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Good. At this point SBF has become an amazing caricature of himself. I'm a very cynical old git, but even I have been amazed by the limited bounds of my imagin

Good. At this point SBF has become an amazing caricature of himself. I'm a very cynical old git, but even I have been amazed by the limited bounds of my imagination which is forever defeated by this story. Saying that, I do get the feeling he is now being scapegoated quite hard, and that probably serves to motivate his latest stupidities, but FTX required collective and not only individual madness. That must not get lost in all this.

refulgentis 3y ago
> FTX required collective and not only individual madness. I think this either conflates crypto with FTX, or alternatively, SBF being on trial with being scapegoated. The other execs admitted they did something wrong and are pleading guilty. This is individual madness
- itake 3y ago
  Why stop at execs?
- lkjdsfsdf 3y ago
  Nope, they were all crazy. Look at the things Ellison was writing and saying back then. And the money she was losing while claiming to be a savant. Look at the programmer who put in the code that was something like TRADE_IS_ALLOWED = HAS_POSITIVE_BALANCE || TRADER_IS_ALMEDA. Just because they're pleading out doesn't mean they are/weren't crazy.
  - babyshake 3y ago
    Not to be all woke, but "crazy" and "madness" probably aren't the right words for what happened here.
    - DonHopkins 3y ago
      Diabolic has religious connotations, but just the right religious connotations.
    - finite_depth 3y ago
      Depends on if you consider "crazy" to include rampant narcissism fueled by the usual ridiculous elitism and we're-smart-so-everything-will-work failure mode of "rationalist" culture.
      - mrguyorama 3y ago
        They could also just be, you know, selfish assholes.
        mcpackieh 3y ago
        If a flat broke person living on the street, doing lots of drugs, mentally stressed by their circumstance, starts making wild self-aggrandizing claims completely divorced from reality, it isn't controversial to say that person is 'crazy' or mentally ill. People might nitpick the terminology you use to describe that person or criticize you for needlessly drawing attention to it, but nobody goes to bat for the sanity of a homeless person saying crazy shit about themselves. But if a very rich person living in mansion, doing lots of drugs, mentally stressed by the enormity of their crimes, starts making wild self-aggrandizing claims completely divorced from reality are they crazy? Suddenly people have an interest in defending their mental sanity. Why? Because rich people are entitled to more respect than the homeless by virtue of their wealth, and therefore we shouldn't put common labels like crazy on them? Or maybe it's because a rich luxurious lifestyle makes people immune to the onset of insanity? Were Caligula and Nero not crazy then? On the contrary, I think being very wealthy puts you at greater risk for becoming crazy; the more elite somebody is the more divorced from the typical human experience they become. Power and wealth corrupts their minds, inflating their egos to such an extent they lose track of reality. These people were all crazy. Maybe they weren't "mentally ill" in any biological sense, but they were crazy.
        mrguyorama 3y ago
        When you have a billion dollars to your name, you no longer get to play the victim card. ANY problem you have is tractable. You could have an entire team of the ten best psychologists in the country surrounding you at all times and keeping you grounded in reality and ethics and humility. At the point you are a CEO, being "crazy" is a choice. More than that, mental illness is almost never an excuse for bad behavior. You don't need to have empathy for the billionaire who has spent their entire life grifting and surrounding themselves with cheerleaders to feed their ego. Ego isn't a mental illness, every living human faces their ego, but most aren't allowed to feed it because they have to interact with a cruel reality. Nobody put a gun to Elon's head and forced him to make as much money as possible through lies and grift.
    - refulgentis 3y ago
      Not be all unpolitical, but maybe people use "woke" to mean "people who turn me into a snowflake"
  - refulgentis 3y ago
