Why did I just get linked to a tweet of a news article?

https://www.nytimes.com/live/2022/11/30/business/sam-bankman...

Ridiculous, I have no idea why people do this.

Because in the tweet is the summary

Because I don't have a NYT subscription.

Thanks for breaking that out. If it's only on Twitter, it's invisible to me.

I'm glad that in the summary, NYT seems to not be buying any of it

Wait, did you mean Bankrupt Fraud? Yet another interview isn't going to change reality. You can stick a fork in it, FTX is done.

We'll see. From my perspective, this could still go either way: he could be put in prison for a long time partly as a consequence of how much is on the record, or he may still be protected regardless of what is on the record.

this? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0ik497cvvcE

Direct interview link, no commentary:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IyoGdwVIwWw

> very much against the advice of his lawyers

According to Sam Bankman-Fried. Not the most reliable source.

Any lawyer worth their salt would tell their client to not talk to the press. There's literally no upside and unlimited downside.

The upside is establishing a counter-narrative in the media. The hope is to inoculate the general public with the story of your defense, so that people who have been exposed to your defense theory are more likely to be on your jury. I'm not vouching for the strategy, but it's far from (legal) suicide.

If a potential jury member knows about him they'll be excused from the jury. It's part of the selection process, and one reason jury selection is hard when you have high profile cases like this.

It can happen that way. It can also happen another way where knowing about him isn't enough to be excused. It depends.

It's not just about the jury. Public opinion motivates and incentives all actors, from prosecutors, regulators and judges.

He's already fuxx0red so getting in front of the media and trying to humanize himself while controlling the public interpretation of what happened is perhaps the only way to avoid getting continually pilloried. I think this is a thought-out move...his parents are law professors. It's not a Shia LaBeouf type of self-flagellation, I don't think.

One thing I learned from the Martin Shkreli saga is that, if the people hate you enough for something atrocious that is technically lawful, the government will poke holes in you until they find something not-atrocious that is clearly unlawful. There's probably value in winning the public over, even if they don't technically have a say in the legal proceedings.

For years I’ve wondered how much SBF’s parents knew about FTX’s operations but I think it’s fair to say they’re either (a) completely uninvolved/ignorant of the details of his situation or (b) giving him some really shit legal advice. I suppose it’s possible they’re so high up in their ivory tower they’ve forgotten there are actual consequences behind the hypotheticals they dream up for their students. Judging by his excel workbook “balance sheet” situation though I’m more inclined to believe everyone even tangentially involved has been misled. I doubt anyone knew the full extent of the fuckery aside from SBF.

They were involved enough to get their names on a $14M condo in the Bahamas. Will be interesting to learn whose funds paid for it.

What self respecting lawyer would ever advise their client, whom is probably being investigated for criminal charges, to tell their story to the media?

Prediction: in the next few weeks we will see a story about his lawyers firing their client.

We already went through one cycle of that:

https://cointelegraph.com/news/sbf-s-lawyers-terminate-ftx-r...

Can't PR play a big part in high profile and political trials? I feel it can definitely be a strategy to try to put your story out before someone else does.

Obviously you're not going to come out and say you're doing this as a PR strategy developed with your legal team, you're going to act like it's a personal risk to yourself to tell your story, which I suppose lends it some credibility in the eyes of some people. Like some of the people in this thread.

The man's a con artist. I'm astounded that people still believe anything he says. I suppose I shouldn't be, he must be a very good con man because he managed to steal billions of dollars.

He doesn't sound like the genius kid that the media had made him out to be. He sounds more like a pawn in some scheme where he was chosen to take the fall.

None of what he says makes sense, but it's not because he's dumb. He's clearly trying to go for an ignorance and negligence defense to avoid being accountable for fraud and theft. There's no way he's as dumb as he's pretending though. I don't have half the credentials he does, but it's easy for me to understand (1) how not to take client funds (2) how not to overleverage funds such that a tweet can make $8 billion disappear.

There's also the fact that you don't develop a corporate hierarchy as complicated as the FTX and Alameda clusters of companies (something like 130 companies), due to ignorance and naivety.

I saw one story where Chamath Palihapitiya said his due diligence team made very simple governance recommendations like “have a board” and “formalize your related-party transactions” and the response from FTX was literally “go fuck yourself”. Given the recent reporting around just how absolutely fucked their records were I can’t help but wonder what on earth they were handing over in response to DDQs? Was it garbage and people invested anyway? Or were they just making shit up whole cloth? Social Capital must have seen something to get their spidey senses tingling about the related-party situation.

Incorporating in the Bahamas is also a flag for "knows enough to be dangerous".

"Made him out to be"? SBF is actually pretty smart. He's repeatedly demonstrated a high level of mental quickness and numeracy that is common to traders, e.g. doing Fermi approximations during live interviews. And plenty of professors' kids don't get into MIT and then Jane Street. He was privileged, sure, but he's got the raw goods, too. Which is one of many why reasons I don't buy his claims that the root problem was just "risk management". No, he just committed fraud.

Smart or not, he clearly made some unethical choices.

Compared to the alternatives, Jane Street doesn't exactly select for street smarts. (Nor does MIT, to be frank.)

Sam Bankman-Fried's statement to Tyler Cowen that he will take any positive-EV bet regardless of the standard deviation of returns, sounds more like a learned-by-rote answer to an on-campus trading interview question rather than a core tenet of a trading philosophy. Professional traders at major institutions (including Jane Street) care about things like Sharpe ratio, value at risk, and position sizing. Not to mention that Jane Street asks Fermi questions in their interviews. I wouldn't be surprised if the average MIT senior with three or more trading offers could proffer the same kind of demonstrations/responses as what you describe.

> I don't buy his claims that the root problem was just "risk management". No, he just committed fraud.

He must be on some weird drugs that just has him spewing his points left and right. What people are misinterpreting is his claim that he was careless and that the accounts where poorly labeled. Those aren’t him trying to say he wasn’t a fraud,m, that’s him saying that he could have kept the fraud going if only they hadn’t been too highly leveraged.