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Sequoia invested $200M in this guy. Has anyone looked at whether SBF could've done as much damage without that investment? Has anyone looked at if Sequoia did

Sequoia invested $200M in this guy. Has anyone looked at whether SBF could've done as much damage without that investment? Has anyone looked at if Sequoia did their due diligence? Seems like Sequoia could've seen red flags just from knowing Alameda existed. The potential abuse there was completely obvious.

zztop44 3y ago
The whole Sequoia thing is so interesting. Here is an excerpt from their (now taken down) profile of SBF, highlighting the moment he convinced them to invest: > That’s when SBF told Sequoia about the so-called super-app: “I want FTX to be a place where you can do anything you want with your next dollar. You can buy bitcoin. You can send money in whatever currency to any friend anywhere in the world. You can buy a banana. You can do anything you want with your money from inside FTX.” > Suddenly, the chat window on Sequoia’s side of the Zoom lights up with partners freaking out. > “I LOVE THIS FOUNDER,” typed one partner. > “I am a 10 out of 10,” pinged another. > “YES!!!” exclaimed a third Like, he’s rambling about how you should buy bananas with Bitcoin. How was this compelling to people who control serious money? It always struck me as the opposite. If someone running a crypto futures exchange said they wanted people to buy bananas and groceries on their platform that’s be a signal to pass, right?
- Brushfire 3y ago
  There is this weird thing in venture investing: the line between "crazy, brilliant founders who will build world changing companies" and "crazy, lunatic founders who will lie and cheat and be awful" is very hard to distinguish, especially at the series seed/series A level. It can lead to false positives and false negatives all the time.
  - cj 3y ago
    FTX didn't have a CFO. They didn't have a legitimate board of directors. No VC in their right mind should ever pour billions into a finance company that doesn't have a CFO or risk management team, doesn't have properly audited financial statements, doesn't have board oversight, etc. Especially so in a risky industry like crypto where scams and fraud are well known to be rampant. This is the main criticism I have of the people who invested in FTX. Even if you thought SBF was a world-changing entrepreneur 2 years ago, the structure of his company should have disqualified it from investment.
  - Capricorn2481 3y ago
    This, to me, is just a myth that is pushed by investors that don't know what they are doing, and media outlets who want to talk about spicy people. There's no strategic reason to put your eggs in the basket of crazy people. We only hear about the crazy people because they are newsworthy.
  - mrguyorama 3y ago
    VCs don't care about the distinction, because VCs don't need a real, successful company, they need a story to sell at IPO
  - rvba 3y ago
    Buy a bag from a hypeman. Sell the bag just in time before the house of cards falls
- SamBam 3y ago
  I don't know. To the extent that Musk had a plan at all with his $44B Twitter purchase, a big part of his idea seems to be that he wants X to be the next banking app/Venmo. Venmo is valuated at something like 40 billion dollars, and a huge amount of its use is people making $10 payments to each other. I'd hate to live in a world where I conducted all my business on FTX, but you can see why it might be appealing to investors.
  - sumtechguy 3y ago
    Musk is copying wechat.
    - brazzy 3y ago
      * dreaming of
- whalesalad 3y ago
  Let's not forget the league of legends incident. https://www.businessinsider.com/ftx-sam-bankman-fried-league-of-legends-investor-pitch-meeting-2022-11 https://www.businessinsider.com/ftx-sam-bankman-fried-league...
  - jackbravo 3y ago
    Oh wow! It was in that same meeting!
- jackbravo 3y ago
  I think that idea in particular is quite good actually ^_^ I mean, I'm not imagining that they have groceries listings on the app, but that the app allows you to transfer money directly to someone from your crypto wallet. Like a venmo payment but with crypto.
  - _fat_santa 3y ago
    > but that the app allows you to transfer money directly to someone from your crypto wallet. Like a venmo payment but with crypto. The thing is that's not a novel concept, just about every crypto wallet app can already do this. And the achilles heel of all of these apps is the gas fees that are out of their control. The only way to conceptually get around gas fees is to keep everyones money centralized and sidestep the trading of crypto all together, but in the process you defeat the entire purpose of crypto.
- the_snooze 3y ago
  I think the practical business/technical goals are almost irrelevant. It's not that SBF had a brilliant business model in mind. It's that he fit the "look" of a founder that those VCs expected. He was one of them, with the right pedigree and right connections. It's affinity fraud [1]. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Affinity_fraud https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Affinity_fraud
  - ActionHank 3y ago
    Crazy thing is that the people who bring about massive change or revolutionary new ideas don't often fit the mould.