    I'm not sure what's crazy, insane, or demonstrates madness with that, that's good ol' fashioned criming. Re: the readings I was assigned, her Tumblr is standard fare for the age and intellectual mileu, nothing crazy.
  - nemo44x 3y ago
    They were on a lot of drugs. Drugs make you say and do shut that in retrospect looks crazy. But sounded like a good idea at the time.
- ramesh31 3y ago
  >The other execs admitted they did something wrong and are pleading guilty. This is individual madness They plead guilty because they were granted deals that involve testifying against SBF, and sang like canaries. But the feds have every intention of nailing Sam as hard as possible. There will be no plea bargaining for him. So it's either fight it in court, or take the max sentence. What we're seeing here are the last acts of a desperate man who knows he's screwed either way.
  - Mistletoe 3y ago
    I feel like they shouldn't have been let off so easy. They are equally responsible. Making this all like some sort of Dr. Evil SBF scheme is silly. They were a gang, working together on the fraud. The case against SBF couldn't be hard to prove, why do you need to plea bargain the other execs and get them to testify?
    - deleted 3y ago
      [deleted]
    - deleted 3y ago
      [deleted]
- pxmpxm 3y ago
  Disagree - there are multiple VC claiming multi-month due diligence before piling money into FTX. That premise and this multi billion exchange running the entire business on emojis and quick books cannot exist in the same reality.
Mistletoe 3y ago
Does anyone know where Sam Trabucco is or what happened to him? Leave as Co-CEO a few months before a total fraud collapse and everything is fine? There is 0% chance this was only happening after he left.
- scrlk 3y ago
  Good question. Sam Trabucco might end up as the equivalent of Lou Pai from the Enron scandal. Left just in time before the whole thing came crashing down and escapes all criminal charges.
  - b112 3y ago
    To be fair, he could have realised all the blather was lie after lie, talked to a lawyer, and was counciled gtfo. Sometimes you get pulled in, little by little, then you wake up and realise what sort of situation you're in. And if he was legitimately thinking "wait, this is wrong"...
    - hackerlight 3y ago
      > "wait, this is wrong" More like, "wait, this is getting too risky from a personal legal/criminal standpoint". If he knew something was off and he cared about someone other than himself, he should have become a whistleblower.
      - Mistletoe 3y ago
        I’m wondering if he did and if he is going to be the prosecution star witness walking down the aisle the first day of the trial. It’s too weird that there is no mention I can find anywhere of a warrant for his arrest etc. They’ve gone after everyone else like Gary Wang and Nishad Singh and of course Caroline.
      - bemusedthrow75 3y ago
        It is surely entirely possible to get stuck in the no-man's land where you know something is seriously wrong but you cannot prove it to the level of qualifying for the kind of whistleblower protections you need to survive the process. In this situation, blowing the whistle and failing to be heard is one outcome. Blowing the whistle and having the consensus in a light-touch regulatory system be that you're doing so without cause or worse maliciously is another. Blowing the whistle, being unable to prove it and being sued into oblivion is yet another. If you are sued into oblivion by a crook, you tend not to get your money back when they are finally caught. My own feeling is that in such a situation I would walk away, refuse to give interviews, pointedly not take a job for a while, talk to a lawyer in a way that is recorded, and likely brief an appropriate journalist off the record. Time will tell if he did.
samstave 3y ago
>unpopular opinion ;; SBF's parents deeply need investigation here - they are both law proffs at stanford. THere is not a chance they dont have dirty fingers in his dealings - where are their political donations from the money SBF/Alameda. I hate how we talk about high level financial crimes (Trump org, Biden Org, Holmes, SBF, etc - and we fail to ever look at their children, parents, siblings, etc in their bubble for similar investment windfalls, or donation channels/ammounts. - @lotsofpulp (I love pulp BTW, grew up with huge orange trees) The "we" is not just some no-face prosecutor, its everyone - but "proof" that they arent looking into it is, have you ever seen a Pelosi, Biden, Kushner child with massive grift based on their familial insider trading knowledge that was exposed. Take Kushner as the primary example. So, we know that he received billions (not just from Qatar), we know that his family has a history of real-estate fraud, and everyone just ignores all of this. This isnt a political comment : its a comment against the financial frauds that are so massive throughout and we do 'surface-level' looking into it. -- I cant believe I have to outline this for some....
