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I liked the article detailing how poorly he did on the stand: https://www.thefp.com/p/humiliating-cross-examination-sam-bankman-fried https://www.thefp.com/p/h

I liked the article detailing how poorly he did on the stand: https://www.thefp.com/p/humiliating-cross-examination-sam-bankman-fried https://www.thefp.com/p/humiliating-cross-examination-sam-ba... “Did you say in private, ‘Fuck regulators?’ ” “Did you call some customers ‘dumb motherfuckers?’ ” “Did you fly to the Super Bowl in a private plane?” “Most FTX customers did not have a line of credit, correct?” “Do you deny that Alameda had a $65 billion line of credit?” And on, and on, and on. Under the circumstances, SBF’s wisest course would have been to just say yes—or yep—to her questions. And sometimes he did that. But just as often, he chose to dance around the question, to quibble about the phrasing, or say that he couldn’t remember the details. And every time he did that—every single time—Sassoon projected an email or video or a spreadsheet onto the screen, showing that he had done exactly what she was accusing him of doing. Which then gave the jurors another look at the evidence while reminding them that SBF was being something less than forthright. You’d think this MIT graduate would wise up, but he never did. (He even equivocated on whether he had taken a private plane to the Super Bowl—to which Sassoon responded by presenting a photograph of SBF fast asleep in the embrace of a comfy chair on a private jet. In the overflow room, we burst into laughter.)

