of the ordinary.