5 ms·

SBF asks for 5-year prison sentence, calls 100-year recommendation "grotesque"

25 points by Tomte 3y ago

thetopher 3y ago
I wonder if he realizes that his behavior (substantiated by compelling evidence) was “grotesque”.
- bell-cot 3y ago
  I didn't get the sense that he had any moral compass, to perceive such subtleties.
- satellite2 3y ago
  At the same time he violated laws meant to protect investor from losses. But if they didn't actually lose something, it would make sense to have a modest sentence. Not knowing what his reckless behavior actually caused would make the sentencing frivolous in my opinion.
  - popcorncowboy 3y ago
    That's not how it works. "No one got hurt" is a facile exoneration, and untrue at that. He didn't break the law "less" because by twist of fortune money showed up in the account sometime down the line.
    - samsin 3y ago
      Loss causation is described here [1] as the major factor influencing the sentencing range, so if all investors are made whole then a modest sentencing could be possible. It was also discussed in a recent Matt Levine newsletter. [1] https://digitalcommons.du.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1010&context=crimlawrev https://digitalcommons.du.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=10...
    - FireBeyond 3y ago
      Especially when a lot of the "lack of loss" is due to the speculatory appreciation of cryptos as a whole, not due to anything on SBF's behalf. If crypto had crashed, they could equally be looking at almost nothing.
    - satellite2 3y ago
      That is very much how all criminal laws work.
bruceb 3y ago
The filing said that Bankman-Fried's Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD) would make him "uniquely vulnerable" in prison, noting that he "has an exceptional IQ, but difficulty with conventional styles of communication, especially around emotion." Do lawyers get embarrassed when writing stuff like this? He made no shortage of public appearances. He is also going to most likely serve in a lower security facility.
- pie420 3y ago
  No, I think they actually are proud of this. It's like a creative exercise. It's the equivalent of getting DOOM to run on stuff that barely counts as a computer. It's an exercise of bending the law as much as logically possible without being outright illegal.
- bdcravens 3y ago
  Prisons across the US are filled with inmates with varying degrees of mental health concerns. (That's a larger discussion, but for this single case, we have to limit our conversation to the status quo) If he's vulnerable, there are a variety of protective custody options available in an incarcerated setting.
- __loam 3y ago
  Lawyers are obligated to do whatever they can for their clients. I really don't understand why people get mad about this stuff or about defense lawyers who defend people like murderers. Even if we know someone 100% did it, giving people fair representation and trial is part of the moral framework we use to put these monsters in prison.
  - bruceb 3y ago
    No problem with lawyer representing client. In this case make client look worse as we know its BS and might even bring him a worse sentence.
    - pvg 3y ago
      as we know What "we" think we know isn't really relevant here, it's the court that decides the sentence with a process a lot more convoluted than 'this sounds like bs to me'.
bdcravens 3y ago
Perhaps 100 is grotesque, but his sentence should be long enough to prevent from having any access to the markets he abused. 5 years is barely one boom and bust cycle. Should be more like 20.
- forinti 3y ago
  Putting someone in prison is expensive. I feel that financial criminals should have to live off minimum wage for many years.
  - bigboy12 3y ago
    20 seems fair. He certainly would do it again if released.
  - bdcravens 3y ago
    Oh sure - that's the point of a long sentence. Unfortunately, federal prisons don't tend to grant parole, but a 10-year prison sentence coupled with a 10-year no-computer-access parole might be fair.
- skissane 3y ago
  > his sentence should be long enough to prevent from having any access to the markets he abused You don’t need to put someone behind bars to deny them access to markets - you just need to give sentencing judges the power to ban them from engaging in certain activities (e.g. owning stock, being a corporate director or officer, trading on financial markets, etc) Maybe sentencing judges don’t have that power - in which case, why doesn’t the legislative branch give it to them?
  - c22 3y ago
    Usually sentencing judges can offer a choice to agree to some novel restriction or face the codified penalty, as far as I know. Not sure granting the judiciary carte blanche to make up their own punishments is the best idea.
ein0p 3y ago
As much as I despise the guy I agree that 100 years for stealing some money, even a lot of it, is grotesque. Particularly considering that people who routinely pilfer orders of magnitude more never see the inside of a jail cell in this country. Give him a tenner and ban him from trading for life.
- WXLCKNO 3y ago
  Stealing that amount of money must have affected a ton of people, I imagine it's possible some committed suicided, ruined their relationships, lost other important things in their life etc. It's not just stealing some money and the other people who steal even more should also get similar sentences.
  - ein0p 3y ago
    “Imagine/possible” is insufficient reason for an effective life sentence even for a person as repugnant as SBF. I’d hope that if I end up in court, “imagining” things about me won’t be enough and hard evidence would be required. Don’t get me wrong, I’m pretty much the opposite of an SBF sympathizer, but still, it is my opinion that stealing money should not get one a life sentence.
- gizmo 3y ago
  SBF defrauded his investors/gamblers to the tune of billions. Bigger than Madoff. He intentionally tried to evade regulators by splitting his business into a dozen shell corporations and by operating from Hong Kong and the Bahamas. He intended to break the law from day 1. Up to 7 years is what people get for grand larceny, for instance stealing a $1200 TV. 5 to 15 years you get for grand larceny in the second degree, for instance stealing a $50,000 car. I don't know what the right punishment for SBF is, but I'm pretty sure what he did is worse than stealing a car, by several orders of magnitude.
  - ein0p 3y ago
    You’re defeating the very point you’re trying to make: 7 years for a TV is most definitely “grotesque” as well.
rKarpinski 3y ago
> The $10 billion loss asserted in the PSR is "illusory" because the "victims are poised to recover—were always poised to recover—a hundred cents on the dollar" in bankruptcy proceedings, SBF's filing said Can someone explain how this would be? Didn't they loose billions of dollars through Alameda?