fsckboy 3y ago
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- fsckboy 3y ago
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  - CoastalCoder 3y ago
    I wonder if you and the other commenters are making different assumptions about his private thoughts during testimony. It sounds like you think he might be trying to be honest and forthright, but his intentions are lost in translation. Whereas the other commenters think it's more likely that he was being obstructionist?
    - fsckboy 3y ago
      >It sounds like you think he might be trying to be honest and forthright, but his intentions are lost in translation. Whereas the other commenters think it's more likely that he was being obstructionist? I'm not thinking it's all one way or the other. A person who is lying/willing to lie will still take every opportunity to tell the truth if it makes him look good. Separately, an autistic person has trouble understanding and being understood, and then emotions flare and the autistic person is more disconnected. His autistic answers to questions can look evasive, but they are not necessarily, especially if the truth is actually on his side. There will be many questions he is trying to answer honestly because the truth is on his side, but his awkwardness looks evasive. He may simultaneously have a motive and willingness to also be evasive and lie. And then a layer of he-said-she-said, there are always two sides to a story and how to remember and tell it, and the truth lies in the middle (with the lies? hahaha) If the defendent is entitled to the benefit of the doubt, I am pointing out that much of what people are making great sport of here can be interpreted as reasonable doubt. But at the same time, I don't doubt that there was a strong case against him overall, and he was guilty. To use a blunt analogy, to me I'm hearing people saying "look at that lying cheating wop eat spaghetti on his private plane and as his last meal!" (I chose Italian because I am) Well, that lying cheating Italian might be named Ponzi (the other reason I chose Italian) and he deserves to go to jail, but it's this bystander jeering that sounds bad to me, that type of attitude can be turned against any one of us.
      - spuz 3y ago
        I agree with you that it's unfair to laugh at what might be Sam's genuine attempts to be honest when answering a question. I appreciate your account of your own experience. The only thing I would disagree with is that there is any kind of "correct" or "normie" answer to questions made by a prosecutor during cross examination. If they are good at their job then they will only ever ask questions that they already know the answer to. The only hope you have in that case is that the judge will allow you to speak beyond what the prosecutor has asked about. I don't think it matters whether you're autistic or normie as you put it. Like you say, most people here would crumble in that position.
      - 3y ago
  - vkou 3y ago
    SBF chose to make his character a part of his defense ("Whoopsie daisies I'm just an incompetent nerd who likes muffins and didn't know I was doing anything wrong"), which makes character attacks like that fair game against him for the prosecution. This is precisely why you shut up, and plead the fifth. You'll be eviscerated on cross-examination when you don't. Although in his case, he probably should have pled guilty, and begged for mercy, instead.
  - defen 3y ago
    "Did you fly on a private plane to an airport 4.5 miles away from the location of the Super Bowl, the day before the Super Bowl" doesn't quite have the same ring to it.
    - hef19898 3y ago
      It woupd make a great follow-up question to the proposed answer of "no, I took an Escalade to the Super Bowl" so. Splitting hairs over definitions and genie-like interpretations of what sentences mean isn't smart, it's annoying most of the time.
  - cedilla 3y ago
    > . Any analysis tells me that the spirit of your question is to paint me as a bad person This is why you never should talk about being "the smartest person in the room". Because if you're that kind of person, you will inevitably try to show your genius work, and it will always be severely lacking. I'm sorry, but you were not the smartest person in the room. You fail to understand what a prosecutor does and why, and you fail to understand what makes good testimony. Maybe you had the highest amount of raw brain power in the court room, but with no intellectual curiosity or humility, that's like running the fastest CPU with no cooling on an unstable power supply.
    - fsckboy 3y ago
      [flagged]
      - cedilla 3y ago
        This has gotten out of scope for this forum. But I will make one last observation: that grandstanding does not make the point you think it does.
        fsckboy 3y ago
        I had edited my comment to additionally point out how poorly you made your argument, I just want to make sure you don't miss it.
        davidgerard 3y ago
        You really are not demonstrating here what you think you're demonstrating.
      - Timshel 3y ago
        You do realize that with this comment you just reinforced the parent point ?
  - freetanga 3y ago
    “Where does the Super Bowl even begins? In the parking lot? Then I drove there. In the seat? Then I walked there. Was I ever there? Who knows, what is a person other than an ever changing cloud of electrons and protons moving, spinning and decaying at amazing rate… where does my butt ends and the seat begin?…” if you roll Pedantic for 20/20 - Is the system rigged? Yes. - Are laws written by mediocre people hence full of loopholes? Yes. - Are most people in the Justice system mediocre? Yes, to the best of my knowledge your honor. - Is Justice != Law application? Yes, greatest marketing scam calling it Justice Department. - Is SBF a scammer that had a chip on his shoulder and got rich off other peoples money? All signs point to yes. - Does he deserved to be in jail? In SBF words, “Yep”. Mate, I don’t question your intellect or memory, surely you are God - even in a forum where there is no lack of bright people - but your emotional intelligence is severely handicapped, so much that the “functional” part of your self description falls into doubt. You come across as the Simpsons comic store guy. Chill.
    - enimodas 3y ago
      >Are laws written by mediocre people hence full of loopholes? Guy once told me his job was to write some law in Spain, or for the EU, or somewhere in between. He submits his writings to his bosses, who tell him (paraphrased): "it's too clear, too watertight. Go back and make it more ambiguous." So he did.
      - bitcurious 3y ago
        Which isn’t necessarily a bad thing - laws should allow for some level of ambiguity, and should be written for outcomes. The enforcement is a negotiation between agents bound by the law and agents tasked with upholding the law. It’s like hiring a web design firm and then showing up with a complete mockup - give them room to work.
    - fsckboy 3y ago
      It's weird that I tell a story with a point: smart autistic people have trouble communicating with people who are not precise in a venue which pretends to insist on precision, and here's a vivid example showing how innocent things can go wrong and you think afterward you need to reiterate the attitude people have that triggered me to write in the first place. Yes, I know. Now read my story, it's a response to what you said, with details that can be discussed which you've ignored, details you should quote as a response rather than just telling me what I already know. I didn't say I was the smartest person in the room to imply that "everybody should listen to me". I said it to ensure the reader that the troubles that ensued in the story were not due to me being unable to follow what was going on. I followed it, it made no sense without context that they were denying me. It would make no sense to anybody paying attention, but clarification was not possible. But nowhere in your vast and vaunted store of EQ-that-I-am-lacking do you find any empathy for me and my experience. You just have the urge to tell me I'm wrong, it's my fault, etc. I'm submitting your response as further evidence of my point.
- usea 3y ago
  This is incredibly relatable, and I feel like you're describing virtually every (verbal) interaction I have with other people.
- VladTheImpalor 3y ago
  I'm not sure you appreciate just how insufferably arrogant a sentence like "I can safely say I was the smartest person in the room" sounds. Especially when you follow it up by calling yourself "a smart detailed person" while dismissing others around you as "normies". If you truly were smart, you'd perhaps appreciate just how difficult it is to even begin to define that word, and also just how much your comment reads like an incoherent word vomit. Who is Susie Q? What petitions? What are you on about?
  - Gigablah 3y ago
    He was basically describing a variation of the “have you stopped beating your wife” parable. Hope that helps.
    - VladTheImpalor 3y ago