    - BowBun 3y ago
      At this point, your 'quirky technologist' definitely IS the mold.
      - ActionHank 3y ago
        He was a quirky cryptobro league player. There are millions of them.
      - jjtheblunt 3y ago
        If you look at recent Nobel Prize winners in sciences, many are not weirdos, just smart and without relying on nonsensical gimmicks. Jennifer Doudna, Emmanuelle Charpentier, others, all examples of just smart and persistent and focused.
    - isk517 3y ago
      Feels very cargo culty. SBF superficially matched peoples idea of a revolutionary genius without any of the actual substance.
    - survirtual 3y ago
      Unfortunately the people in power do not care for revolutionary change. They want change that makes them money, not change that fundamentally restructures society. Change that fundamentally restructures society does not need permission from anyone. When the tech is here it will speak for itself, in spite of any of the major resource allocators being blind to those who bring it -- because a part of that change is those resource allocators being made irrelevant. They have held back the human race with their ego, blindness, and total lack of vision. They will spend $200m+ on a clown like this but ignore countless people with real innovations.
- ActionHank 3y ago
  This whole exchange made me think that there must have been a family or friend connection back to Sequoia. As a humble poor, if I were running the show over at Sequoia I would have these people out on their asses, but again, I also don't have buckets of money clouding my judgement.
  - rchaud 3y ago
    Sequoia likely made plenty of money by underwriting their in-house e-coin FTT, hyping up SBF across the media, and then dumping FTT on retail investors afterwards.
    - StressedDev 3y ago
      Do you have any proof they did that? That is a very serious accusation to make.
      - rchaud 3y ago
        No proof, because absolutely nothing was audited. That's the whole point of crypto, avoiding securities regulations. Regardless, what I'm describing is exactly what an investment bank does for a legit public company. They purchase shares from the issuing company to guarantee a certain amount of capital for the company, and then sell it on the secondary market, which in most cases would be to other invstment groups or directly on the NYSE. The difference is that those companies issue S-1s disclosing their performance and numbers, allowing secondary market investors to make an informed buying decision. https://corporatefinanceinstitute.com/resources/career-map/sell-side/capital-markets/underwriting-overview/ https://corporatefinanceinstitute.com/resources/career-map/s...
- mschuster91 3y ago
  > Like, he’s rambling about how you should buy bananas with Bitcoin. How was this compelling to people who control serious money? Everyone and their dog was looking for an actually credible, mass-market compatible usage scenario for Bitcoin beyond buying drugs on Silk Road.
  - sleepybrett 3y ago
    coinbro brain. 'everyone' couldn't give a shit about bitcoin, statistically speaking.
    - mschuster91 3y ago
      Yeah but back in the Bitcoin crazy time it wasn't that unrealistic for "serious money". Mastercard, Visa and AmEx move trillions of dollars a year, capturing even a slice of that marketshare means being in possession of a money printer, which explains the (often absurd) investments into anything crypto.
- coldpie 3y ago
  > How was this compelling to people who control serious money? Access to money, and intelligence, are not positively correlated. Jury is out on whether there is no correlation, or if there is negative correlation. Given the braindead antics of the wealthy over the past 10 years, I'm leaning towards the latter.
  - ToucanLoucan 3y ago
    Anybody remember that rich dude who built a submarine against every single convention and over the screaming shouting objections of literally every other person alive who's built submarines, who then tried to go to the Titanic and killed himself and four other people? How about Musk who bought a successful if mid-tier social media site for 44 billion dollars and has cratered it to being worth barely 4? How about Zuck who renamed his entire damn company in a bid to pivot to the metaverse just in time for that entire house of cards to come crashing down?
    - coldpie 3y ago
      [flagged]
      - pxmpxm 3y ago
        I suspect the sole purpose of ideas like wealth tax is to point out undiscerning left leaning voters. You know, the people whose mental model of "the rich" comes from scrooge mcduck - wealth being mostly stored in gold coins that are easy to dive into and/or tax on annual basis.
        coldpie 3y ago
        Keep licking that boot, maybe you'll get a scrap!
- twright 3y ago
  The taken down profile for anyone who wants to see just how wild they were about SBF: https://web.archive.org/web/20221027181005/https://www.sequoiacap.com/article/sam-bankman-fried-spotlight/ https://web.archive.org/web/20221027181005/https://www.sequo...
  - hef19898 3y ago
    That's what happens when you raise a red flag on top of large building, and paint the building red afterwards just to be sure everyone notices it. I loved that piece, and the fact that it was removed soon after.
