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It's easy to look back and say "it should have been obvious," but besides those who had general disdain for crypto like Buffett aside, were there any MSM outlet

It's easy to look back and say "it should have been obvious," but besides those who had general disdain for crypto like Buffett aside, were there any MSM outlets that actually saw through SBF for what he was at the onset and wrote an actual article about it before this all occurred? Because I can't seem to find any, and this just makes me want to avoid reading the news altogether at this point.

JeremyNT 4y ago
I read this article and I think this is the entire point. You can't trust corporate media's coverage of would-be wunderkind "entrepreneurs." Between access journalism, hero worship, a narrative formula that's known to sell, and laziness, journalists are all too glad to not only look the other way, but actively curate a reality distortion field on behalf of bad actors. It's not just that they didn't see through SBF, it's that it never would occur to them to even look. That's simply not what they are optimised to do when they cover this class of person.
- autotune 4y ago
  Yeah, the best any of them can say at this point is "we ignored publishing anything on him," and that was more likely due to sheer luck than responsible journalism.
- koofdoof 4y ago
  The book "Trust me I'm lying" goes into detail about this phenomenon. It is the interest of the media to be tricked, the authors get big stories and clicks and can then turn around and play dumb if things blow up. No one remembers the individual journalist who wrote the puff pieces, so the negative effects of eroding trust fall to a tragedy of the commons situation.
Lerc 4y ago
It's not clear to me that there was anything to 'see though'. This makes him seem like a Machiavellian genius putting up a front. It seems entirely possible that he is exactly what he seems. Sincere but lacking the skill and wisdom to run a large financial organization. While ignorance of the law cannot be used as a defense for breaking it, an organization such as FTX comprises a complex interaction of financial, technological and legal issues. You can easily imagine naive hands breaking multiple laws in their ignorance. It is also possible that they did things knowingly illegal only after their lack of experience had put them into a situation where they were trying to stabilize a teetering house of cards. Some things are hard, very hard. In some domains, being clever without being an expert doesn't work. It is also worth mentioning that the media sources that said how great things were going are also the same ones that are telling us how badly it ended up. I say 'possible' and 'imagine' above because we can't really get a good picture of what happened from reading a few articles. There will be a few good well researched summaries in a few years time. Hardly anyone will be interested by then; besides, the truth will be boringly complicated and nuanced.
- autotune 4y ago
  > This makes him seem like a Machiavellian genius putting up a front. It is not so much that he was a "Machiavellian genius," it was that he was basically the main character in Idiocracy; the smartest one in the room, but the room was a circus made for his own entertainment than anything else. > an organization such as FTX comprises a complex interaction of financial, technological and legal issues. It is unclear if this complexity was designed specifically to hide blatant acts of fraud or just cover up incompetence. Either way, the lack of transparency does not look good for him. >It is also worth mentioning that the media sources that said how great things were going are also the same ones that are telling us how badly it ended up. I am sure the individual investors who got scammed out of their investment(s) due to getting suckered into it by the MSM will be more than forgiving as well. >There will be a few good well researched summaries in a few years time. Hardly anyone will be interested by then; besides, the truth will be boringly complicated and nuanced. Until the next fraudster gets propped up and we can all look back to this and hope for the revival of independent, constructive journalism that the internet was supposed to bring over this current iteration of the MSM circus.
  - Lerc 4y ago
    >> an organization such as FTX comprises a complex interaction of financial, technological and legal issues. >It is unclear if this complexity was designed specifically to hide blatant acts of fraud or just cover up incompetence. Either way, the lack of transparency does not look good for him. I would strongly suggest neither. I did not intend to imply that this complexity was specific to FTX but rather all organizations in that field. The complexity is a unavoidable result of combining the demands of financial, technological and most significantly legal aspects.
- asiachick 4y ago
  Ignorance of the law can be use for breaking it for cops https://www.vox.com/2015/8/4/9095213/police-stops-heien-v-north-carolina https://www.vox.com/2015/8/4/9095213/police-stops-heien-v-no...