      I was disabusing him of the notion that he might be the smartest person in that room. Smartness is across various axes, for one, but mainly, the presumptuousness and the sheer confidence of the assumption rubbed me the wrong way, not so much the content of the argument.
      - hef19898 3y ago
        And that attotude usually doesn't go well in court. Or meetings with, how did OP put it, "normies".
      - gilleain 3y ago
        Agreed. I think that some people - SBF included - could take to heart the idea that sometimes they are not the smartest person in the room. Or even that being 'smart' is not the always the most important thing to be at every point in time.
    - gilleain 3y ago
      Also known as a 'loaded question' (<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Loaded_question https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Loaded_question>) - I really don't think that questions like "Did Alameda have an essentially unbounded line of credit?" are all that loaded. SBF simply did not want to answer the questions.
- DaiPlusPlus 3y ago
  > I have testified in a court... Out of curiosity, were you given the option of giving a deposition instead of taking the witness stand? ---- Random boredom-browsing took me to this article: https://www.gu.se/en/gnc/defendants-with-autism-spectrum-disorder-in-the-courtroom-considerations-and-implications https://www.gu.se/en/gnc/defendants-with-autism-spectrum-dis... > A defendant with ASD may shift the topic of the court discussions to a topic which is of interest to them and it can be difficult for anyone to interrupt them. The interest may be one of the individual’s preoccupations. Jurors may perceive this behaviour as an indication that the defendant is deliberately being evasive and trying to avoid answering the question that has been asked of them. As mentioned earlier, they may also go into excessive and unnecessary detail (and often at great length) when asked a question. Their responses may, in addition to being detailed and lengthy, it can also be repetitive ---- Like some (most?) of us here, I've got ASD too; I've been in court too, though only as a small-claims plaintiff (got a default judgement against no-show defendent with a negative net-worth, fun...); and yeah, I remember putting a lot of details into what I said in court and the judge seeming annoyed with me - but I thought it was all relevant (still, the judge said I would have won anyway even if it wasn't a default judgement...). But yeah - if I was was ever a criminal defendent, the prosecution would probably let me talk myself into a trap - or something. Stuff like that makes me think I should intentionally play-up the autism instead of trying to act normal, to clearly demonstrate to the jury that I'm far more of a social-idiot than a cold sociopath.
  - fsckboy 3y ago
    I'm not an expert and I left details out to simplify, but depositions had already been submitted. Sometimes judges will hive off a piece of a case to "a special master" or something like that, to answer a subsidiary question. This was such a thing, the person presiding was a retired judge, and he has "powers" (like kicking me out if I continued to not say "yes or no", which kills my case because I'm the one making the complaint) and his purview was answering the question of whether the petitions had been properly served. All parties to the suit were there, but it was not in a court, and there was no "stand", we all sat around a table. I suppose it was something like a deposition, but the master was there and my attorney was not free to argue directly with their attorney. This piece of the story is also a big bowl of horribly unfair spaghetti. Wanna hear it? There is no such thing as "service" or "serving" where a shareholder petition is concerned, there's no standard for it, it's not a thing. You could do it by mail, etc. because the officers are your fiduciaries and they are to look out for your interests. As it stood, by total coincidence, when I went to the front desk where paperwork like an actual service would be handled, the "mailing address" so to speak, who is standing right there but the president of the board! So I smiled and said "I've got petitions for you", which she was well aware my group had been collecting, they just thought we'd never make it over the hump. She went cold and like wouldn't take the envelope, was holding her hands away, and told me to leave it at the desk, the desk she was standing by. So I did. Then she started inventing reasons why these petitions had not been served properly (they were served the way she told me to). In her deposition, this event turned into me "lying in wait, angrily physically assaulting her with the envelope". I was not angry: nobody thought we could get enough signatures but we did, I was positively giddy. I wasn't even showing my inner Nelson, "HAA-HAA", that's what I was covering up with my smile. In any case: to repeat, there is no standard for service, it's not a thing. But the way we delivered them was the way service would be made. She is also my fiduciary who was obligated to look after my shareholder rights. It cost me about $250,000 in attorney fees to just cover this piece of the case. How can an overfull court system claim that this is something that must be looked into? They had to invent reasons to look into it. All entirely separate from further time and money wasting whether what we were petitioning was something we could petition (it was, to call a shareholder meeting) and what is allowed to come to the floor at a shareholder meeting (you know who decides that, who courts won't override? shareholders, and they'd be at the meeting) and we were explicitly petitioning to remove board members at the meeting, another of our enumerated rights in the by-laws. We did not have the right to call an election, but all board members being removed triggers an election under a separate clause so... if you're going to make up a standard, it's so easy to see this should be thrown to the shareholders. The board was simply throwing up one implausible excuse after another to avoid calling the meeting. So many legal questions which weren't even legal questions, for this type of corporation there are no standards for any of it, but the court was entertaining far flung notions borrowing ideas from other facets of industry as sort of frontier justice or something. It should have been a slam dunk, I don't know why the court didn't just order a meeting immediately because meetings are easy to hold, it's not a big deal, and no matter what, the shareholders were both the affected parties and the arbiters, so why not just let them have a meeting? oh, the attorney lady was an employment law attorney, and I know of another incident where she claimed somebody had assaulted her with documents. I have a feeling that's her modus operandi in employment lawsuits "they were angry, they might have done anything". Disgusting. And equally disgusting to spend a million in shareholder money trying not to have a shareholder meeting.
- thepasswordis 3y ago
  This comment resonates strongly with me. I have watched a lot of hours of court cases. The adversarial lawyers are very literally trying to get you to screw up verbally. That’s their job. They could hold of a picture of an apple and say “is this an apple, yes or no.” Or even “is this a photograph of an apple yes or no?” And depending on what they mean the answer could be both.
- caconym_ 3y ago
  SBF's case didn't go his way because he was obviously lying and lying and lying ("I don't recall") and equivocating and evading when he wasn't outright lying, because he was guilty. There may have been instances where he was genuinely trying to communicate a salient truth in response to a prosecutor's rhetorical trap, but indulging him in those cases wasn't going to change the outcome. He should not have testified; he should have pled guilty.
- bitcharmer 3y ago
  > I can safely say I was the smartest person in the room I stopped reading after that
az226 3y ago
I guess he didn't have the money to pay for a good defense team, or didn't listen. Pretty amateur hour what he did. Made it very easy and quick for the jurors.
- m1keil 3y ago
  His bail was 250M USD, I don't think money is an issue to his family.
  - retube 3y ago
    What they actually posted was far, far less. Less than 2m if i recall.
    - chirau 3y ago
      It would have to be around 25M
      - dragonwriter 3y ago
        No, it wouldn't, didn't, and wasn't. It would have had to have been around 10% if it was in state court in many states, because of the way lots of state bail systems work. The federal system is very different.
        krustyburger 3y ago
        It was literally just his parents’ house. And now it’s come out that those same parents were collecting large payments from FTX in the boom times for their supposed services. We’ll see if they ever face any charges themselves.
        smcl 3y ago
