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Jane Street Boss Says He Was Duped into Funding AK-47s for Coup
- ironyman 1y agopaywall: https://archive.is/lowX3 https://archive.is/lowX3
- dsq 1y agoAren't they supposed to be the smartest of all quant firms?
- QuadmasterXLII 1y agoThere’s a pretty narrow band of intelligences in quant: any dumber and you can’t make 400k a year playing games for children, any smarter and you start to be able to make 400k a year curing disease or building a reusable rocket or any number of other actually interesting jobs.
- graemep 1y ago> any smarter and you start to be able to make 400k a year curing disease or building a reusable rocket or any number of other actually interesting jobs. A co-founder of something like Jane Street must be making a great deal more than $400k/year. Its probably small change for him. You cannot make that much money doing those "interesting jobs". You might by financing and employing the people doing them. A smart person going into finance will definitely make a lot more money than that same person going into another field. Going into finance from an "interesting" field has made a lot people rich: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jim_Simons https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jim_Simons
- PaulHoule 1y agoYou might get paid $100M from Meta to not work on LLMs for OpenAI!
- raverbashing 1y agoYes, a co-founder. Not your average quant
- graemep 1y agoI am pretty sure the average quant also makes a multiple of what the average person in something like science or engineering research.
- jghn 1y agoI interpreted the comment as saying someone sufficiently smart would really that maximizing income isn't the optimal path in life, and instead would apply their brains towards higher pursuits. But perhaps I'm wrong.
- graemep 1y agoDid not read that way to me. I do agree that maximising income is not the optimal path. I sacrificed a lot of income for time with my kids and it was definitely the right decision.
- seec 1y agoIt's pretty sad that this is something that many people consider "wrong". There is always some sort of nonsense about being able to do more with money because it gives you power or something like that. And of course, we keep hearing "greed is good". We are very fortunate that some people could see beyond that in the past because we are resting on their financial "sacrifice". Thankfully there are still people who still think that way today, but it is always infuriating to hear people pretend some are stupid for not choosing the path that would maximize their earnings. I think it is a sort of projection from "small minded" people who cannot see anything beyond what they would do, precisely because they are intellectually limited and thus cannot properly reason about those "issues".
- lesuorac 1y agoI don't think anything hardware related is reliably 400k out of college unless you're self-employed. https://www.levels.fyi/companies/spacex/salaries https://www.levels.fyi/companies/spacex/salaries
- QuadmasterXLII 1y agobig unless!
- throwanem 1y agoIf we're going to talk about it in terms like these, what does it say about the evolution of this our own field since that was colonized by finance beginning around 2000?
- QuadmasterXLII 1y agoFacebook, palantir and bitcoin, pretty dire tbh
- dguest 1y agoWhich people curing diseases are making 400k a year? If you're talking about academic research I'd expect around 300k to be the high end.
- jghn 1y agoIt's not hard to get above 400k TC in big pharma
- laidoffamazon 1y agoI think it is? I have an uncle who made his career in it, he only started hitting 400k+ when he hit the director and C suite level. Meanwhile I started making 400 when I was 28 and that’s considered late for SWEs - it’s less than what Jane Street pays out of college.
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]
- FireBeyond 1y ago> Meanwhile I started making 400 when I was 28 and that’s considered late for SWEs Well, for FAANG and the second tier. Meanwhile, I don't know if you've looked around lately but I see security startups that are well funded offering <200K for Senior ICs.
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]
- cyanydeez 1y agoAny smarter and you have moral problems with social cannibalism. There is a band, but whats termed intelligence.
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]
- corimaith 1y agoMan can we do sway with the notion that competence in one area translates to another? Being able to identify market arbitrage has little to do with biology and rocket science, and smart people are already working on such problems with the limitations of current fields well known. Throwing "smart” people at solving cancer isn't going to magically solve cancer.
- fragmede 1y agoWhat's with the anti-intellectualism? Not having people work on cancer definitely isn't going to solve it, and given the choice, we probably want smart people working on cancer vs having dumb people do it. It might take a decade for someone to go back to school and retrain to a different field, but if that's what they want to do, who are we to stop them?