- more_corn 3y ago
  Sure. This assertion is due to “lies” SBF is a liar and a conman.
- 4d66ba06 3y ago
  Anthrophic share sale sounds like it can cover it at those original prices https://www.reuters.com/technology/crypto-exchange-ftx-sell-shares-ai-startup-anthropic-2024-02-22/ https://www.reuters.com/technology/crypto-exchange-ftx-sell-...
  - rKarpinski 3y ago
    From the article it looks like the 500mm investment is now around 1.5B (if they could sell their block at the 18B valuation). Thats a lot less than they lost.
- charleslmunger 3y ago
  They are paying out dollarized claims, and the crypto prices they used to calculate the dollar value of claims were way lower than the crypto prices when they actually sold FTX's crypto holdings. So if you had 1 BTC on ftx, your claim is for $16,871.63. The team responsible to managing the FTX bankruptcy sold at some higher price, and today BTC is trading at $61,766.40. Understandably people are not thrilled about "being made whole" under these circumstances.
  - FireBeyond 3y ago
    And not to mention, a large part of SBF's claims of being able to make people whole is in large part because of this appreciation, not because of any "non-predatory" behavior on his part.
credit_guy 3y ago
For comparison, Martin Shrkeli [1] got 7 years. While SBF claims that there's a chance his victims will recover their money, Shrekeli's victims did actually recover everything. The scale of Shrkeli's affairs was in the millions (maybe tens of millions), certainly not in the billions. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Martin_Shkreli https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Martin_Shkreli
- effingwewt 3y ago
  That's not even close to comparable. Also, Shkreli should have gotten far longer. E- context->comparable
  - credit_guy 3y ago
    Why is it not comparable? They both committed financial crimes. Shkreli got 7 years. SBF's crime vastly surpasses Shkreli's one (for example he was also convicted for money laudering). Why does SBF think 5 years is appropriate? Because his victims might one day recover their money? Well, Shkreli's victims did recover 100% of their money, but he still did his time.
  - boppo1 3y ago
    >Shkreli should have gotten far longer. For defrauding investors who got their money back?
judith48 3y ago
[flagged]
1vuio0pswjnm7 3y ago
Excerpts from From Michael Lewis' Going Infinite: Constance nevertheless sensed that he didn't really register the damage hed caused to other people in the way that, say, she might have. He has absolutely zero empathy, she said. That's what I learned that I didn't know. He can't feel anything. Sam didn't care about real animals. It had been an expected value calculation, rather than emotion, that had led him to go vegan. Other people felt emotions; he did not. Maybe most alarmingly, more than a few Jane Streeters were disturbed by Sam's indifference to other peoples feelings. As an example, the Jane Street executives cited what Sam had done to a fellow intern, here called Asher Mellman. He'd long since realized that his inability to convey emotion created a distance between himself and others. Just because he didn't feel the emotion didn't mean he couldn't convey it. He'd started with his facial expressions. He practiced forcing his mouth and eyes to move in ways they didn't naturally. It's not totally trivial to fake things, he said. It was physically painful. It felt unnatural. And I wasn't good at it. It didnt look right. I don't feel pleasure, he wrote one day, late in his Jane Street career. I don't feel happiness. Somehow my reward system never clicked. My highest highs, my proudest moments, come and pass and I feel nothing but the aching hole in my brain where happiness should be. To truly be thankful, you have to have felt it in your heart, in your stomach, in your head the rush of pleasure, of kinship, of gratitude, he wrote. And I don't feel those things. But I don't feel anything, or at least anything good. I don't feel pleasure, or love, or pride, or devotion. I feel the awkwardness of the moment enclosing on me. The pressure to react appropriately, to show that I love them back. And I don't, because I can't. He thought of himself as a thinking machine rather than a feeling one. He thought of himself as a person who thought his way to action. And yet somehow Sam had committed his life to maximizing happiness on earth without feeling any of his own. [Somehow indeed. Why would there be any reason to believe these unhappy "EA" proponents would know anything about how to manage the happiness of others.] Even if the VCs didn't all realize that Sam was playing a video game at the same time that he was talking to them, most sensed that he didn't care what they had to say. Ramnik came to think that Sam's indifference to their feelings actually heightened their interest in him. In a lot of ways I don't really have a soul. This is a lot more obvious in some contexts than others. But in the end there's a pretty decent argument that my empathy is fake, my feelings are fake, my facial reactions are fake. I don't feel happiness. As a group, they eased a worry George [FTX's psychiatrist] had about himself: the limits to his powers of empathy. When ordinary people came to him with their ordinary feelings, he often found himself faking an understanding. [Sam and other EA followers at FTX used a shrink who himself could not feel emotions.] What he liked about George was that George simply took him as he was and actually didn't seem all that interested in engaging in pointless conversations about his feelings. One day some historian of effective altruism will marvel at how easily it transformed itself. It turned its back on living people without bloodshed or even, really, much shouting. You might think that people who had sacrificed fame and fortune to save poor children in Africa would rebel at the idea of moving on from poor children in Africa to future children in another galaxy. They didn't, not really, which tells you something about the role of ordinary human feeling in the movement. It didn't matter. What mattered was the math. Effective altruism never got its emotional charge from the places that charged ordinary philanthropy. It was always fueled by a cool lust for the most logical way to lead a good life. [How many people would want to live in an EA "utopia" where emotional states are incomprehensible to the self-appointed experts responsible for managing the world's "happiness". To these people emotions have zero utility. How many people want to live in that world. There is no sense of humour. Nothing. Will anyone be given an opportunity to "opt-out". SBF will provide for our happiness. What an interesting idea. Not.]