        The email exchange where his dad grumbles about how he's getting only $200k/yr (for doing nothing) and then CCs his mum for comment was quite amusing :)
JackFr 3y ago
With or without testifying he cut a remarkably unlikeable figure. Smug, aloof, arrogant and condescending, honestly much more so than a typical white collar defendant. I suppose his fatal flaw, though was not having anyone else to blame.
- tw04 3y ago
  >though was not having anyone else to blame. Oh, he definitely had people to blame, like the FTX lawyers, it’s just that he got caught lying or dancing around the truth so frequently that nobody would believe him.
  - StressedDev 3y ago
    You hit the nail on the head here. Here is a list of some of the people he blamed for his fraud/downfall: 1. Binance / CZ (Binance's CEO) 2. Caroline Ellison 3. Sullivan & Cromwell LLP (https://www.sullcrom.com/ https://www.sullcrom.com/) 4. John Ray III (FTX's bankruptcy CEO)
- polygamous_bat 3y ago
  > Smug, aloof, arrogant and condescending, honestly much more so than a typical white collar defendant. At least he wasn’t playing League of Legends on the stand. That’s a small win, I guess?
- polynomial 3y ago
  Where is Dan Friedberg during all this?
JohnFen 3y ago
I'm no lawyer, but I think that the defense has to be presented with all the evidence that will be used in the prosecution's case, before the trial starts. In that case, it's even funnier because the defense knew the prosecution had all of those things before he was even asked those questions.
- SilasX 3y ago
  Yes, they’re obligated to turn over everything they’ll use in their case. They’re also obligated to turn over everything that could help the defendant (exculpatory evidence). But my understanding is, they’re not obligated to turn over evidence that is not part of their case and is only used to rebut a witness’s testimony. Which would cover the stuff they used to contradict SBF’s statements on the stand. Can someone clarify? (Sorry, “add color”.)
  - compiler-guy 3y ago
    Any defense lawyer worth their salt would have known everything the prosecution had. It all came from ftx and sbf himself in one form or another. It is very unlikely that anything presented on rebuttal was a surprise.
    - SilasX 3y ago
      My comment was replying to the question of whether they’d get it (and similar materials) directly from the prosecution, not whether they’d get it some other way.
      - MagicMoonlight 3y ago
        If it’s anything like other legal systems, they would have to provide it all in advance. Otherwise you could start using something inadmissible in front of the jury.
  - deleted 3y ago
    [deleted]
hintymad 3y ago
Yeah. And I find it quite contemptuous for SBF to often use "Yup" instead of yes.
- zoklet-enjoyer 3y ago
  That's how he talks. Watch any interview with him.
  - dragonwriter 3y ago
    "That's how he talks" and "it is quite contemptuous" are not opposed concepts.
    - fsckboy 3y ago
      [flagged]
      - Edman274 3y ago
        I feel like until SBF has actually been diagnosed as having autism, it's not a good idea to treat his open disregard for the decorum in a court of law as being the result of autism.
        fsckboy 3y ago
        [flagged]
        smcl 3y ago
        Additionally he was perfectly capable of speaking normally when it was his team questioning him.
      - CoastalCoder 3y ago
        FWIW, as someone on the spectrum and with a kid on it as well, I'm not getting that vibe from the other comments.
- 3y ago
tacon 3y ago
The most unbelievable behavior on cross was described by Tiffany Fong. The prosecutor asked Sam to read a section on "preventing clawbacks", which was a head and then some text underneath. Sam read the text underneath out loud. Then she asked him to read the headline, "Preventing Clawbacks", too. So he said the following: "The first word is 'preventing'. The second word is 'clawbacks'." If I was on a jury where the defendant pulled that, I would want to go up and punch him in the face. Tiffany was restrained. Her notes said she only wanted to slap him.
- b112 3y ago
  Weird. I don't believe he even had an obligation to read any of it. Unless someone is demonstrating their voice for identification, I cannot see why someone can be compelled to just "read stuff". An example... a presumed murderer is on the stand. You hand them paper. It says "I murdered someone". Are they expected to read it?! And further, as a juror, why would it enrage you to not see him comply? You say on a jury, you'd want to attack the defendant, but at that point you should not believe he is guilty, or innocent! So, would you be upset if an innocent person, refused to read statements maligning himself?
  - deleted 3y ago
    [deleted]
  - seabass-labrax 3y ago
    I too am confused. Is it not the barrister's job to respond on behalf of the accused? Presumably Sam Bankman-Fried was not actually obliged to read anything aloud (except of course the court's oath), and just chose to for some reason.
    - foldr 3y ago
      He was being cross examined, so he was certainly obliged to answer the questions put by the prosecutor, just as any other witness would be.
      - 3y ago
rsaxvc 3y ago
> Under the circumstances, SBF’s wisest course would have been to just say yes—or yep—to her questions. Why did he take the stand at all?
- stuartjohnson12 3y ago
  Worst case: the situation doesn't get much worse than it already is Best case: the situation gets substantially better If you like to take risks, the answer is obvious.
  - closewith 3y ago
    I don't think that's true for the worst case. His time on the stand could significantly increase his sentence within the guidelines and I think that will be the case now.
  - javier123454321 3y ago
    Actually, in this situation, there are only negatives to take the stand. As was the case when he kept giving interviews right after the fiasco came to light. There was no possitive that would come of it. Remember, in the US everything you say can be used against you, and only against you. That is why you lawyer up on any interrogation and the first thing the lawyers will tell you is to SAY NOTHING.
    - stuartjohnson12 3y ago
      That's true if you're talking to police but not if you're on the stand. If you're on the stand you have the opportunity to convince the jury that you're a trustworthy person. In fact, even talking to police has the possibility to make you better off for example if you can wrongly lead them to not think you're the suspect.
      - gitgud 3y ago
        The sad reality is that you can easily incriminate yourself by talking to the police. Especially if you were in the wrong place at the wrong time. Lawyers are there to make sure the police do their job
jimmySixDOF 3y ago
There is an hr long interview with Michael Lewis about his time with SBF and its fascinating how his unusually high aptitude for jane street type decision making under uncertainty was able to paper over his unusually high emotional disconnectedness. Great interview (available as podcast and on YouTube) https://www.intelligencesquared.com/events/the-rise-and-fall-of-sam-bankman-fried-a-tale-of-money-hubris-and-downfall-with-michael-lewis/ https://www.intelligencesquared.com/events/the-rise-and-fall...
- bitcharmer 3y ago
  I watched the 60 minutes with Lewis who used to be one of my favourite writers but I had to do a 180 after I saw him defending SBF for the whole time. It was hard to watch and made me question the accuracy of every single book of his that I had read.
  - smcl 3y ago
    The way he was completely charmed by SBF was really quite surprising.
    - kaashif 3y ago
      The root cause is that he wrote most of the book before the fraud came out, so the tone is wrong. For the book to sell, he had to release it now, while the story is ongoing. But that means he doesn't have time to rewrite the whole thing to get the tone right and pretend he wasn't charmed. So either he's pretending he was charmed by SBF so that he can pretend the book makes sense, or he really was charmed. Either of these outcomes boosts his book sales. Lewis believes what he needs to believe to sell his book. Is that a coincidence? Maybe.
      - jimmySixDOF 3y ago
        Actually Lewis explicitly says in the interview that he didn't write a word before the indictment and was actually complaining he didn't have a way to end the story. True or not I can't say but I get the feeling he has considered SBF as a subject deeply and is responding to wholly justified criticism of the recklessness by filling in the gaps and that comes across as a defensive position but if the interview had been shining praise on SBF then Lewis may have come off looking like a harsh critic for the same reason of balancing out the picture. Perhaps I am being too generous but the whole saga is fascinating partly because there are so many possible interpretations of causes beyond the facts involved.
thefascistleft 3y ago
[dead]
the_black_hand 3y ago