- bitsandbooks 3y ago
  > If someone running a crypto futures exchange said they wanted people to buy bananas and groceries on their platform that’s be a signal to pass, right? Not if you're so silly as to think you can replace the currency people use, plus control completely its medium of exchange, plus be able to trade against those same exchange's participants. It boils down to people trying to rebrand casinos as markets.
- dpflan 3y ago
  What else should investors do in the time of ZIRP? This looked like a potentially crazy return, right? That's point of investing like this, right? Pour money into a "winner" and ride the crypto-future-promise-delusion-wave... It's pretty wild how unhinged they became about pretty much rambling...
- AlexandrB 3y ago
  I think it's a good reminder that large investors are human and don't possess any special knowledge or magical foresight. Consequently, everything they say about the future of technology and society should be taken with a large grain of salt - not treated like god's honest truth.
- creer 3y ago
  Wow wow wow. He's talking about inserting a business in the normal person's payment path. It's certainly ambitious and could be profitable if you could get on that trajectory. The question would be whether there is a credible path from crypto futures exchange to that, technical, financial or marketing-wise - but that's a different question.
- mwhitfield 3y ago
  You gotta remember, what's being sold in this kind of pitch is not a business model. They're looking for unicorns. What's being sold is the maximum possible size of the market you can extract value from. I'm no VC, but I feel like if I am and you're telling me that _all_ consumer transactions of any kind are going to flow through a portal _you_ own, it doesn't get much bigger than that. The odds of success don't have to be that high, and in principle you just factor the possibility that the founder's full of crap into those odds; you don't have the time to understand every possible market and every person pitching you in the depth necessary to make that determination, right?
  - kbf 3y ago
    >[if] you're telling me that _all_ consumer transactions of any kind are going to flow through a portal _you_ own >The odds of success don’t have to be that high The odds of success are as good as nonexistent and I also don’t have to be a VC to understand that.
- rchaud 3y ago
  > How was this compelling to people who control serious money? Holders of serious money often put them into decidedly unserious things. Somebody once put together $44bn cash financing for Twitter dot com.
- P_I_Staker 3y ago
  This just goes to show all the critiques of this kind of investing were very true. FTX and Theranos are examples of how this can all go very wrong. I've gotten in a number arguments with people who don't understand white collar crime, think these guys are "smart", and are so surprised by how basic their scheme is, and how they thought they'd get away with it. These people aren't smart, any more than your local gang banger, or small time fraudster... the stories are remarkably similar. There's lots of white collar criminals that have cloaked their schemes as part of "altruism". This isn't even new.
- outside1234 3y ago
  VCs often have no idea what they are actually doing and you would be surprised to learn how much just goes on vibes.
- par 3y ago
  Sequoia had some stuff up on their website absolutely fellating this guy before it all went to hell. It was so cringe.
pookha 3y ago
Baffling. When I hear SBF speak and I analyze his system all I can see is a thoroughly medicore JAG hyping up a bad product that was a spit-and-a-prayer. And yet he was raking it in...I can still remember investors and the general public being appalled at facebook being valued at 11 billion in 2008, after they'd destroyed their competition and taken over "social networking". Something changed in the collective consciousness.
mrkramer 3y ago
Silicon valley investors always jump on hype, just remember the dot-com bubble and yea crypto was and still is very hypey although AI, LLMs and generative AI are now taking over the hype. To the next hype train we go.
itslennysfault 3y ago
...and they didn't even request a board seat. Meanwhile, I gave up a board seat for a $1m investment.
deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
IKantRead 3y ago
As I mentioned in another comment, I think it's not accidental that SBF was pumped full of delusions of being a boy genius. This worked great as a marketing gimmick for sure, as people love the mythos of a revolutionary company run by a tech prodigy. But it also works when everything falls apart because SBF's delusion driven ego sucked up every morsel of attention and responsibility. I also wouldn't be surprised if, through various means, many of his investors ultimately walked away with far more money than they started. And nobody bothers asking questions about that because SBF does such a great job of drawing all the attention.
- StressedDev 3y ago
  This does not sound plausible because the investors will almost certainly not get anything out of the bankruptcy. Also there is no evidence any investor secretly profited from FTX and it is hard to believe any VC put millions in and some how got them out. They put money in and FTX lost it.