25 points by Tomte 3y ago

thetopher 3y ago

I wonder if he realizes that his behavior (substantiated by compelling evidence) was “grotesque”.

bell-cot 3y ago
I didn't get the sense that he had any moral compass, to perceive such subtleties.
satellite2 3y ago
At the same time he violated laws meant to protect investor from losses. But if they didn't actually lose something, it would make sense to have a modest sentence. Not knowing what his reckless behavior actually caused would make the sentencing frivolous in my opinion.
- popcorncowboy 3y ago
  That's not how it works. "No one got hurt" is a facile exoneration, and untrue at that. He didn't break the law "less" because by twist of fortune money showed up in the account sometime down the line.
  - samsin 3y ago
    Loss causation is described here [1] as the major factor influencing the sentencing range, so if all investors are made whole then a modest sentencing could be possible. It was also discussed in a recent Matt Levine newsletter. [1] https://digitalcommons.du.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1010&context=crimlawrev https://digitalcommons.du.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=10...
  - FireBeyond 3y ago
    Especially when a lot of the "lack of loss" is due to the speculatory appreciation of cryptos as a whole, not due to anything on SBF's behalf. If crypto had crashed, they could equally be looking at almost nothing.
  - satellite2 3y ago
    That is very much how all criminal laws work.

bruceb 3y ago

The filing said that Bankman-Fried's Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD) would make him "uniquely vulnerable" in prison, noting that he "has an exceptional IQ, but difficulty with conventional styles of communication, especially around emotion." Do lawyers get embarrassed when writing stuff like this? He made no shortage of public appearances. He is also going to most likely serve in a lower security facility.

pie420 3y ago
No, I think they actually are proud of this. It's like a creative exercise. It's the equivalent of getting DOOM to run on stuff that barely counts as a computer. It's an exercise of bending the law as much as logically possible without being outright illegal.
bdcravens 3y ago
Prisons across the US are filled with inmates with varying degrees of mental health concerns. (That's a larger discussion, but for this single case, we have to limit our conversation to the status quo) If he's vulnerable, there are a variety of protective custody options available in an incarcerated setting.
__loam 3y ago
Lawyers are obligated to do whatever they can for their clients. I really don't understand why people get mad about this stuff or about defense lawyers who defend people like murderers. Even if we know someone 100% did it, giving people fair representation and trial is part of the moral framework we use to put these monsters in prison.
- bruceb 3y ago
  No problem with lawyer representing client. In this case make client look worse as we know its BS and might even bring him a worse sentence.
  - pvg 3y ago
    as we know What "we" think we know isn't really relevant here, it's the court that decides the sentence with a process a lot more convoluted than 'this sounds like bs to me'.