> You’d think this MIT graduate would wise up, but he never did I don't think it's lack of wisdom but rather pathological hubris and a God-Complex. I've met kids like SBF at MIT. Very smart but at some point they think the rules don't apply to them. The've never failed before so why would they start now. After all, he was like the youngest billionaire, rich parents, good grades, top schools. Everything has gone his way so the thought of admitting failure was out of the question. The defense also took this weird strategy of painting SBF as incompetent manger who had no clue what his subordinates were up to. Who knows, maybe that will get softer sentencing. TBH I wouldn't be surprised if he gets out after 2-3 years on "good behavior". those political donations have to count for something. He very well may have the last laugh.
- RandomLensman 3y ago
  What would be the incentive for anyone to pull strings for him?
- Tangurena2 3y ago
  "Getting out early" is not something done at the federal level. The President could pardon him. That's about it. Let's pretend that Congress legalizes marijuana. The folks still in prison who had been convicted of selling or transporting it would not get released - unless the statute removing it from Schedule 1 also specifically required releasing those already convicted.
- jihadjihad 3y ago
  The most time you get off your sentence in the federal system is 54 days per year of imprisonment [0]. That's roughly a 1:7 ratio. If he's sentenced to 14 years for example (not by any stretch of the imagination an unbelievable scenario), he'd only get 2 years off for "good behavior," thus serving 12 instead of 14. 0: https://www.kohlerandhart.com/blog/2023/03/15/how-is-good-behavior-measured-in-prison https://www.kohlerandhart.com/blog/2023/03/15/how-is-good-be...
agilob 3y ago
>just as often, he chose to dance around the question, to quibble about the phrasing, or say that he couldn’t remember the details. And every time he did that—every single time Which is exactly what representatives from Facebook, Google and Microsoft did on trials and when being questioned by congress
- 5636588 3y ago
  > Which is exactly what representatives from Facebook, Google and Microsoft did on trials To be exact, they weren't trials; only hearings.
  - agilob 3y ago
    Yes, I went too far with Google and Facebook, I had this in mind: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gRelVFm7iJE https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gRelVFm7iJE https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_v._Microsoft_Corp https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_v._Microsoft_Cor....
- ceejayoz 3y ago
  > Which is exactly what representatives from Facebook, Google and Microsoft did on trials and when being questioned by congress Personal criminal trials hinge quite a bit more on "is the defendant personally likeable/credible" than a civil trial involving a multinational corporation.
nikster 3y ago
[flagged]
- automatic6131 3y ago
  These controllers, are they in the room with us now? >What 28 year old is quite so perfect at political "donations" aka bribes? One, he wasn't "perfect" or even close to it - he mostly gave to crypto positive politicians of both parties, and two, his lawyer mother and his lawyer father helped him
- davidgerard 3y ago
  SBF was a bright lad at school and thought that made him a universal genius. There's persistent rumours that he was set up and backed by Tether/Bitfinex, after the heat got a bit much for Bitfinex in 2017. Notice how Alameda somehow printed $39 billion "worth" of tethers and only ever sent about $4 billion of actual money/crypto to Tether.
arethuza 3y ago
I believe a very basic rule-of-thumb for lawyers in court is to don't ask witnesses questions you don't already know the answer to. Edit: I remember my wife telling me this during her time as an Advocate's Devil.
- TeMPOraL 3y ago
  > Advocate's Devil What does such role/job entail? It sounds like being a drill sergeant on a lawyers' boot camp.
  - arethuza 3y ago
    Advocates are the Scottish equivalent of barristers - specialised lawyers who can appear in the highest courts. During training one of the things they have to do is act as an unpaid assistant for a senior junior (but not a senior!) advocate for a year or so - during this time they are known as Advocate's Devils. The process is known as devilling but, you might expect, this means different things in different parts of the UK: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Devilling#Scotland https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Devilling#Scotland
    - TeMPOraL 3y ago
      Thanks for explaining! I only knew about the term "Devil's Advocate", I didn't realize the transposed term is a thing too.
gwd 3y ago
> You’d think this MIT graduate would wise up, but he never did. I think there were potentially two problems. First, for the previous 10 years, lying and taking massive risks actually did work for him: Even if some people became disillusioned and stopped buying what he was selling, he could just walk away from them and start working with people who would. Secondly -- well, what else could he have done? It's a bit like back when we saw those AIs playing Go or Starcraft or whatever at the point where it was clear they were going to lose: They'd just start making random moves, because terrible moves had as much chance of winning as "minimize loss" moves. There's an interesting article I read which is half book review, half critique of SBF and "Effective Altruism" (EA), that has some interesting connections[1]. Basically, EA encourages "cost / benefits utilitarian analysis" thinking; every time SBF lied (or committed fraud), he could tell himself that it was actually moral because it maximized some other good towards thinking people somehow. It also encourages poker-type gambling in some circumstances, where it makes sense to take a bet where you lose 75% of the time, as long as the potential payout is larger than 4x. And if that article's reading is right, FTX actually had a profitable business. All they had to do was sit back and take x% of trades and they would have been fine. But that wouldn't have been a huge massive multiple that SBF was looking for, so he went in for a bunch of poker-style bets with his customer's money -- ultimately in the name of making more money to give that money away. (And he did actually give a load of money away, even when it didn't make financial sense to do so.) SBF's choices were: 1. Accept that you're going to jail for a long time no matter what, and try to minimize the damage. Maybe you can cut your jail time in half. 2. See if you can weasel your way out of it. Maybe your jail time is a bit worse, but maybe you don't get any at all. First of all, he'd always been able to do #2 so far, so why would this time be any different? Secondly, #1 means a huge emotional downside for current SBF; #2 only means a potential downside for future SBF. The attitude he got into, where he screwed everyone else in favor of "current SBF", carries over into screwing "future SBF". So there's a sort of poetic justice to it. [1] https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/AocXh6gJ9tJC2WyCL/book-review-going-infinite https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/AocXh6gJ9tJC2WyCL/book-revie...
- hef19898 3y ago
  As the senior partner in Margin Call said: "Your smarter, your first or you cheat, and I don't cheat." It seams SBF and FTX came a different conclusion than the guy in Margin Call ("While I believe there are a lot small people here, it's much easier to be first"), and that was: "I, and we at FTX are the smartest people aroind, so nobody will catch us cheating". Hadn't they not cheated, FTX would habe gone under, sure, but nobody would have ended in jail.
flanked-evergl 3y ago
> You’d think this MIT graduate would wise up, but he never did. After interacting with professional managers with degrees from supposedly illustrious institutions for years during my career, I don't see a good basis for this expectation. What is more fascinating is how the professional management class, as incompetent as they are, have managed to gain the reputation of wisdom and competence in the collective subconscious.
- diydsp 3y ago
  That is an invite to an interesting conversation about fame, media, publication, status, hierachy, "alpha"-ness, reproduction, entitlement, culture, etc!
  - ted_bunny 3y ago
    Maybe Class, as a treat.
- AlexandrB 3y ago
  > What is more fascinating is how the professional management class, as incompetent as they are, have managed to gain the reputation of wisdom and competence in the collective subconscious. Have they? It's pretty common to hear people complaining about "clueless MBAs" here and on other parts of the internet.
ActionHank 3y ago
I genuinely think none of them thought he would be convicted, because you know, the judicial system punishes the poors, not the wealthy.
strikelaserclaw 3y ago
No one said smart people need to have wisdom
andsoitis 3y ago
You need self-awareness, the ability to read the room, and the discipline to suppress your ego.
deleted 3y ago
[deleted]