- adastra22 4y ago
eternalban 4y ago
Same thing with early stories on Epstein. He is just presented as a successful investor. And then decades later, they start (even then in a very tepid fashion) asking questions like "where did he get his money?", "why did Wexner give him a mansion and power of attorney?", etc. Now we hear this (in 2021) but it happened ~3 decades ago: "On one of Levin’s trips to New York in 1989, Wexner asked him to meet a brilliant young financier who wanted to pitch an investment opportunity. "Levin had never heard of the man, Jeffrey Epstein, which was odd. After working for Wexner for seven years, Levin knew virtually every player on Wall Street (a few months earlier, Levin says, he met with arbitrageur Ivan Boesky). Levin’s skepticism was confirmed as soon as he arrived at Epstein’s Madison Avenue office. There were no visible signs of a trading operation; just Epstein sitting behind a desk that didn’t even have a computer. “Epstein was trying to explain a currency trade he wanted to do. I have an MBA from Ohio State, and I didn’t understand a word the man said,” Levin recalled. Levin went back to Columbus and reported that Epstein was a fraud. “I told Les, ‘Stay away from him,’ ” Levin remembered. Wexner agreed not to do the trade." "Levin was shocked when Epstein showed up in Columbus a few months later and announced Wexner had put him in charge of his finances. Levin tried to protest but says Wexner wouldn’t take his calls. Levin couldn’t stand having Epstein as a boss. “He was an asshole. The most arrogant person I ever met,” Levin recalled. A few months later, Levin quit. "Levin said Epstein taunted him on his way out. “On my last day, Epstein walked into my office and held up a piece of paper. He bragged that Les had given him power of attorney over his money. I worked for Les for seven years and I never had general power of attorney,” Levin said. Epstein, Levin continued, even ordered him to surrender equity in Wexner’s town project, likely costing Levin millions. “Epstein basically said, ‘If you want, you can fight it out, but I have a lot of lawyers and I’ll make sure it’ll cost you a fortune.’ ” https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2021/06/inside-jeffrey-epsteins-decades-long-relationship-with-his-biggest-client https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2021/06/inside-jeffrey-epste... This is NYTimes mentioning Epstein and Wexner (with a heads-up on surveillance to visitors /g): "Mr. Wexner bought the house in 1989 for $13.2 million and lavished tens of millions on renovations, art and furnishings. Those curious to see the princely accommodations Mr. Wexner abandoned need look no further than the cover of last month's Architectural Digest. When asked how long Mr. Wexner had occupied the property, Jeffrey Epstein, his protege and one of his financial advisers, replied, "Les never spent more than two months there." Thus the prorated cost of Mr. Wexner's sejours would appear to have been in excess of a million dollars a day. "Visitors described a bathroom reminiscent of James Bond movies: hidden beneath a stairway, lined with lead to provide shelter from attack and supplied with closed-circuit television screens and a telephone, both concealed in a cabinet beneath the sink." https://www.nytimes.com/1996/01/11/garden/home-sweet-elsewhere.html https://www.nytimes.com/1996/01/11/garden/home-sweet-elsewhe... Btw, this is the one and only (in NYTimes, WSJ, NewYorker) article mentioning J.E. in 1990-2000 range per google (for me at least).
not_kurt_godel 4y ago
Not reading any news at all is like not voting. The need to be informed in order to effectively participate in civic life does not magically go away just because you recognize that there are systemic problems. Likewise, referring to all journalism as "the news" is making the same fallacy as referring to "the government" as a singular being. Neither are completely monolithic entities with anthropomorphic agency.
dimgl 4y ago
People have been steadily losing trust in the media for years. All it had to take was a few responsible people to do some probing and realize that it's all a scam. The issue is that there's money to be made in promoting crypto, and therein lies the problem. There's no way anyone can say they didn't see it coming. There's a whole subreddit dedicated to making fun of crypto and a website has existed for years now that archives every grift https://web3isgoinggreat.com/ https://web3isgoinggreat.com/. So, yeah, I think the media is just fundamentally flawed and I'm not sure what the answer is.
dehrmann 4y ago
It wasn't just the Buffetts of the world. Did any credible financial advisors or economists say speculating on crypto is a good idea?
Panzer04 4y ago
There’s a substantial amount of evidence for FTX scepticism around form 6-12m ago, or even longer. (https://www.reddit.com/r/Buttcoin/comments/pjv86z/ftx_just_brazenly_admitted_to_manipulating/ https://www.reddit.com/r/Buttcoin/comments/pjv86z/ftx_just_b...) In the mainstream news, I’m not sure, but there were clear reasons to be skeptics, and that no one with any money involved did real DD beggars belief.