bdcravens 3y ago

Perhaps 100 is grotesque, but his sentence should be long enough to prevent from having any access to the markets he abused. 5 years is barely one boom and bust cycle. Should be more like 20.

forinti 3y ago
Putting someone in prison is expensive. I feel that financial criminals should have to live off minimum wage for many years.
- bigboy12 3y ago
  20 seems fair. He certainly would do it again if released.
- bdcravens 3y ago
  Oh sure - that's the point of a long sentence. Unfortunately, federal prisons don't tend to grant parole, but a 10-year prison sentence coupled with a 10-year no-computer-access parole might be fair.
skissane 3y ago
> his sentence should be long enough to prevent from having any access to the markets he abused You don’t need to put someone behind bars to deny them access to markets - you just need to give sentencing judges the power to ban them from engaging in certain activities (e.g. owning stock, being a corporate director or officer, trading on financial markets, etc) Maybe sentencing judges don’t have that power - in which case, why doesn’t the legislative branch give it to them?
- c22 3y ago
  Usually sentencing judges can offer a choice to agree to some novel restriction or face the codified penalty, as far as I know. Not sure granting the judiciary carte blanche to make up their own punishments is the best idea.

ein0p 3y ago

As much as I despise the guy I agree that 100 years for stealing some money, even a lot of it, is grotesque. Particularly considering that people who routinely pilfer orders of magnitude more never see the inside of a jail cell in this country. Give him a tenner and ban him from trading for life.

WXLCKNO 3y ago
Stealing that amount of money must have affected a ton of people, I imagine it's possible some committed suicided, ruined their relationships, lost other important things in their life etc. It's not just stealing some money and the other people who steal even more should also get similar sentences.
- ein0p 3y ago
  “Imagine/possible” is insufficient reason for an effective life sentence even for a person as repugnant as SBF. I’d hope that if I end up in court, “imagining” things about me won’t be enough and hard evidence would be required. Don’t get me wrong, I’m pretty much the opposite of an SBF sympathizer, but still, it is my opinion that stealing money should not get one a life sentence.
gizmo 3y ago
SBF defrauded his investors/gamblers to the tune of billions. Bigger than Madoff. He intentionally tried to evade regulators by splitting his business into a dozen shell corporations and by operating from Hong Kong and the Bahamas. He intended to break the law from day 1. Up to 7 years is what people get for grand larceny, for instance stealing a $1200 TV. 5 to 15 years you get for grand larceny in the second degree, for instance stealing a $50,000 car. I don't know what the right punishment for SBF is, but I'm pretty sure what he did is worse than stealing a car, by several orders of magnitude.
- ein0p 3y ago
  You’re defeating the very point you’re trying to make: 7 years for a TV is most definitely “grotesque” as well.

rKarpinski 3y ago

> The $10 billion loss asserted in the PSR is "illusory" because the "victims are poised to recover—were always poised to recover—a hundred cents on the dollar" in bankruptcy proceedings, SBF's filing said Can someone explain how this would be? Didn't they loose billions of dollars through Alameda?

more_corn 3y ago
Sure. This assertion is due to “lies” SBF is a liar and a conman.
4d66ba06 3y ago
Anthrophic share sale sounds like it can cover it at those original prices https://www.reuters.com/technology/crypto-exchange-ftx-sell-shares-ai-startup-anthropic-2024-02-22/ https://www.reuters.com/technology/crypto-exchange-ftx-sell-...
- rKarpinski 3y ago
  From the article it looks like the 500mm investment is now around 1.5B (if they could sell their block at the 18B valuation). Thats a lot less than they lost.
charleslmunger 3y ago
They are paying out dollarized claims, and the crypto prices they used to calculate the dollar value of claims were way lower than the crypto prices when they actually sold FTX's crypto holdings. So if you had 1 BTC on ftx, your claim is for $16,871.63. The team responsible to managing the FTX bankruptcy sold at some higher price, and today BTC is trading at $61,766.40. Understandably people are not thrilled about "being made whole" under these circumstances.
- FireBeyond 3y ago
  And not to mention, a large part of SBF's claims of being able to make people whole is in large part because of this appreciation, not because of any "non-predatory" behavior on his part.