- wmf 3y ago
  Don't worry; it's documented that money stolen from FTX went to the parents. It's grinding slowly.
- lotsofpulp 3y ago
  > I hate how we talk about high level financial crimes (Trump org, Biden Org, Holmes, SBF, etc - and we fail to ever look at their children, parents, siblings, etc in their bubble for similar investment windfalls, or donation channels/ammounts. Who is “we”? If you mean prosecutor, do you have a source that they fail to look at the networks of those they are prosecuting?
- confoundcofound 3y ago
  You shouldn't be downvoted. I don't know if it's willful ignorance or what, but most people can't grok the fact that children do not develop in a vacuum. They are in most cases a reflection of their parents' traits and values. Worse for SBF, it is entirely plausible that they had a direct hand in enabling his fraudulent behavior. They were politically-connected Stanford lawyers. It would be foolish to dismiss the possibility of them opening doors and providing cover for their son. Perhaps an extreme comparison, but I feel the same exact way about adolescent school shooters. We are so quick to absolve and sanctify the parents as if their child's violent tendencies emerged suddenly and spontaneously.
BSEdlMMldESB 3y ago
> That must not get lost in all this. I fear it will. so long as we keep being all confused between individual things (actions of persons) and systemic truths (actions of institutions). e.g. "Putin be Bad"... uhm, he's just the face of a large government.... he does not exist in isolation.
- y0ssar1an 3y ago
  Huh? Was Hitler just the face of a large government? Like Hitler, Putin is directing the large government *that he controls* to commit horrendous war crimes.
- AnimalMuppet 3y ago
  Putin has spent over two decades building "the vertical of power" - he's at the top, and all the power goes through him. So, yes, he's the face. He's also the unquestioned decisionmaker. He does not exist in isolation - there are people who carry out his decisions - but they're his decisions.
  - BSEdlMMldESB 3y ago
    yea, you (both replies to my comment) reinforce my point hahahha. you are of the stance "there's no collective madness, just evil rulers"... it's naive
    - simple-thoughts 3y ago
      It’s both. Collective madness supports the ruler while the ruler cultivated collective madness. You don’t even have to look into the extremes to see this- both democrats with Biden and republicans with Trump are seeing complete unreality, while both rulers have taken well documented evil actions (mass murder, human rights violations, etc). Rulers can be evil while their supporters are also evil and insane as well.
    - hackerlight 3y ago
      Because it was Putin as an individual who made the key moves to remove democracy and install himself as the autocrat. Putin was not just a cog in the system. He was the central force making these intentional decisions that caused this outcome. If Putin didn't want to make Russia an autocracy, and instead he as an individual preferred democracy, then that's what would have happened. 1990s Russia is quite dissimilar to other situations in history where there isn't one person causing the outcome. For example, regarding Japanese history of 1930s/1940s, it was not one kingmaker, it was a long chain of events and decisions involving many people. Your thinking would be correct if applied here. It's true, however, that Putin's moves wouldn't have been possible without the situation that he found himself in ... a weakened Yeltsin, dire economy, and nationalist sentiment after the apartment bombings. Putin capitalized on these things to get power. But once he was in power, it was mostly him.
cyanydeez 3y ago
Trump: steal money from tubes, tamper at will. SBF: steal money from Wall Street, best not do anything