- Barrin92 1y agoit's not even about intelligence as much as it is about the background of these people. A lot of them are gifted kids coming out of academic households, prep schools and ivy league colleges and quite a few are on the spectrum. When people were confused why Sam Bankman Fried behaved as stupidly as he did and thought this was all an act, no they genuinely are like overgrown kids who don't know what guile is, they couldn't survive in a rough neighborhood of New York let alone deal with South Sudanese arms dealers.
- jackthetab 1y agoSo I hear. And we all know smart/rich people can never be duped or make a mistake outside their areas of expertise. /s
- BoxFour 1y agoSmart people can be deceived too. Without devolving the conversation into semantics, Garry Kasparov is also someone we would consider to be “smart” by many definitions.
- oersted 1y agoI'm missing something, what's wrong with Kasparov? I've done some searching but didn't find much I'd consider significant... EDIT: My bad, I didn't realize he was part of the article, didn't take the time to deal with the paywall.
- vulcan01 1y ago> The lawyers accused authorities of selectively prosecuting two Black men, even though support also came from Granieri and Garry Kasparov, the chess champion and prominent Russian dissident. The US hasn’t accused either of them of wrongdoing. From TFA (emphasis mine)
- dismalaf 1y agoRead the article, he's involved in this...
- feralsandwich 1y agoIf you feel you're missing something in a discussion centered around a news article, skimming the news article often helps.
- K0balt 1y agoNo, that’s what headlines are for!
- darepublic 1y agoIIRC He believes in this quack theory of history: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_chronology_(Fomenko) https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_chronology_(Fomenko)
- Der_Einzige 1y agoYou're thinking of RenTec. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Renaissance_Technologies https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Renaissance_Technologies
- IIAOPSW 1y agowell, normal stupid doesn't get duped into funding AK47s for a coup. It takes brilliance to be this stupid.
- JohnFen 1y agoBeing competent in one specialty does not mean you're competent outside of that specialty.
- windex 1y agoJane Street was caught manipulating the India derivates market recently.
- thehappyfellow 1y agosource?
- dbu21 1y agoJS is being investigated. https://www.reuters.com/sustainability/boards-policy-regulation/india-regulator-probes-jane-streets-derivative-trades-over-three-years-sources-2025-06-09/ https://www.reuters.com/sustainability/boards-policy-regulat...
- ing33k 1y agoSEBI’s investigation into Jane Street is ongoing. Sources: https://www.reuters.com/sustainability/boards-policy-regulation/india-regulator-probes-jane-streets-derivative-trades-over-three-years-sources-2025-06-09/ https://www.reuters.com/sustainability/boards-policy-regulat... https://www.business-standard.com/finance/news/explained-jane-street-trading-revenue-global-india-sebi-probe-125061000933_1.html https://www.business-standard.com/finance/news/explained-jan... https://www.outlookbusiness.com/markets/jane-street-under-sebi-lens-for-algo-trade-strategies-in-nifty-bank-nifty https://www.outlookbusiness.com/markets/jane-street-under-se... https://www.rediff.com/business/report/why-is-sebi-probing-a-trading-giant/20250621.htm https://www.rediff.com/business/report/why-is-sebi-probing-a...
- chollida1 1y agoAllegedly. And if you read anything about the case its clearly in a very gray area. Their actions are what you'd expect any firm to do to hedge their exposure. Its just that they were so large and the Indian stock market is relatively so small that they're hedging moved the market. So the question is, was their market moving hedging actual market manipulation or was it just the same thing every other quant firm would do in the same situation to hedge out their option exposure? https://libgen.li/edition.php?id=151275376 https://libgen.li/edition.php?id=151275376 Here's a decent description of the issue.
- sgt 1y agoA Jane Street article on HN not mentioning OCaml. A true miracle!
- throwaway89201 1y agoRegrettably, the same cannot be said about the comment section [1]. [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44376256 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44376256
- dismalaf 1y agoPretty wild story. And not going to lie, as someone who did an economics degree myself (never worked as an "economist" though) I have a bit of sympathy. No one listens to economists, then blames them for not being able to fix things (since no one listens to them), it's a cycle that makes you cynical enough to want to simply overthrow everyone else and become a dictator lol...