zztop44 3y ago

The whole Sequoia thing is so interesting. Here is an excerpt from their (now taken down) profile of SBF, highlighting the moment he convinced them to invest: > That’s when SBF told Sequoia about the so-called super-app: “I want FTX to be a place where you can do anything you want with your next dollar. You can buy bitcoin. You can send money in whatever currency to any friend anywhere in the world. You can buy a banana. You can do anything you want with your money from inside FTX.” > Suddenly, the chat window on Sequoia’s side of the Zoom lights up with partners freaking out. > “I LOVE THIS FOUNDER,” typed one partner. > “I am a 10 out of 10,” pinged another. > “YES!!!” exclaimed a third Like, he’s rambling about how you should buy bananas with Bitcoin. How was this compelling to people who control serious money? It always struck me as the opposite. If someone running a crypto futures exchange said they wanted people to buy bananas and groceries on their platform that’s be a signal to pass, right?

Brushfire 3y ago
There is this weird thing in venture investing: the line between "crazy, brilliant founders who will build world changing companies" and "crazy, lunatic founders who will lie and cheat and be awful" is very hard to distinguish, especially at the series seed/series A level. It can lead to false positives and false negatives all the time.
- cj 3y ago
  FTX didn't have a CFO. They didn't have a legitimate board of directors. No VC in their right mind should ever pour billions into a finance company that doesn't have a CFO or risk management team, doesn't have properly audited financial statements, doesn't have board oversight, etc. Especially so in a risky industry like crypto where scams and fraud are well known to be rampant. This is the main criticism I have of the people who invested in FTX. Even if you thought SBF was a world-changing entrepreneur 2 years ago, the structure of his company should have disqualified it from investment.
- Capricorn2481 3y ago
  This, to me, is just a myth that is pushed by investors that don't know what they are doing, and media outlets who want to talk about spicy people. There's no strategic reason to put your eggs in the basket of crazy people. We only hear about the crazy people because they are newsworthy.
- mrguyorama 3y ago
  VCs don't care about the distinction, because VCs don't need a real, successful company, they need a story to sell at IPO
- rvba 3y ago
  Buy a bag from a hypeman. Sell the bag just in time before the house of cards falls
SamBam 3y ago
I don't know. To the extent that Musk had a plan at all with his $44B Twitter purchase, a big part of his idea seems to be that he wants X to be the next banking app/Venmo. Venmo is valuated at something like 40 billion dollars, and a huge amount of its use is people making $10 payments to each other. I'd hate to live in a world where I conducted all my business on FTX, but you can see why it might be appealing to investors.
- sumtechguy 3y ago
  Musk is copying wechat.
  - brazzy 3y ago
    * dreaming of
whalesalad 3y ago
Let's not forget the league of legends incident. https://www.businessinsider.com/ftx-sam-bankman-fried-league-of-legends-investor-pitch-meeting-2022-11 https://www.businessinsider.com/ftx-sam-bankman-fried-league...
- jackbravo 3y ago
  Oh wow! It was in that same meeting!
jackbravo 3y ago
I think that idea in particular is quite good actually ^_^ I mean, I'm not imagining that they have groceries listings on the app, but that the app allows you to transfer money directly to someone from your crypto wallet. Like a venmo payment but with crypto.
- _fat_santa 3y ago
  > but that the app allows you to transfer money directly to someone from your crypto wallet. Like a venmo payment but with crypto. The thing is that's not a novel concept, just about every crypto wallet app can already do this. And the achilles heel of all of these apps is the gas fees that are out of their control. The only way to conceptually get around gas fees is to keep everyones money centralized and sidestep the trading of crypto all together, but in the process you defeat the entire purpose of crypto.
the_snooze 3y ago
I think the practical business/technical goals are almost irrelevant. It's not that SBF had a brilliant business model in mind. It's that he fit the "look" of a founder that those VCs expected. He was one of them, with the right pedigree and right connections. It's affinity fraud [1]. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Affinity_fraud https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Affinity_fraud
- ActionHank 3y ago
  Crazy thing is that the people who bring about massive change or revolutionary new ideas don't often fit the mould.
  - BowBun 3y ago
    At this point, your 'quirky technologist' definitely IS the mold.
    - ActionHank 3y ago
      He was a quirky cryptobro league player. There are millions of them.
    - jjtheblunt 3y ago
      If you look at recent Nobel Prize winners in sciences, many are not weirdos, just smart and without relying on nonsensical gimmicks. Jennifer Doudna, Emmanuelle Charpentier, others, all examples of just smart and persistent and focused.
  - isk517 3y ago
    Feels very cargo culty. SBF superficially matched peoples idea of a revolutionary genius without any of the actual substance.
  - survirtual 3y ago
    Unfortunately the people in power do not care for revolutionary change. They want change that makes them money, not change that fundamentally restructures society. Change that fundamentally restructures society does not need permission from anyone. When the tech is here it will speak for itself, in spite of any of the major resource allocators being blind to those who bring it -- because a part of that change is those resource allocators being made irrelevant. They have held back the human race with their ego, blindness, and total lack of vision. They will spend $200m+ on a clown like this but ignore countless people with real innovations.
ActionHank 3y ago
This whole exchange made me think that there must have been a family or friend connection back to Sequoia. As a humble poor, if I were running the show over at Sequoia I would have these people out on their asses, but again, I also don't have buckets of money clouding my judgement.
- rchaud 3y ago
  Sequoia likely made plenty of money by underwriting their in-house e-coin FTT, hyping up SBF across the media, and then dumping FTT on retail investors afterwards.
  - StressedDev 3y ago
    Do you have any proof they did that? That is a very serious accusation to make.
    - rchaud 3y ago