refulgentis 3y ago

> FTX required collective and not only individual madness. I think this either conflates crypto with FTX, or alternatively, SBF being on trial with being scapegoated. The other execs admitted they did something wrong and are pleading guilty. This is individual madness

itake 3y ago
Why stop at execs?
lkjdsfsdf 3y ago
Nope, they were all crazy. Look at the things Ellison was writing and saying back then. And the money she was losing while claiming to be a savant. Look at the programmer who put in the code that was something like TRADE_IS_ALLOWED = HAS_POSITIVE_BALANCE || TRADER_IS_ALMEDA. Just because they're pleading out doesn't mean they are/weren't crazy.
- babyshake 3y ago
  Not to be all woke, but "crazy" and "madness" probably aren't the right words for what happened here.
  - DonHopkins 3y ago
    Diabolic has religious connotations, but just the right religious connotations.
  - finite_depth 3y ago
    Depends on if you consider "crazy" to include rampant narcissism fueled by the usual ridiculous elitism and we're-smart-so-everything-will-work failure mode of "rationalist" culture.
    - mrguyorama 3y ago
      They could also just be, you know, selfish assholes.
      - mcpackieh 3y ago
        If a flat broke person living on the street, doing lots of drugs, mentally stressed by their circumstance, starts making wild self-aggrandizing claims completely divorced from reality, it isn't controversial to say that person is 'crazy' or mentally ill. People might nitpick the terminology you use to describe that person or criticize you for needlessly drawing attention to it, but nobody goes to bat for the sanity of a homeless person saying crazy shit about themselves. But if a very rich person living in mansion, doing lots of drugs, mentally stressed by the enormity of their crimes, starts making wild self-aggrandizing claims completely divorced from reality are they crazy? Suddenly people have an interest in defending their mental sanity. Why? Because rich people are entitled to more respect than the homeless by virtue of their wealth, and therefore we shouldn't put common labels like crazy on them? Or maybe it's because a rich luxurious lifestyle makes people immune to the onset of insanity? Were Caligula and Nero not crazy then? On the contrary, I think being very wealthy puts you at greater risk for becoming crazy; the more elite somebody is the more divorced from the typical human experience they become. Power and wealth corrupts their minds, inflating their egos to such an extent they lose track of reality. These people were all crazy. Maybe they weren't "mentally ill" in any biological sense, but they were crazy.
        mrguyorama 3y ago
        When you have a billion dollars to your name, you no longer get to play the victim card. ANY problem you have is tractable. You could have an entire team of the ten best psychologists in the country surrounding you at all times and keeping you grounded in reality and ethics and humility. At the point you are a CEO, being "crazy" is a choice. More than that, mental illness is almost never an excuse for bad behavior. You don't need to have empathy for the billionaire who has spent their entire life grifting and surrounding themselves with cheerleaders to feed their ego. Ego isn't a mental illness, every living human faces their ego, but most aren't allowed to feed it because they have to interact with a cruel reality. Nobody put a gun to Elon's head and forced him to make as much money as possible through lies and grift.
  - refulgentis 3y ago
    Not be all unpolitical, but maybe people use "woke" to mean "people who turn me into a snowflake"
- refulgentis 3y ago
  I'm not sure what's crazy, insane, or demonstrates madness with that, that's good ol' fashioned criming. Re: the readings I was assigned, her Tumblr is standard fare for the age and intellectual mileu, nothing crazy.
- nemo44x 3y ago
  They were on a lot of drugs. Drugs make you say and do shut that in retrospect looks crazy. But sounded like a good idea at the time.
ramesh31 3y ago
>The other execs admitted they did something wrong and are pleading guilty. This is individual madness They plead guilty because they were granted deals that involve testifying against SBF, and sang like canaries. But the feds have every intention of nailing Sam as hard as possible. There will be no plea bargaining for him. So it's either fight it in court, or take the max sentence. What we're seeing here are the last acts of a desperate man who knows he's screwed either way.
- Mistletoe 3y ago
  I feel like they shouldn't have been let off so easy. They are equally responsible. Making this all like some sort of Dr. Evil SBF scheme is silly. They were a gang, working together on the fraud. The case against SBF couldn't be hard to prove, why do you need to plea bargain the other execs and get them to testify?
  - deleted 3y ago
    [deleted]
  - deleted 3y ago
    [deleted]
pxmpxm 3y ago
Disagree - there are multiple VC claiming multi-month due diligence before piling money into FTX. That premise and this multi billion exchange running the entire business on emojis and quick books cannot exist in the same reality.

Mistletoe 3y ago

Does anyone know where Sam Trabucco is or what happened to him? Leave as Co-CEO a few months before a total fraud collapse and everything is fine? There is 0% chance this was only happening after he left.

scrlk 3y ago
Good question. Sam Trabucco might end up as the equivalent of Lou Pai from the Enron scandal. Left just in time before the whole thing came crashing down and escapes all criminal charges.
- b112 3y ago
  To be fair, he could have realised all the blather was lie after lie, talked to a lawyer, and was counciled gtfo. Sometimes you get pulled in, little by little, then you wake up and realise what sort of situation you're in. And if he was legitimately thinking "wait, this is wrong"...
  - hackerlight 3y ago
    > "wait, this is wrong" More like, "wait, this is getting too risky from a personal legal/criminal standpoint". If he knew something was off and he cared about someone other than himself, he should have become a whistleblower.
    - Mistletoe 3y ago
      I’m wondering if he did and if he is going to be the prosecution star witness walking down the aisle the first day of the trial. It’s too weird that there is no mention I can find anywhere of a warrant for his arrest etc. They’ve gone after everyone else like Gary Wang and Nishad Singh and of course Caroline.
    - bemusedthrow75 3y ago
      It is surely entirely possible to get stuck in the no-man's land where you know something is seriously wrong but you cannot prove it to the level of qualifying for the kind of whistleblower protections you need to survive the process. In this situation, blowing the whistle and failing to be heard is one outcome. Blowing the whistle and having the consensus in a light-touch regulatory system be that you're doing so without cause or worse maliciously is another. Blowing the whistle, being unable to prove it and being sued into oblivion is yet another. If you are sued into oblivion by a crook, you tend not to get your money back when they are finally caught. My own feeling is that in such a situation I would walk away, refuse to give interviews, pointedly not take a job for a while, talk to a lawyer in a way that is recorded, and likely brief an appropriate journalist off the record. Time will tell if he did.