credit_guy 3y ago

For comparison, Martin Shrkeli [1] got 7 years. While SBF claims that there's a chance his victims will recover their money, Shrekeli's victims did actually recover everything. The scale of Shrkeli's affairs was in the millions (maybe tens of millions), certainly not in the billions. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Martin_Shkreli https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Martin_Shkreli

effingwewt 3y ago
That's not even close to comparable. Also, Shkreli should have gotten far longer. E- context->comparable
- credit_guy 3y ago
  Why is it not comparable? They both committed financial crimes. Shkreli got 7 years. SBF's crime vastly surpasses Shkreli's one (for example he was also convicted for money laudering). Why does SBF think 5 years is appropriate? Because his victims might one day recover their money? Well, Shkreli's victims did recover 100% of their money, but he still did his time.
- boppo1 3y ago
  >Shkreli should have gotten far longer. For defrauding investors who got their money back?

judith48 3y ago

[flagged]

1vuio0pswjnm7 3y ago

Excerpts from From Michael Lewis' Going Infinite: Constance nevertheless sensed that he didn't really register the damage hed caused to other people in the way that, say, she might have. He has absolutely zero empathy, she said. That's what I learned that I didn't know. He can't feel anything. Sam didn't care about real animals. It had been an expected value calculation, rather than emotion, that had led him to go vegan. Other people felt emotions; he did not. Maybe most alarmingly, more than a few Jane Streeters were disturbed by Sam's indifference to other peoples feelings. As an example, the Jane Street executives cited what Sam had done to a fellow intern, here called Asher Mellman. He'd long since realized that his inability to convey emotion created a distance between himself and others. Just because he didn't feel the emotion didn't mean he couldn't convey it. He'd started with his facial expressions. He practiced forcing his mouth and eyes to move in ways they didn't naturally. It's not totally trivial to fake things, he said. It was physically painful. It felt unnatural. And I wasn't good at it. It didnt look right. I don't feel pleasure, he wrote one day, late in his Jane Street career. I don't feel happiness. Somehow my reward system never clicked. My highest highs, my proudest moments, come and pass and I feel nothing but the aching hole in my brain where happiness should be. To truly be thankful, you have to have felt it in your heart, in your stomach, in your head the rush of pleasure, of kinship, of gratitude, he wrote. And I don't feel those things. But I don't feel anything, or at least anything good. I don't feel pleasure, or love, or pride, or devotion. I feel the awkwardness of the moment enclosing on me. The pressure to react appropriately, to show that I love them back. And I don't, because I can't. He thought of himself as a thinking machine rather than a feeling one. He thought of himself as a person who thought his way to action. And yet somehow Sam had committed his life to maximizing happiness on earth without feeling any of his own. [Somehow indeed. Why would there be any reason to believe these unhappy "EA" proponents would know anything about how to manage the happiness of others.] Even if the VCs didn't all realize that Sam was playing a video game at the same time that he was talking to them, most sensed that he didn't care what they had to say. Ramnik came to think that Sam's indifference to their feelings actually heightened their interest in him. In a lot of ways I don't really have a soul. This is a lot more obvious in some contexts than others. But in the end there's a pretty decent argument that my empathy is fake, my feelings are fake, my facial reactions are fake. I don't feel happiness. As a group, they eased a worry George [FTX's psychiatrist] had about himself: the limits to his powers of empathy. When ordinary people came to him with their ordinary feelings, he often found himself faking an understanding. [Sam and other EA followers at FTX used a shrink who himself could not feel emotions.] What he liked about George was that George simply took him as he was and actually didn't seem all that interested in engaging in pointless conversations about his feelings. One day some historian of effective altruism will marvel at how easily it transformed itself. It turned its back on living people without bloodshed or even, really, much shouting. You might think that people who had sacrificed fame and fortune to save poor children in Africa would rebel at the idea of moving on from poor children in Africa to future children in another galaxy. They didn't, not really, which tells you something about the role of ordinary human feeling in the movement. It didn't matter. What mattered was the math. Effective altruism never got its emotional charge from the places that charged ordinary philanthropy. It was always fueled by a cool lust for the most logical way to lead a good life. [How many people would want to live in an EA "utopia" where emotional states are incomprehensible to the self-appointed experts responsible for managing the world's "happiness". To these people emotions have zero utility. How many people want to live in that world. There is no sense of humour. Nothing. Will anyone be given an opportunity to "opt-out". SBF will provide for our happiness. What an interesting idea. Not.]