      No proof, because absolutely nothing was audited. That's the whole point of crypto, avoiding securities regulations. Regardless, what I'm describing is exactly what an investment bank does for a legit public company. They purchase shares from the issuing company to guarantee a certain amount of capital for the company, and then sell it on the secondary market, which in most cases would be to other invstment groups or directly on the NYSE. The difference is that those companies issue S-1s disclosing their performance and numbers, allowing secondary market investors to make an informed buying decision. https://corporatefinanceinstitute.com/resources/career-map/sell-side/capital-markets/underwriting-overview/ https://corporatefinanceinstitute.com/resources/career-map/s...
mschuster91 3y ago
> Like, he’s rambling about how you should buy bananas with Bitcoin. How was this compelling to people who control serious money? Everyone and their dog was looking for an actually credible, mass-market compatible usage scenario for Bitcoin beyond buying drugs on Silk Road.
- sleepybrett 3y ago
  coinbro brain. 'everyone' couldn't give a shit about bitcoin, statistically speaking.
  - mschuster91 3y ago
    Yeah but back in the Bitcoin crazy time it wasn't that unrealistic for "serious money". Mastercard, Visa and AmEx move trillions of dollars a year, capturing even a slice of that marketshare means being in possession of a money printer, which explains the (often absurd) investments into anything crypto.
coldpie 3y ago
> How was this compelling to people who control serious money? Access to money, and intelligence, are not positively correlated. Jury is out on whether there is no correlation, or if there is negative correlation. Given the braindead antics of the wealthy over the past 10 years, I'm leaning towards the latter.
- ToucanLoucan 3y ago
  Anybody remember that rich dude who built a submarine against every single convention and over the screaming shouting objections of literally every other person alive who's built submarines, who then tried to go to the Titanic and killed himself and four other people? How about Musk who bought a successful if mid-tier social media site for 44 billion dollars and has cratered it to being worth barely 4? How about Zuck who renamed his entire damn company in a bid to pivot to the metaverse just in time for that entire house of cards to come crashing down?
  - coldpie 3y ago
    [flagged]
    - pxmpxm 3y ago
      I suspect the sole purpose of ideas like wealth tax is to point out undiscerning left leaning voters. You know, the people whose mental model of "the rich" comes from scrooge mcduck - wealth being mostly stored in gold coins that are easy to dive into and/or tax on annual basis.
      - coldpie 3y ago
        Keep licking that boot, maybe you'll get a scrap!
twright 3y ago
The taken down profile for anyone who wants to see just how wild they were about SBF: https://web.archive.org/web/20221027181005/https://www.sequoiacap.com/article/sam-bankman-fried-spotlight/ https://web.archive.org/web/20221027181005/https://www.sequo...
- hef19898 3y ago
  That's what happens when you raise a red flag on top of large building, and paint the building red afterwards just to be sure everyone notices it. I loved that piece, and the fact that it was removed soon after.
bitsandbooks 3y ago
> If someone running a crypto futures exchange said they wanted people to buy bananas and groceries on their platform that’s be a signal to pass, right? Not if you're so silly as to think you can replace the currency people use, plus control completely its medium of exchange, plus be able to trade against those same exchange's participants. It boils down to people trying to rebrand casinos as markets.
dpflan 3y ago
What else should investors do in the time of ZIRP? This looked like a potentially crazy return, right? That's point of investing like this, right? Pour money into a "winner" and ride the crypto-future-promise-delusion-wave... It's pretty wild how unhinged they became about pretty much rambling...
AlexandrB 3y ago
I think it's a good reminder that large investors are human and don't possess any special knowledge or magical foresight. Consequently, everything they say about the future of technology and society should be taken with a large grain of salt - not treated like god's honest truth.
creer 3y ago
Wow wow wow. He's talking about inserting a business in the normal person's payment path. It's certainly ambitious and could be profitable if you could get on that trajectory. The question would be whether there is a credible path from crypto futures exchange to that, technical, financial or marketing-wise - but that's a different question.
mwhitfield 3y ago
You gotta remember, what's being sold in this kind of pitch is not a business model. They're looking for unicorns. What's being sold is the maximum possible size of the market you can extract value from. I'm no VC, but I feel like if I am and you're telling me that _all_ consumer transactions of any kind are going to flow through a portal _you_ own, it doesn't get much bigger than that. The odds of success don't have to be that high, and in principle you just factor the possibility that the founder's full of crap into those odds; you don't have the time to understand every possible market and every person pitching you in the depth necessary to make that determination, right?
- kbf 3y ago
  >[if] you're telling me that _all_ consumer transactions of any kind are going to flow through a portal _you_ own >The odds of success don’t have to be that high The odds of success are as good as nonexistent and I also don’t have to be a VC to understand that.
rchaud 3y ago
> How was this compelling to people who control serious money? Holders of serious money often put them into decidedly unserious things. Somebody once put together $44bn cash financing for Twitter dot com.
P_I_Staker 3y ago
This just goes to show all the critiques of this kind of investing were very true. FTX and Theranos are examples of how this can all go very wrong. I've gotten in a number arguments with people who don't understand white collar crime, think these guys are "smart", and are so surprised by how basic their scheme is, and how they thought they'd get away with it. These people aren't smart, any more than your local gang banger, or small time fraudster... the stories are remarkably similar. There's lots of white collar criminals that have cloaked their schemes as part of "altruism". This isn't even new.
outside1234 3y ago
VCs often have no idea what they are actually doing and you would be surprised to learn how much just goes on vibes.
par 3y ago
Sequoia had some stuff up on their website absolutely fellating this guy before it all went to hell. It was so cringe.