samstave 3y ago

>unpopular opinion ;; SBF's parents deeply need investigation here - they are both law proffs at stanford. THere is not a chance they dont have dirty fingers in his dealings - where are their political donations from the money SBF/Alameda. I hate how we talk about high level financial crimes (Trump org, Biden Org, Holmes, SBF, etc - and we fail to ever look at their children, parents, siblings, etc in their bubble for similar investment windfalls, or donation channels/ammounts. - @lotsofpulp (I love pulp BTW, grew up with huge orange trees) The "we" is not just some no-face prosecutor, its everyone - but "proof" that they arent looking into it is, have you ever seen a Pelosi, Biden, Kushner child with massive grift based on their familial insider trading knowledge that was exposed. Take Kushner as the primary example. So, we know that he received billions (not just from Qatar), we know that his family has a history of real-estate fraud, and everyone just ignores all of this. This isnt a political comment : its a comment against the financial frauds that are so massive throughout and we do 'surface-level' looking into it. -- I cant believe I have to outline this for some....

wmf 3y ago
Don't worry; it's documented that money stolen from FTX went to the parents. It's grinding slowly.
lotsofpulp 3y ago
> I hate how we talk about high level financial crimes (Trump org, Biden Org, Holmes, SBF, etc - and we fail to ever look at their children, parents, siblings, etc in their bubble for similar investment windfalls, or donation channels/ammounts. Who is “we”? If you mean prosecutor, do you have a source that they fail to look at the networks of those they are prosecuting?
confoundcofound 3y ago
You shouldn't be downvoted. I don't know if it's willful ignorance or what, but most people can't grok the fact that children do not develop in a vacuum. They are in most cases a reflection of their parents' traits and values. Worse for SBF, it is entirely plausible that they had a direct hand in enabling his fraudulent behavior. They were politically-connected Stanford lawyers. It would be foolish to dismiss the possibility of them opening doors and providing cover for their son. Perhaps an extreme comparison, but I feel the same exact way about adolescent school shooters. We are so quick to absolve and sanctify the parents as if their child's violent tendencies emerged suddenly and spontaneously.

BSEdlMMldESB 3y ago

> That must not get lost in all this. I fear it will. so long as we keep being all confused between individual things (actions of persons) and systemic truths (actions of institutions). e.g. "Putin be Bad"... uhm, he's just the face of a large government.... he does not exist in isolation.

y0ssar1an 3y ago
Huh? Was Hitler just the face of a large government? Like Hitler, Putin is directing the large government *that he controls* to commit horrendous war crimes.
AnimalMuppet 3y ago
Putin has spent over two decades building "the vertical of power" - he's at the top, and all the power goes through him. So, yes, he's the face. He's also the unquestioned decisionmaker. He does not exist in isolation - there are people who carry out his decisions - but they're his decisions.
- BSEdlMMldESB 3y ago
  yea, you (both replies to my comment) reinforce my point hahahha. you are of the stance "there's no collective madness, just evil rulers"... it's naive
  - simple-thoughts 3y ago
    It’s both. Collective madness supports the ruler while the ruler cultivated collective madness. You don’t even have to look into the extremes to see this- both democrats with Biden and republicans with Trump are seeing complete unreality, while both rulers have taken well documented evil actions (mass murder, human rights violations, etc). Rulers can be evil while their supporters are also evil and insane as well.
  - hackerlight 3y ago
    Because it was Putin as an individual who made the key moves to remove democracy and install himself as the autocrat. Putin was not just a cog in the system. He was the central force making these intentional decisions that caused this outcome. If Putin didn't want to make Russia an autocracy, and instead he as an individual preferred democracy, then that's what would have happened. 1990s Russia is quite dissimilar to other situations in history where there isn't one person causing the outcome. For example, regarding Japanese history of 1930s/1940s, it was not one kingmaker, it was a long chain of events and decisions involving many people. Your thinking would be correct if applied here. It's true, however, that Putin's moves wouldn't have been possible without the situation that he found himself in ... a weakened Yeltsin, dire economy, and nationalist sentiment after the apartment bombings. Putin capitalized on these things to get power. But once he was in power, it was mostly him.

cyanydeez 3y ago

Trump: steal money from tubes, tamper at will. SBF: steal money from Wall Street, best not do anything