fsckboy 3y ago

[flagged]

fsckboy 3y ago
[flagged]
- CoastalCoder 3y ago
  I wonder if you and the other commenters are making different assumptions about his private thoughts during testimony. It sounds like you think he might be trying to be honest and forthright, but his intentions are lost in translation. Whereas the other commenters think it's more likely that he was being obstructionist?
  - fsckboy 3y ago
    >It sounds like you think he might be trying to be honest and forthright, but his intentions are lost in translation. Whereas the other commenters think it's more likely that he was being obstructionist? I'm not thinking it's all one way or the other. A person who is lying/willing to lie will still take every opportunity to tell the truth if it makes him look good. Separately, an autistic person has trouble understanding and being understood, and then emotions flare and the autistic person is more disconnected. His autistic answers to questions can look evasive, but they are not necessarily, especially if the truth is actually on his side. There will be many questions he is trying to answer honestly because the truth is on his side, but his awkwardness looks evasive. He may simultaneously have a motive and willingness to also be evasive and lie. And then a layer of he-said-she-said, there are always two sides to a story and how to remember and tell it, and the truth lies in the middle (with the lies? hahaha) If the defendent is entitled to the benefit of the doubt, I am pointing out that much of what people are making great sport of here can be interpreted as reasonable doubt. But at the same time, I don't doubt that there was a strong case against him overall, and he was guilty. To use a blunt analogy, to me I'm hearing people saying "look at that lying cheating wop eat spaghetti on his private plane and as his last meal!" (I chose Italian because I am) Well, that lying cheating Italian might be named Ponzi (the other reason I chose Italian) and he deserves to go to jail, but it's this bystander jeering that sounds bad to me, that type of attitude can be turned against any one of us.
    - spuz 3y ago
      I agree with you that it's unfair to laugh at what might be Sam's genuine attempts to be honest when answering a question. I appreciate your account of your own experience. The only thing I would disagree with is that there is any kind of "correct" or "normie" answer to questions made by a prosecutor during cross examination. If they are good at their job then they will only ever ask questions that they already know the answer to. The only hope you have in that case is that the judge will allow you to speak beyond what the prosecutor has asked about. I don't think it matters whether you're autistic or normie as you put it. Like you say, most people here would crumble in that position.
    - 3y ago
- vkou 3y ago
  SBF chose to make his character a part of his defense ("Whoopsie daisies I'm just an incompetent nerd who likes muffins and didn't know I was doing anything wrong"), which makes character attacks like that fair game against him for the prosecution. This is precisely why you shut up, and plead the fifth. You'll be eviscerated on cross-examination when you don't. Although in his case, he probably should have pled guilty, and begged for mercy, instead.
- defen 3y ago
  "Did you fly on a private plane to an airport 4.5 miles away from the location of the Super Bowl, the day before the Super Bowl" doesn't quite have the same ring to it.
  - hef19898 3y ago
    It woupd make a great follow-up question to the proposed answer of "no, I took an Escalade to the Super Bowl" so. Splitting hairs over definitions and genie-like interpretations of what sentences mean isn't smart, it's annoying most of the time.
- cedilla 3y ago
  > . Any analysis tells me that the spirit of your question is to paint me as a bad person This is why you never should talk about being "the smartest person in the room". Because if you're that kind of person, you will inevitably try to show your genius work, and it will always be severely lacking. I'm sorry, but you were not the smartest person in the room. You fail to understand what a prosecutor does and why, and you fail to understand what makes good testimony. Maybe you had the highest amount of raw brain power in the court room, but with no intellectual curiosity or humility, that's like running the fastest CPU with no cooling on an unstable power supply.
  - fsckboy 3y ago
    [flagged]
    - cedilla 3y ago
      This has gotten out of scope for this forum. But I will make one last observation: that grandstanding does not make the point you think it does.
      - fsckboy 3y ago
        I had edited my comment to additionally point out how poorly you made your argument, I just want to make sure you don't miss it.
        davidgerard 3y ago
        You really are not demonstrating here what you think you're demonstrating.
    - Timshel 3y ago
      You do realize that with this comment you just reinforced the parent point ?
- freetanga 3y ago
  “Where does the Super Bowl even begins? In the parking lot? Then I drove there. In the seat? Then I walked there. Was I ever there? Who knows, what is a person other than an ever changing cloud of electrons and protons moving, spinning and decaying at amazing rate… where does my butt ends and the seat begin?…” if you roll Pedantic for 20/20 - Is the system rigged? Yes. - Are laws written by mediocre people hence full of loopholes? Yes. - Are most people in the Justice system mediocre? Yes, to the best of my knowledge your honor. - Is Justice != Law application? Yes, greatest marketing scam calling it Justice Department. - Is SBF a scammer that had a chip on his shoulder and got rich off other peoples money? All signs point to yes. - Does he deserved to be in jail? In SBF words, “Yep”. Mate, I don’t question your intellect or memory, surely you are God - even in a forum where there is no lack of bright people - but your emotional intelligence is severely handicapped, so much that the “functional” part of your self description falls into doubt. You come across as the Simpsons comic store guy. Chill.
  - enimodas 3y ago
    >Are laws written by mediocre people hence full of loopholes? Guy once told me his job was to write some law in Spain, or for the EU, or somewhere in between. He submits his writings to his bosses, who tell him (paraphrased): "it's too clear, too watertight. Go back and make it more ambiguous." So he did.
    - bitcurious 3y ago
      Which isn’t necessarily a bad thing - laws should allow for some level of ambiguity, and should be written for outcomes. The enforcement is a negotiation between agents bound by the law and agents tasked with upholding the law. It’s like hiring a web design firm and then showing up with a complete mockup - give them room to work.
  - fsckboy 3y ago
    It's weird that I tell a story with a point: smart autistic people have trouble communicating with people who are not precise in a venue which pretends to insist on precision, and here's a vivid example showing how innocent things can go wrong and you think afterward you need to reiterate the attitude people have that triggered me to write in the first place. Yes, I know. Now read my story, it's a response to what you said, with details that can be discussed which you've ignored, details you should quote as a response rather than just telling me what I already know. I didn't say I was the smartest person in the room to imply that "everybody should listen to me". I said it to ensure the reader that the troubles that ensued in the story were not due to me being unable to follow what was going on. I followed it, it made no sense without context that they were denying me. It would make no sense to anybody paying attention, but clarification was not possible. But nowhere in your vast and vaunted store of EQ-that-I-am-lacking do you find any empathy for me and my experience. You just have the urge to tell me I'm wrong, it's my fault, etc. I'm submitting your response as further evidence of my point.
usea 3y ago
This is incredibly relatable, and I feel like you're describing virtually every (verbal) interaction I have with other people.
VladTheImpalor 3y ago
I'm not sure you appreciate just how insufferably arrogant a sentence like "I can safely say I was the smartest person in the room" sounds. Especially when you follow it up by calling yourself "a smart detailed person" while dismissing others around you as "normies". If you truly were smart, you'd perhaps appreciate just how difficult it is to even begin to define that word, and also just how much your comment reads like an incoherent word vomit. Who is Susie Q? What petitions? What are you on about?
- Gigablah 3y ago
  He was basically describing a variation of the “have you stopped beating your wife” parable. Hope that helps.
  - VladTheImpalor 3y ago
    I was disabusing him of the notion that he might be the smartest person in that room. Smartness is across various axes, for one, but mainly, the presumptuousness and the sheer confidence of the assumption rubbed me the wrong way, not so much the content of the argument.
    - hef19898 3y ago
      And that attotude usually doesn't go well in court. Or meetings with, how did OP put it, "normies".
    - gilleain 3y ago
      Agreed. I think that some people - SBF included - could take to heart the idea that sometimes they are not the smartest person in the room. Or even that being 'smart' is not the always the most important thing to be at every point in time.
  - gilleain 3y ago
    Also known as a 'loaded question' (<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Loaded_question https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Loaded_question>) - I really don't think that questions like "Did Alameda have an essentially unbounded line of credit?" are all that loaded. SBF simply did not want to answer the questions.
DaiPlusPlus 3y ago
> I have testified in a court... Out of curiosity, were you given the option of giving a deposition instead of taking the witness stand? ---- Random boredom-browsing took me to this article: https://www.gu.se/en/gnc/defendants-with-autism-spectrum-disorder-in-the-courtroom-considerations-and-implications https://www.gu.se/en/gnc/defendants-with-autism-spectrum-dis... > A defendant with ASD may shift the topic of the court discussions to a topic which is of interest to them and it can be difficult for anyone to interrupt them. The interest may be one of the individual’s preoccupations. Jurors may perceive this behaviour as an indication that the defendant is deliberately being evasive and trying to avoid answering the question that has been asked of them. As mentioned earlier, they may also go into excessive and unnecessary detail (and often at great length) when asked a question. Their responses may, in addition to being detailed and lengthy, it can also be repetitive ---- Like some (most?) of us here, I've got ASD too; I've been in court too, though only as a small-claims plaintiff (got a default judgement against no-show defendent with a negative net-worth, fun...); and yeah, I remember putting a lot of details into what I said in court and the judge seeming annoyed with me - but I thought it was all relevant (still, the judge said I would have won anyway even if it wasn't a default judgement...). But yeah - if I was was ever a criminal defendent, the prosecution would probably let me talk myself into a trap - or something. Stuff like that makes me think I should intentionally play-up the autism instead of trying to act normal, to clearly demonstrate to the jury that I'm far more of a social-idiot than a cold sociopath.
- fsckboy 3y ago
  I'm not an expert and I left details out to simplify, but depositions had already been submitted. Sometimes judges will hive off a piece of a case to "a special master" or something like that, to answer a subsidiary question. This was such a thing, the person presiding was a retired judge, and he has "powers" (like kicking me out if I continued to not say "yes or no", which kills my case because I'm the one making the complaint) and his purview was answering the question of whether the petitions had been properly served. All parties to the suit were there, but it was not in a court, and there was no "stand", we all sat around a table. I suppose it was something like a deposition, but the master was there and my attorney was not free to argue directly with their attorney. This piece of the story is also a big bowl of horribly unfair spaghetti. Wanna hear it? There is no such thing as "service" or "serving" where a shareholder petition is concerned, there's no standard for it, it's not a thing. You could do it by mail, etc. because the officers are your fiduciaries and they are to look out for your interests. As it stood, by total coincidence, when I went to the front desk where paperwork like an actual service would be handled, the "mailing address" so to speak, who is standing right there but the president of the board! So I smiled and said "I've got petitions for you", which she was well aware my group had been collecting, they just thought we'd never make it over the hump. She went cold and like wouldn't take the envelope, was holding her hands away, and told me to leave it at the desk, the desk she was standing by. So I did. Then she started inventing reasons why these petitions had not been served properly (they were served the way she told me to). In her deposition, this event turned into me "lying in wait, angrily physically assaulting her with the envelope". I was not angry: nobody thought we could get enough signatures but we did, I was positively giddy. I wasn't even showing my inner Nelson, "HAA-HAA", that's what I was covering up with my smile. In any case: to repeat, there is no standard for service, it's not a thing. But the way we delivered them was the way service would be made. She is also my fiduciary who was obligated to look after my shareholder rights. It cost me about $250,000 in attorney fees to just cover this piece of the case. How can an overfull court system claim that this is something that must be looked into? They had to invent reasons to look into it. All entirely separate from further time and money wasting whether what we were petitioning was something we could petition (it was, to call a shareholder meeting) and what is allowed to come to the floor at a shareholder meeting (you know who decides that, who courts won't override? shareholders, and they'd be at the meeting) and we were explicitly petitioning to remove board members at the meeting, another of our enumerated rights in the by-laws. We did not have the right to call an election, but all board members being removed triggers an election under a separate clause so... if you're going to make up a standard, it's so easy to see this should be thrown to the shareholders. The board was simply throwing up one implausible excuse after another to avoid calling the meeting. So many legal questions which weren't even legal questions, for this type of corporation there are no standards for any of it, but the court was entertaining far flung notions borrowing ideas from other facets of industry as sort of frontier justice or something. It should have been a slam dunk, I don't know why the court didn't just order a meeting immediately because meetings are easy to hold, it's not a big deal, and no matter what, the shareholders were both the affected parties and the arbiters, so why not just let them have a meeting? oh, the attorney lady was an employment law attorney, and I know of another incident where she claimed somebody had assaulted her with documents. I have a feeling that's her modus operandi in employment lawsuits "they were angry, they might have done anything". Disgusting. And equally disgusting to spend a million in shareholder money trying not to have a shareholder meeting.
thepasswordis 3y ago
This comment resonates strongly with me. I have watched a lot of hours of court cases. The adversarial lawyers are very literally trying to get you to screw up verbally. That’s their job. They could hold of a picture of an apple and say “is this an apple, yes or no.” Or even “is this a photograph of an apple yes or no?” And depending on what they mean the answer could be both.
caconym_ 3y ago
SBF's case didn't go his way because he was obviously lying and lying and lying ("I don't recall") and equivocating and evading when he wasn't outright lying, because he was guilty. There may have been instances where he was genuinely trying to communicate a salient truth in response to a prosecutor's rhetorical trap, but indulging him in those cases wasn't going to change the outcome. He should not have testified; he should have pled guilty.
bitcharmer 3y ago
> I can safely say I was the smartest person in the room I stopped reading after that

