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Boggles the mind that they invested that much in RobinHood at all, but especially that late in the game. Maybe part of a broader scheme to access their capital

Boggles the mind that they invested that much in RobinHood at all, but especially that late in the game. Maybe part of a broader scheme to access their capital as well?

dr-detroit 4y ago
[dead]
adamnemecek 4y ago
It's not really an investment as much as money laundering scheme which tend to be 'unprofitable on paper'.
- lordfrito 4y ago
  Yeah I wonder if part of his strategy was just to dilute the crime so much by having it's tentacles dig into and wrap around every small corner of the legit financial/political system. At some point the surgery to separate the spreading cancer does more harm to the patient than just leaving it. It's just impossible to cleanly remove all of the tendrils. The strategy would start with getting intertwined with crypto, then move into crypto-tangential like Robinhood, eventually hoping to claw his way into Washington and Wall Street. The FTX / Farmington State Bank investment comes to mind. John Ray definitely has his work cut out for him trying to unravel this mess. I think he'll be able to cleanly claw back anything in TradFi (it's a great test of the TradFi system). Good luck trying to clawback any of the crypto. Not like it matters though, anything he can claw back there is worthless. "Hey, here's your XYZ coin back, you've been made whole." This is just so fun to watch.
  - waterhouse 4y ago
    > Yeah I wonder if part of his strategy was just to dilute the crime so much by having it's tentacles dig into and wrap around every small corner of the legit financial/political system. Deliberately becoming "too big to fail", eh? (Which was more accurately termed "too big to be permitted to fail". Which then raises the question of who is doing the permitting, and why we would trust their judgment; but that would give the game away.)
    - lordfrito 4y ago
      > who is doing the permitting The "who" is just greedy connected people, who are everywhere. Including government and finance. Thankfully we have laws and regulations, which at least serve as some checks and balances to prevent these people from causing too much damage. The genius of checks and balances government as that it doesn't rely on ensuring "bad" people never get into positions of power. You will never be able to stamp out 100% of bad actors. Instead it sets things up such that the damage bad actors can do is minimized and/or identified quickly. Less collateral damage, and a chance for justice afterwards. "No regulations" in crypto should be a warning flag to people. Meanwhile, I'm really really interested if any crimes were committed on the "regulated" side of things. Those people need to be put in jail. Will be fun to watch this unravel.
SilasX 4y ago
Not really, SBF was caught in a lot of hype himself -- he was trying to get included on the Twitter deal as well, and the FTX balance sheet showed $43 million of TWTR stock near the acquisition, though Musk claims the offer was rejected. https://www.yahoo.com/entertainment/elon-musk-calls-report-sbf-161721544.html https://www.yahoo.com/entertainment/elon-musk-calls-report-s...
- texasbigdata 4y ago
  Read the text messages (different lawsuit) between musk and prominent (imho) Oxford philosopher William McAskill. Musk is asked repeatedly to meet and take money from this brillian guy called SBF. It’s weird bc I read wills book and really looked up to him, but clearly SBF can be very convincing. Elon seemed to not want to do it but the text messages suggest he did eventually take a call. So Elon must not have liked how that went since he was publicly encouraging others to roll over. My speculation of course.
  - jessaustin 4y ago
    If this episode isn't a giant warning sign for MacAskill and all of the rest of these characters, what would be? Maybe he's not as dumb as he always acts, but SBF seems more like a pawn of the altruism cabal than the other way around.
  - freejazz 4y ago
    All three of those people are dumb assholes. Not sure how that couldn't be clearer given all of their behavior. Part of life is being able to suss out people like these characters and never once did I think any of them had anything of value to contribute.
wmf 4y ago
It has been reported that Alameda made around $5B of VC investments. The scale of this thing is huge.
- londons_explore 4y ago
  How much of that $5B was actual cash, and how much was various loans/swaps/promises/tokens/paper money?
  - wmf 4y ago
    The worse case is that it was all customer cash. The funniest case is that it was IOUs and the startups will run out of money when their capital calls fail.
- WJW 4y ago
  5 billion is definitely a large number in absolute terms and I would love to be that rich, but if one of the largest crypto VCs made ~5b in investments TOTAL then the real economy has nothing to worry about. The forex markets did over $6 trillion per day in 2022, and that is just the currency exchanges. There are single ships in the world that cost more than 6 billion.
scottLobster 4y ago
If FTX and the pathetic Elon-simping txts from the Twitter lawsuit discovery have revealed anything, it's that once you reach a certain level of wealth you're so immune from consequences that losing money has zero effect on you personally, and since most of these guys are extremely ego-centric to begin with, that removes the only constraint they seriously cared about. There are exceptions to this, but that seems to be the trend. Billionaires in general aren't playing 4D chess, why would they? 4D chess is hard, requires sacrifice and valuing something bigger than oneself and one's bank account. Much easier to jump on popular hype trains. If it works you look like a genius and have a million stans to stroke you off, and money number go up so you can flex on other billionaires. If it fails nothing really happens to you personally. SBF wasn't actually at that level, but he had enough paper wealth that he clearly thought he was. We're watching the wealthy equivalent of that COVID-denier who, with their last breath before being intubated, calls the doctors and nurses who diagnosed them liars.
- spookthesunset 4y ago
  > We're watching the wealthy equivalent of that COVID-denier who, with their last breath before being intubated, calls the doctors and nurses who diagnosed them liars. Which is a work of fiction. Such a thing probably happened no more than a few times. The only reason it gets parroted back is because it serves as a nice bit of propaganda to gin up fear and get people to fall in line.
  - babypuncher 4y ago
    Herman Cain's Twitter account was still tweeting COVID denialism after he died of COVID.
    - macspoofing 4y ago
      [flagged]
      - raverbashing 4y ago
        > making it seem like his death was justified. Death by Denialism? Darwin sends his regards "The good thing about science is that it doesn't give a f about what you think"

