Well it seemed to have worked. The scam kept going until the math stopped working, it wasn't regulators or investigative journalists that brought it down.

Advising congress and buying formula 1 ads and sponsoring stadium names gave his scheme a certain unearned legitimacy.

The media is also culpable, because his face was always on it. I never used FTX, but I assumed that it was legit and regulated based upon his appearances on Bloomberg etc.

This seems to have been a case of XKCD 978, i.e. lazy journalists. https://xkcd.com/978/

Citogenesis is actually a Germanism stemming from "Zitogenese". [1]

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33581269

Today's media "journalists" follow whatever gets cameras and eyes on them.

He ran the inverse Theranos playbook.

Instead of a supremely polished persona, he hard-committed to the sweaty geek.

Confidence, man.

I once played poker in a Reno poker room. It was structured betting, not all in madness like on TV. I was probably 21 and sitting down with a mixed group, but mostly old timers. I was not new to poker, but I occasionally got the allowed bets wrong. I did really well that night. It could have been luck but I like to think I gamed them with my behavior, by pretending to be stupid. Like in a Guy-Ritchie movie plot twist kind of way.

-- apparently he was jacked to the hilt on adderall 24/7 --

It sure seemed like it in all his interviews. He can’t keep his leg still and always looked like he just came from an all night LAN party.

Also, the phrase “jacked to the hilt” just makes me giggle. I’ve always thought it was funny.

it's still the theranos playbook, it's just a different image projected. and it still serves the same role - tapping into SV narratives and preconceptions to create an image that is super appealing to investors, the media and employees in order to spin up the hype flywheel, and excuse inconsistencies and misbehaviour. fundamentally both still took advantage of contrasting their traditionally inscrutable fields to contrast their highly visible images and paper over any skepticism.

either way the failing is the same - investors failed to preform adequate due diligence and lent their credibility to things they didn't fully understand because they were distracted by the charisma of the founder and were worried that they would miss potentially outsized gains. as long as large amounts of capital keep flowing to private markets (especially VCs) this will continue happening

Well as michael burry said, its ludicrous to think asset bubbles cant be predicted. One of leading indicators is an increase in the frequency and complexity of fraud within the sector.

> it's still the theranos playbook, it's just a different image projected

You unfairly group all types of fraud together.

Fraud is a creative endeavor, diverse and fascinating.

He just wants to impress his girlfriend, who seems to have turned herself into a monster by doing enough amphetamines to replace the contents of her brain with Slate Star Codex.

https://twitter.com/0xhonky/status/1591630071915483136

https://twitter.com/autismcapital/status/1591601671943393280

(From the first tweet, it doesn’t seem like anyone in the conversation has read https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Martingale_(probability_theory...)

Hopefully out of all this debacle that rationalist community will be brought down a peg or two (including kumbaya pie in the sky stuff like Effective Altruism).

It was all funny when these people were portrayed in TV shows, not so funny when that mindset is behind billions of dollars of people's money getting defrauded.