az226 3y ago

I guess he didn't have the money to pay for a good defense team, or didn't listen. Pretty amateur hour what he did. Made it very easy and quick for the jurors.

m1keil 3y ago
His bail was 250M USD, I don't think money is an issue to his family.
- retube 3y ago
  What they actually posted was far, far less. Less than 2m if i recall.
  - chirau 3y ago
    It would have to be around 25M
    - dragonwriter 3y ago
      No, it wouldn't, didn't, and wasn't. It would have had to have been around 10% if it was in state court in many states, because of the way lots of state bail systems work. The federal system is very different.
      - krustyburger 3y ago
        It was literally just his parents’ house. And now it’s come out that those same parents were collecting large payments from FTX in the boom times for their supposed services. We’ll see if they ever face any charges themselves.
        smcl 3y ago
        The email exchange where his dad grumbles about how he's getting only $200k/yr (for doing nothing) and then CCs his mum for comment was quite amusing :)

JackFr 3y ago

With or without testifying he cut a remarkably unlikeable figure. Smug, aloof, arrogant and condescending, honestly much more so than a typical white collar defendant. I suppose his fatal flaw, though was not having anyone else to blame.

tw04 3y ago
>though was not having anyone else to blame. Oh, he definitely had people to blame, like the FTX lawyers, it’s just that he got caught lying or dancing around the truth so frequently that nobody would believe him.
- StressedDev 3y ago
  You hit the nail on the head here. Here is a list of some of the people he blamed for his fraud/downfall: 1. Binance / CZ (Binance's CEO) 2. Caroline Ellison 3. Sullivan & Cromwell LLP (https://www.sullcrom.com/ https://www.sullcrom.com/) 4. John Ray III (FTX's bankruptcy CEO)
polygamous_bat 3y ago
> Smug, aloof, arrogant and condescending, honestly much more so than a typical white collar defendant. At least he wasn’t playing League of Legends on the stand. That’s a small win, I guess?
polynomial 3y ago
Where is Dan Friedberg during all this?

JohnFen 3y ago

I'm no lawyer, but I think that the defense has to be presented with all the evidence that will be used in the prosecution's case, before the trial starts. In that case, it's even funnier because the defense knew the prosecution had all of those things before he was even asked those questions.

SilasX 3y ago
Yes, they’re obligated to turn over everything they’ll use in their case. They’re also obligated to turn over everything that could help the defendant (exculpatory evidence). But my understanding is, they’re not obligated to turn over evidence that is not part of their case and is only used to rebut a witness’s testimony. Which would cover the stuff they used to contradict SBF’s statements on the stand. Can someone clarify? (Sorry, “add color”.)
- compiler-guy 3y ago
  Any defense lawyer worth their salt would have known everything the prosecution had. It all came from ftx and sbf himself in one form or another. It is very unlikely that anything presented on rebuttal was a surprise.
  - SilasX 3y ago
    My comment was replying to the question of whether they’d get it (and similar materials) directly from the prosecution, not whether they’d get it some other way.
    - MagicMoonlight 3y ago
      If it’s anything like other legal systems, they would have to provide it all in advance. Otherwise you could start using something inadmissible in front of the jury.
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]

hintymad 3y ago

Yeah. And I find it quite contemptuous for SBF to often use "Yup" instead of yes.

zoklet-enjoyer 3y ago
That's how he talks. Watch any interview with him.
- dragonwriter 3y ago
  "That's how he talks" and "it is quite contemptuous" are not opposed concepts.
  - fsckboy 3y ago
    [flagged]
    - Edman274 3y ago
      I feel like until SBF has actually been diagnosed as having autism, it's not a good idea to treat his open disregard for the decorum in a court of law as being the result of autism.
      - fsckboy 3y ago
        [flagged]
      - smcl 3y ago
        Additionally he was perfectly capable of speaking normally when it was his team questioning him.
    - CoastalCoder 3y ago
      FWIW, as someone on the spectrum and with a kid on it as well, I'm not getting that vibe from the other comments.
3y ago

tacon 3y ago

The most unbelievable behavior on cross was described by Tiffany Fong. The prosecutor asked Sam to read a section on "preventing clawbacks", which was a head and then some text underneath. Sam read the text underneath out loud. Then she asked him to read the headline, "Preventing Clawbacks", too. So he said the following: "The first word is 'preventing'. The second word is 'clawbacks'." If I was on a jury where the defendant pulled that, I would want to go up and punch him in the face. Tiffany was restrained. Her notes said she only wanted to slap him.

b112 3y ago
Weird. I don't believe he even had an obligation to read any of it. Unless someone is demonstrating their voice for identification, I cannot see why someone can be compelled to just "read stuff". An example... a presumed murderer is on the stand. You hand them paper. It says "I murdered someone". Are they expected to read it?! And further, as a juror, why would it enrage you to not see him comply? You say on a jury, you'd want to attack the defendant, but at that point you should not believe he is guilty, or innocent! So, would you be upset if an innocent person, refused to read statements maligning himself?
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
- seabass-labrax 3y ago
  I too am confused. Is it not the barrister's job to respond on behalf of the accused? Presumably Sam Bankman-Fried was not actually obliged to read anything aloud (except of course the court's oath), and just chose to for some reason.
  - foldr 3y ago
    He was being cross examined, so he was certainly obliged to answer the questions put by the prosecutor, just as any other witness would be.
    - 3y ago

rsaxvc 3y ago

> Under the circumstances, SBF’s wisest course would have been to just say yes—or yep—to her questions. Why did he take the stand at all?

stuartjohnson12 3y ago
Worst case: the situation doesn't get much worse than it already is Best case: the situation gets substantially better If you like to take risks, the answer is obvious.
- closewith 3y ago
  I don't think that's true for the worst case. His time on the stand could significantly increase his sentence within the guidelines and I think that will be the case now.
- javier123454321 3y ago
  Actually, in this situation, there are only negatives to take the stand. As was the case when he kept giving interviews right after the fiasco came to light. There was no possitive that would come of it. Remember, in the US everything you say can be used against you, and only against you. That is why you lawyer up on any interrogation and the first thing the lawyers will tell you is to SAY NOTHING.
  - stuartjohnson12 3y ago
    That's true if you're talking to police but not if you're on the stand. If you're on the stand you have the opportunity to convince the jury that you're a trustworthy person. In fact, even talking to police has the possibility to make you better off for example if you can wrongly lead them to not think you're the suspect.
    - gitgud 3y ago
      The sad reality is that you can easily incriminate yourself by talking to the police. Especially if you were in the wrong place at the wrong time. Lawyers are there to make sure the police do their job

jimmySixDOF 3y ago

There is an hr long interview with Michael Lewis about his time with SBF and its fascinating how his unusually high aptitude for jane street type decision making under uncertainty was able to paper over his unusually high emotional disconnectedness. Great interview (available as podcast and on YouTube) https://www.intelligencesquared.com/events/the-rise-and-fall-of-sam-bankman-fried-a-tale-of-money-hubris-and-downfall-with-michael-lewis/ https://www.intelligencesquared.com/events/the-rise-and-fall...

bitcharmer 3y ago
I watched the 60 minutes with Lewis who used to be one of my favourite writers but I had to do a 180 after I saw him defending SBF for the whole time. It was hard to watch and made me question the accuracy of every single book of his that I had read.
- smcl 3y ago
  The way he was completely charmed by SBF was really quite surprising.
  - kaashif 3y ago
    The root cause is that he wrote most of the book before the fraud came out, so the tone is wrong. For the book to sell, he had to release it now, while the story is ongoing. But that means he doesn't have time to rewrite the whole thing to get the tone right and pretend he wasn't charmed. So either he's pretending he was charmed by SBF so that he can pretend the book makes sense, or he really was charmed. Either of these outcomes boosts his book sales. Lewis believes what he needs to believe to sell his book. Is that a coincidence? Maybe.
    - jimmySixDOF 3y ago
      Actually Lewis explicitly says in the interview that he didn't write a word before the indictment and was actually complaining he didn't have a way to end the story. True or not I can't say but I get the feeling he has considered SBF as a subject deeply and is responding to wholly justified criticism of the recklessness by filling in the gaps and that comes across as a defensive position but if the interview had been shining praise on SBF then Lewis may have come off looking like a harsh critic for the same reason of balancing out the picture. Perhaps I am being too generous but the whole saga is fascinating partly because there are so many possible interpretations of causes beyond the facts involved.

thefascistleft 3y ago

[dead]

the_black_hand 3y ago

> You’d think this MIT graduate would wise up, but he never did I don't think it's lack of wisdom but rather pathological hubris and a God-Complex. I've met kids like SBF at MIT. Very smart but at some point they think the rules don't apply to them. The've never failed before so why would they start now. After all, he was like the youngest billionaire, rich parents, good grades, top schools. Everything has gone his way so the thought of admitting failure was out of the question. The defense also took this weird strategy of painting SBF as incompetent manger who had no clue what his subordinates were up to. Who knows, maybe that will get softer sentencing. TBH I wouldn't be surprised if he gets out after 2-3 years on "good behavior". those political donations have to count for something. He very well may have the last laugh.