JeremyNT 4y ago

I read this article and I think this is the entire point. You can't trust corporate media's coverage of would-be wunderkind "entrepreneurs." Between access journalism, hero worship, a narrative formula that's known to sell, and laziness, journalists are all too glad to not only look the other way, but actively curate a reality distortion field on behalf of bad actors. It's not just that they didn't see through SBF, it's that it never would occur to them to even look. That's simply not what they are optimised to do when they cover this class of person.

autotune 4y ago
Yeah, the best any of them can say at this point is "we ignored publishing anything on him," and that was more likely due to sheer luck than responsible journalism.
koofdoof 4y ago
The book "Trust me I'm lying" goes into detail about this phenomenon. It is the interest of the media to be tricked, the authors get big stories and clicks and can then turn around and play dumb if things blow up. No one remembers the individual journalist who wrote the puff pieces, so the negative effects of eroding trust fall to a tragedy of the commons situation.

Lerc 4y ago

It's not clear to me that there was anything to 'see though'. This makes him seem like a Machiavellian genius putting up a front. It seems entirely possible that he is exactly what he seems. Sincere but lacking the skill and wisdom to run a large financial organization. While ignorance of the law cannot be used as a defense for breaking it, an organization such as FTX comprises a complex interaction of financial, technological and legal issues. You can easily imagine naive hands breaking multiple laws in their ignorance. It is also possible that they did things knowingly illegal only after their lack of experience had put them into a situation where they were trying to stabilize a teetering house of cards. Some things are hard, very hard. In some domains, being clever without being an expert doesn't work. It is also worth mentioning that the media sources that said how great things were going are also the same ones that are telling us how badly it ended up. I say 'possible' and 'imagine' above because we can't really get a good picture of what happened from reading a few articles. There will be a few good well researched summaries in a few years time. Hardly anyone will be interested by then; besides, the truth will be boringly complicated and nuanced.

autotune 4y ago
> This makes him seem like a Machiavellian genius putting up a front. It is not so much that he was a "Machiavellian genius," it was that he was basically the main character in Idiocracy; the smartest one in the room, but the room was a circus made for his own entertainment than anything else. > an organization such as FTX comprises a complex interaction of financial, technological and legal issues. It is unclear if this complexity was designed specifically to hide blatant acts of fraud or just cover up incompetence. Either way, the lack of transparency does not look good for him. >It is also worth mentioning that the media sources that said how great things were going are also the same ones that are telling us how badly it ended up. I am sure the individual investors who got scammed out of their investment(s) due to getting suckered into it by the MSM will be more than forgiving as well. >There will be a few good well researched summaries in a few years time. Hardly anyone will be interested by then; besides, the truth will be boringly complicated and nuanced. Until the next fraudster gets propped up and we can all look back to this and hope for the revival of independent, constructive journalism that the internet was supposed to bring over this current iteration of the MSM circus.
- Lerc 4y ago
  >> an organization such as FTX comprises a complex interaction of financial, technological and legal issues. >It is unclear if this complexity was designed specifically to hide blatant acts of fraud or just cover up incompetence. Either way, the lack of transparency does not look good for him. I would strongly suggest neither. I did not intend to imply that this complexity was specific to FTX but rather all organizations in that field. The complexity is a unavoidable result of combining the demands of financial, technological and most significantly legal aspects.
asiachick 4y ago
Ignorance of the law can be use for breaking it for cops https://www.vox.com/2015/8/4/9095213/police-stops-heien-v-north-carolina https://www.vox.com/2015/8/4/9095213/police-stops-heien-v-no...
adastra22 4y ago