pookha 3y ago

Baffling. When I hear SBF speak and I analyze his system all I can see is a thoroughly medicore JAG hyping up a bad product that was a spit-and-a-prayer. And yet he was raking it in...I can still remember investors and the general public being appalled at facebook being valued at 11 billion in 2008, after they'd destroyed their competition and taken over "social networking". Something changed in the collective consciousness.

mrkramer 3y ago

Silicon valley investors always jump on hype, just remember the dot-com bubble and yea crypto was and still is very hypey although AI, LLMs and generative AI are now taking over the hype. To the next hype train we go.

itslennysfault 3y ago

...and they didn't even request a board seat. Meanwhile, I gave up a board seat for a $1m investment.

deleted 3y ago

[deleted]

IKantRead 3y ago

As I mentioned in another comment, I think it's not accidental that SBF was pumped full of delusions of being a boy genius. This worked great as a marketing gimmick for sure, as people love the mythos of a revolutionary company run by a tech prodigy. But it also works when everything falls apart because SBF's delusion driven ego sucked up every morsel of attention and responsibility. I also wouldn't be surprised if, through various means, many of his investors ultimately walked away with far more money than they started. And nobody bothers asking questions about that because SBF does such a great job of drawing all the attention.

StressedDev 3y ago
This does not sound plausible because the investors will almost certainly not get anything out of the bankruptcy. Also there is no evidence any investor secretly profited from FTX and it is hard to believe any VC put millions in and some how got them out. They put money in and FTX lost it.