RandomLensman 3y ago
What would be the incentive for anyone to pull strings for him?
Tangurena2 3y ago
"Getting out early" is not something done at the federal level. The President could pardon him. That's about it. Let's pretend that Congress legalizes marijuana. The folks still in prison who had been convicted of selling or transporting it would not get released - unless the statute removing it from Schedule 1 also specifically required releasing those already convicted.
jihadjihad 3y ago
The most time you get off your sentence in the federal system is 54 days per year of imprisonment [0]. That's roughly a 1:7 ratio. If he's sentenced to 14 years for example (not by any stretch of the imagination an unbelievable scenario), he'd only get 2 years off for "good behavior," thus serving 12 instead of 14. 0: https://www.kohlerandhart.com/blog/2023/03/15/how-is-good-behavior-measured-in-prison https://www.kohlerandhart.com/blog/2023/03/15/how-is-good-be...

agilob 3y ago

>just as often, he chose to dance around the question, to quibble about the phrasing, or say that he couldn’t remember the details. And every time he did that—every single time Which is exactly what representatives from Facebook, Google and Microsoft did on trials and when being questioned by congress

5636588 3y ago
> Which is exactly what representatives from Facebook, Google and Microsoft did on trials To be exact, they weren't trials; only hearings.
- agilob 3y ago
  Yes, I went too far with Google and Facebook, I had this in mind: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gRelVFm7iJE https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gRelVFm7iJE https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_v._Microsoft_Corp https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_v._Microsoft_Cor....
ceejayoz 3y ago
> Which is exactly what representatives from Facebook, Google and Microsoft did on trials and when being questioned by congress Personal criminal trials hinge quite a bit more on "is the defendant personally likeable/credible" than a civil trial involving a multinational corporation.

nikster 3y ago

[flagged]

automatic6131 3y ago
These controllers, are they in the room with us now? >What 28 year old is quite so perfect at political "donations" aka bribes? One, he wasn't "perfect" or even close to it - he mostly gave to crypto positive politicians of both parties, and two, his lawyer mother and his lawyer father helped him
davidgerard 3y ago
SBF was a bright lad at school and thought that made him a universal genius. There's persistent rumours that he was set up and backed by Tether/Bitfinex, after the heat got a bit much for Bitfinex in 2017. Notice how Alameda somehow printed $39 billion "worth" of tethers and only ever sent about $4 billion of actual money/crypto to Tether.

arethuza 3y ago

I believe a very basic rule-of-thumb for lawyers in court is to don't ask witnesses questions you don't already know the answer to. Edit: I remember my wife telling me this during her time as an Advocate's Devil.

TeMPOraL 3y ago
> Advocate's Devil What does such role/job entail? It sounds like being a drill sergeant on a lawyers' boot camp.
- arethuza 3y ago
  Advocates are the Scottish equivalent of barristers - specialised lawyers who can appear in the highest courts. During training one of the things they have to do is act as an unpaid assistant for a senior junior (but not a senior!) advocate for a year or so - during this time they are known as Advocate's Devils. The process is known as devilling but, you might expect, this means different things in different parts of the UK: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Devilling#Scotland https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Devilling#Scotland
  - TeMPOraL 3y ago
    Thanks for explaining! I only knew about the term "Devil's Advocate", I didn't realize the transposed term is a thing too.

gwd 3y ago

> You’d think this MIT graduate would wise up, but he never did. I think there were potentially two problems. First, for the previous 10 years, lying and taking massive risks actually did work for him: Even if some people became disillusioned and stopped buying what he was selling, he could just walk away from them and start working with people who would. Secondly -- well, what else could he have done? It's a bit like back when we saw those AIs playing Go or Starcraft or whatever at the point where it was clear they were going to lose: They'd just start making random moves, because terrible moves had as much chance of winning as "minimize loss" moves. There's an interesting article I read which is half book review, half critique of SBF and "Effective Altruism" (EA), that has some interesting connections[1]. Basically, EA encourages "cost / benefits utilitarian analysis" thinking; every time SBF lied (or committed fraud), he could tell himself that it was actually moral because it maximized some other good towards thinking people somehow. It also encourages poker-type gambling in some circumstances, where it makes sense to take a bet where you lose 75% of the time, as long as the potential payout is larger than 4x. And if that article's reading is right, FTX actually had a profitable business. All they had to do was sit back and take x% of trades and they would have been fine. But that wouldn't have been a huge massive multiple that SBF was looking for, so he went in for a bunch of poker-style bets with his customer's money -- ultimately in the name of making more money to give that money away. (And he did actually give a load of money away, even when it didn't make financial sense to do so.) SBF's choices were: 1. Accept that you're going to jail for a long time no matter what, and try to minimize the damage. Maybe you can cut your jail time in half. 2. See if you can weasel your way out of it. Maybe your jail time is a bit worse, but maybe you don't get any at all. First of all, he'd always been able to do #2 so far, so why would this time be any different? Secondly, #1 means a huge emotional downside for current SBF; #2 only means a potential downside for future SBF. The attitude he got into, where he screwed everyone else in favor of "current SBF", carries over into screwing "future SBF". So there's a sort of poetic justice to it. [1] https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/AocXh6gJ9tJC2WyCL/book-review-going-infinite https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/AocXh6gJ9tJC2WyCL/book-revie...

hef19898 3y ago
As the senior partner in Margin Call said: "Your smarter, your first or you cheat, and I don't cheat." It seams SBF and FTX came a different conclusion than the guy in Margin Call ("While I believe there are a lot small people here, it's much easier to be first"), and that was: "I, and we at FTX are the smartest people aroind, so nobody will catch us cheating". Hadn't they not cheated, FTX would habe gone under, sure, but nobody would have ended in jail.

flanked-evergl 3y ago

> You’d think this MIT graduate would wise up, but he never did. After interacting with professional managers with degrees from supposedly illustrious institutions for years during my career, I don't see a good basis for this expectation. What is more fascinating is how the professional management class, as incompetent as they are, have managed to gain the reputation of wisdom and competence in the collective subconscious.

diydsp 3y ago
That is an invite to an interesting conversation about fame, media, publication, status, hierachy, "alpha"-ness, reproduction, entitlement, culture, etc!
- ted_bunny 3y ago
  Maybe Class, as a treat.
AlexandrB 3y ago
> What is more fascinating is how the professional management class, as incompetent as they are, have managed to gain the reputation of wisdom and competence in the collective subconscious. Have they? It's pretty common to hear people complaining about "clueless MBAs" here and on other parts of the internet.

ActionHank 3y ago

I genuinely think none of them thought he would be convicted, because you know, the judicial system punishes the poors, not the wealthy.

strikelaserclaw 3y ago

No one said smart people need to have wisdom

andsoitis 3y ago

You need self-awareness, the ability to read the room, and the discipline to suppress your ego.

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