- meepmorp 1y agoso, the rich guy version of a nigerian prince scam?
- hoseja 1y agoAh yes the journo definition of "AK-47": It has wood furniture.
- pc86 1y agoIn the bottom right image, the top right do appear to be AKs with the stock removed. The top center could be as well but it's hard to tell with that angle and they might be RPKs as well. At least correctly differentiating between western and combloc weaponry is pretty impressive for two finance reporters.
- alephnerd 1y agoI wouldn't be too surprised. Peter Ajak [0] (the Belfer Center fellow indicted by the DoJ for attempting the coup) is a fairly slick and well spoken guy. Westerners seem to underestimate how mercenary and brass knuckled politics in the developing world is (no, politics in insert_OECD_country_here is not to the same degree), and assume every bleeding heart activist will become the next Gandhi. Ironically this is how Orban's political career got started as well as an pro-Democracy campaigner in the 1980s and 1990s. This isn't to undermine activists and NGOs working in these countries, but the default assumption in due dilligence should be that everyone is a crook and then validate. That said, I definetly saw plenty of glazing of questionable developing country politicians during my time when I was much more HKS adjacent, but this is common for just about every pmajor policy program - it's the only way you can attract big names, and non-Westerners know how to take advantage of that Western naivete (I've definitely used it on occasion despite being raised in North America). [0] - https://www.belfercenter.org/person/peter-ajak https://www.belfercenter.org/person/peter-ajak
- patcon 1y agoHe's been trying to participate in opposition politics in South Sudan and imprisoned for it, likely because he's a real threat to power. I think it's too much to label him a crook, he's just fighting corruption by actual crooks with tactics others will obviously disagree with. He's definitely a radical activist. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peter_Biar_Ajak https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peter_Biar_Ajak
- alephnerd 1y agoI'm not denying that South Sudan's leadership aren't crooks, but the only way you can climb up in these kinds of environments is to be a crook yourself - reformists do not survive in political environments where violence and criminalization is normalized. And this is part of that naïveté I mentioned earlier. And if a coup were to happen, would stuff even get any better? Countries run on institutions, and a coup by default undermine institutions by normalizing violence as a short circuit to consensus building. This weak institution building due to the power of the gun is what lead both Argentina and Pakistan to stagnate despite being economic darlings in the early and mid 20th century respectively. And more critically - we in the US do not want to normalize private citizens fundraising armed movements en masse in the 21st century. This is a bad precedent. Finally, the Wikipedia article has clearly had some PR panache attached to it based on the edit history, and it's silence about Ajak's case despite having been going on for over a year now.
- mindvirus 1y agoHappens to the best of us.
- londons_explore 1y agoThis sort of behaviour is okay if it's the CIA, but if a private citizen tries the same, direct to prison!
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]
- subarctic 1y agoThere's probably a lot of things where that's the case and it kind of makes sense tbh
- harambae 1y agoThere are, at least in theory, methods by which the citizens of the United States control the CIA. (The president and senate nominate and confirm the Director of the Central Intelligence Agency, for instance) This isn’t perfect but it’s better than randos choosing what to manipulate abroad
- wewewedxfgdf 1y agoPretty sure they are the biggest Ocaml company.
- max_ 1y ago"I was lied to" — Jane Street Boss. This sounds very suspicious. So Jane Street, a large commodity derivatives trader has no interest in an oil rich South Sudan? They just wanted to finance the "human rights"
- tmaly 1y agoI don't think the Patriot Act has an exception for that.
- cryptodan 1y agoThese are cheap and arent really known for being accurate. Pretty much spray and pray.
- more_corn 1y agoI find it strange that one would come to the US to buy AK-47s. There’s only one party in the US that has those in quantity. I think these guys knew they were buying from the US government, they just thought they were buying with permission.
- readthenotes1 1y ago" Harvard Fellow and another activist allegedly wanted to buy AK-47s, Stinger missiles and grenades to topple South Sudan’s government." Reminds me of: "In every disaster throughout American history, there always seems to be a man from Harvard in the middle of it."
- mcat_god 1y agoBased