eternalban 4y ago

Same thing with early stories on Epstein. He is just presented as a successful investor. And then decades later, they start (even then in a very tepid fashion) asking questions like "where did he get his money?", "why did Wexner give him a mansion and power of attorney?", etc. Now we hear this (in 2021) but it happened ~3 decades ago: "On one of Levin’s trips to New York in 1989, Wexner asked him to meet a brilliant young financier who wanted to pitch an investment opportunity. "Levin had never heard of the man, Jeffrey Epstein, which was odd. After working for Wexner for seven years, Levin knew virtually every player on Wall Street (a few months earlier, Levin says, he met with arbitrageur Ivan Boesky). Levin’s skepticism was confirmed as soon as he arrived at Epstein’s Madison Avenue office. There were no visible signs of a trading operation; just Epstein sitting behind a desk that didn’t even have a computer. “Epstein was trying to explain a currency trade he wanted to do. I have an MBA from Ohio State, and I didn’t understand a word the man said,” Levin recalled. Levin went back to Columbus and reported that Epstein was a fraud. “I told Les, ‘Stay away from him,’ ” Levin remembered. Wexner agreed not to do the trade." "Levin was shocked when Epstein showed up in Columbus a few months later and announced Wexner had put him in charge of his finances. Levin tried to protest but says Wexner wouldn’t take his calls. Levin couldn’t stand having Epstein as a boss. “He was an asshole. The most arrogant person I ever met,” Levin recalled. A few months later, Levin quit. "Levin said Epstein taunted him on his way out. “On my last day, Epstein walked into my office and held up a piece of paper. He bragged that Les had given him power of attorney over his money. I worked for Les for seven years and I never had general power of attorney,” Levin said. Epstein, Levin continued, even ordered him to surrender equity in Wexner’s town project, likely costing Levin millions. “Epstein basically said, ‘If you want, you can fight it out, but I have a lot of lawyers and I’ll make sure it’ll cost you a fortune.’ ” https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2021/06/inside-jeffrey-epsteins-decades-long-relationship-with-his-biggest-client https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2021/06/inside-jeffrey-epste... This is NYTimes mentioning Epstein and Wexner (with a heads-up on surveillance to visitors /g): "Mr. Wexner bought the house in 1989 for $13.2 million and lavished tens of millions on renovations, art and furnishings. Those curious to see the princely accommodations Mr. Wexner abandoned need look no further than the cover of last month's Architectural Digest. When asked how long Mr. Wexner had occupied the property, Jeffrey Epstein, his protege and one of his financial advisers, replied, "Les never spent more than two months there." Thus the prorated cost of Mr. Wexner's sejours would appear to have been in excess of a million dollars a day. "Visitors described a bathroom reminiscent of James Bond movies: hidden beneath a stairway, lined with lead to provide shelter from attack and supplied with closed-circuit television screens and a telephone, both concealed in a cabinet beneath the sink." https://www.nytimes.com/1996/01/11/garden/home-sweet-elsewhere.html https://www.nytimes.com/1996/01/11/garden/home-sweet-elsewhe... Btw, this is the one and only (in NYTimes, WSJ, NewYorker) article mentioning J.E. in 1990-2000 range per google (for me at least).

not_kurt_godel 4y ago

Not reading any news at all is like not voting. The need to be informed in order to effectively participate in civic life does not magically go away just because you recognize that there are systemic problems. Likewise, referring to all journalism as "the news" is making the same fallacy as referring to "the government" as a singular being. Neither are completely monolithic entities with anthropomorphic agency.

dimgl 4y ago

People have been steadily losing trust in the media for years. All it had to take was a few responsible people to do some probing and realize that it's all a scam. The issue is that there's money to be made in promoting crypto, and therein lies the problem. There's no way anyone can say they didn't see it coming. There's a whole subreddit dedicated to making fun of crypto and a website has existed for years now that archives every grift https://web3isgoinggreat.com/ https://web3isgoinggreat.com/. So, yeah, I think the media is just fundamentally flawed and I'm not sure what the answer is.

dehrmann 4y ago

It wasn't just the Buffetts of the world. Did any credible financial advisors or economists say speculating on crypto is a good idea?

Panzer04 4y ago

There’s a substantial amount of evidence for FTX scepticism around form 6-12m ago, or even longer. (https://www.reddit.com/r/Buttcoin/comments/pjv86z/ftx_just_brazenly_admitted_to_manipulating/ https://www.reddit.com/r/Buttcoin/comments/pjv86z/ftx_just_b...) In the mainstream news, I’m not sure, but there were clear reasons to be skeptics, and that no one with any money involved did real DD beggars belief.