Boggles the mind that they invested that much in RobinHood at all, but especially that late in the game. Maybe part of a broader scheme to access their capital as well?

dr-detroit 4y ago

[dead]

adamnemecek 4y ago

It's not really an investment as much as money laundering scheme which tend to be 'unprofitable on paper'.

lordfrito 4y ago
Yeah I wonder if part of his strategy was just to dilute the crime so much by having it's tentacles dig into and wrap around every small corner of the legit financial/political system. At some point the surgery to separate the spreading cancer does more harm to the patient than just leaving it. It's just impossible to cleanly remove all of the tendrils. The strategy would start with getting intertwined with crypto, then move into crypto-tangential like Robinhood, eventually hoping to claw his way into Washington and Wall Street. The FTX / Farmington State Bank investment comes to mind. John Ray definitely has his work cut out for him trying to unravel this mess. I think he'll be able to cleanly claw back anything in TradFi (it's a great test of the TradFi system). Good luck trying to clawback any of the crypto. Not like it matters though, anything he can claw back there is worthless. "Hey, here's your XYZ coin back, you've been made whole." This is just so fun to watch.
- waterhouse 4y ago
  > Yeah I wonder if part of his strategy was just to dilute the crime so much by having it's tentacles dig into and wrap around every small corner of the legit financial/political system. Deliberately becoming "too big to fail", eh? (Which was more accurately termed "too big to be permitted to fail". Which then raises the question of who is doing the permitting, and why we would trust their judgment; but that would give the game away.)
  - lordfrito 4y ago
    > who is doing the permitting The "who" is just greedy connected people, who are everywhere. Including government and finance. Thankfully we have laws and regulations, which at least serve as some checks and balances to prevent these people from causing too much damage. The genius of checks and balances government as that it doesn't rely on ensuring "bad" people never get into positions of power. You will never be able to stamp out 100% of bad actors. Instead it sets things up such that the damage bad actors can do is minimized and/or identified quickly. Less collateral damage, and a chance for justice afterwards. "No regulations" in crypto should be a warning flag to people. Meanwhile, I'm really really interested if any crimes were committed on the "regulated" side of things. Those people need to be put in jail. Will be fun to watch this unravel.

SilasX 4y ago

Not really, SBF was caught in a lot of hype himself -- he was trying to get included on the Twitter deal as well, and the FTX balance sheet showed $43 million of TWTR stock near the acquisition, though Musk claims the offer was rejected. https://www.yahoo.com/entertainment/elon-musk-calls-report-sbf-161721544.html https://www.yahoo.com/entertainment/elon-musk-calls-report-s...

texasbigdata 4y ago
Read the text messages (different lawsuit) between musk and prominent (imho) Oxford philosopher William McAskill. Musk is asked repeatedly to meet and take money from this brillian guy called SBF. It’s weird bc I read wills book and really looked up to him, but clearly SBF can be very convincing. Elon seemed to not want to do it but the text messages suggest he did eventually take a call. So Elon must not have liked how that went since he was publicly encouraging others to roll over. My speculation of course.
- jessaustin 4y ago
  If this episode isn't a giant warning sign for MacAskill and all of the rest of these characters, what would be? Maybe he's not as dumb as he always acts, but SBF seems more like a pawn of the altruism cabal than the other way around.
- freejazz 4y ago
  All three of those people are dumb assholes. Not sure how that couldn't be clearer given all of their behavior. Part of life is being able to suss out people like these characters and never once did I think any of them had anything of value to contribute.

wmf 4y ago

It has been reported that Alameda made around $5B of VC investments. The scale of this thing is huge.

londons_explore 4y ago
How much of that $5B was actual cash, and how much was various loans/swaps/promises/tokens/paper money?
- wmf 4y ago
  The worse case is that it was all customer cash. The funniest case is that it was IOUs and the startups will run out of money when their capital calls fail.
WJW 4y ago
5 billion is definitely a large number in absolute terms and I would love to be that rich, but if one of the largest crypto VCs made ~5b in investments TOTAL then the real economy has nothing to worry about. The forex markets did over $6 trillion per day in 2022, and that is just the currency exchanges. There are single ships in the world that cost more than 6 billion.

scottLobster 4y ago

If FTX and the pathetic Elon-simping txts from the Twitter lawsuit discovery have revealed anything, it's that once you reach a certain level of wealth you're so immune from consequences that losing money has zero effect on you personally, and since most of these guys are extremely ego-centric to begin with, that removes the only constraint they seriously cared about. There are exceptions to this, but that seems to be the trend. Billionaires in general aren't playing 4D chess, why would they? 4D chess is hard, requires sacrifice and valuing something bigger than oneself and one's bank account. Much easier to jump on popular hype trains. If it works you look like a genius and have a million stans to stroke you off, and money number go up so you can flex on other billionaires. If it fails nothing really happens to you personally. SBF wasn't actually at that level, but he had enough paper wealth that he clearly thought he was. We're watching the wealthy equivalent of that COVID-denier who, with their last breath before being intubated, calls the doctors and nurses who diagnosed them liars.

spookthesunset 4y ago
> We're watching the wealthy equivalent of that COVID-denier who, with their last breath before being intubated, calls the doctors and nurses who diagnosed them liars. Which is a work of fiction. Such a thing probably happened no more than a few times. The only reason it gets parroted back is because it serves as a nice bit of propaganda to gin up fear and get people to fall in line.
- babypuncher 4y ago
  Herman Cain's Twitter account was still tweeting COVID denialism after he died of COVID.
  - macspoofing 4y ago
    [flagged]
    - raverbashing 4y ago
      > making it seem like his death was justified. Death by Denialism? Darwin sends his regards "The good thing about science is that it doesn't give a f about what you think"