This is mainstream media being sensationalist per usual. This is what the original Coindesk article wrote.

"They appeared to oscillate between dejection and defiance, at times holding their heads in their hands and clasping their hands. Bankman-Fried’s mother audibly laughed several times when her son was referred to as a “fugitive” and his father occasionally put his fingers in his ears as if to drown out the sound of the proceedings."

It definitely sounds more like a stress response.

Lol. When Coindesk is bringing more nuanced news reporting than CNBC, you know things are whack.

I wasn't acquainted with them until roughly 6 months ago, but from what I've seen Coindesk has actually been an excellent publication.

Media arm of digital currency group. Fine people, but just as a disclaimer.

They both make money by selling ad space and attracting eyeballs to that space, but the audience of Coindesk is going to be much more interested in the financial details, whereas the more general audience of CNBC is going to be less interested in getting the details of the story right, and more likely to read a story that is lightly sensationalized.

"less interested in getting the details of the story right" is exactly what is "whack" about media today.

Some media seem more interested in getting the details of a story wrong.

Wrong vs right is unimportant when short term profit is at stake.

Or maybe it's better said that Coindesk readers are much more likely to have real skin in the game, and therefore highly penalize news outlets that give inaccurate information.

things be whack

What a laughable game of telephone. A writes “holding their heads in their hands”. And B, presumably to add their own twist to the story, perhaps to avoid quoting A verbatim, turns it into “put their fingers in their ears”.

Edit: Just realized that A actually did speak of the father putting his fingers in his ears.

So you’re saying that the facts in the sentence are true

They watched their own flesh and blood son transition with breakneck speed from a high rolling billionaire who hobnobbed with society's elites to facing spending the best years of his life in prison, a disgrace to his family and their legacy. How do you think you'd cope with that psychological ordeal?

> ... a disgrace to his family and their legacy

Count 8 of the indictment: "Conspiracy to defraud and violate the campaign finance law".

Who was running the fundraiser? SBF's mom.

Who was helping SBF trying to obtain regulatory capture of the crypto currency exchange market in DC? SBF's father.

I'm not sure SBF is the only one to bring disgrace to that name, that'll from now on always be associated with fraud indeed.

And quite probably are near the top of the clawback list if it turns out that any of the funds ended up with them. They have very good reasons to be distressed, their sons future behind bars is only one of the things they need to be worried about. Their whole world is crashing down around them, besides of course becoming persona non-grata to pretty much all of their friends and quite possibly family in case others got sucked in as well. I don't envy them.

Oh, it's worse than that. There will at least be civil suits. Possibly criminal prosecution.[1]

NYT: "Mr. Bankman was deeply involved in FTX. In its early days, he helped the company recruit its first lawyers. Last year, he joined FTX staff in meetings on Capitol Hill and advised his son as Mr. Bankman-Fried prepared to testify to the House Financial Services Committee, a person familiar with the matter said. FTX employees occasionally consulted him on tax-related matters, the person said. Mr. Bankman visited the FTX offices in the Bahamas as often as once a month, a person who saw him there said. ... He and Ms. Fried stayed in a $16.4 million house in Old Fort Bay, a gated community in Nassau, the capital of the Bahamas; the couple’s names appear on real estate documents, according to Reuters, though Mr. Bankman-Fried has said the house was “intended to be the company’s property.”"

His class at Stanford has been cancelled.

[1] https://www.nytimes.com/2022/12/12/technology/sbf-parents-ft...

It appears that his goose is fried, not cooked. As a lawyer he really should have known better.

That’s what gets me about this whole thing: two law professor parents. A gaggle of young, incredibly wealthy people who all had their tickets pre-punched with prestige schools, A-list jobs like Jane Street, etc. I have to admit, this story has pissed me off more than most of these corporate frauds.

It's never enough I guess. Holmes is another case like that.

From that quote it isn't clear precisely how Mr. Bankman was involved with his son's firm, how much he was an insider, particularly in the later days as the fraud presumably intensified. It's plausible that SBF, digging himself deeper in fraud while getting high on his own supply, insulated his law professor father from the seedier proceedings at his darling company. Probably will take the courts to determine the apple's proximity to the tree.

Sure as hell wouldn’t laugh and put my fingers in my ears during a hearing. They are professional lawyers. Time to man up and not put your son at even more risk. Who knows how involved they’ve been in his shenanigans up til now, but it’s time to stop the madness..

This reads like a stress response to me. I don’t think realizing your child is probably going to live behind bars for the rest of your life and your family will never recover is something you “man up” through.

I agree. People act weird under extreme stress. Once when I arrived at work my boss was grinning. I asked him what was going on and he told me my co-worker tried to kill my supervisor. I laughed. Other co-workers were laughing and grinning too.

What happened with the co-worker? (Prison?)

Academic lawyers (his parents) are nothing like trial lawyers. Don’t expect them to have a good poker face.

The act never ends. Surely, in a decade or two or three, SBF will be looking all innocent from behind bars and still unable to open his mouth without incriminating himself.

I wonder how many others will be charged. This will be more difficult than walking all over this guy, and I seriously doubt he is alone in all of this.

Best years? More like all the years.

He should not go to prison for life. Nobody should ever go to prison for life, for wasting money. Money is literally made up. Sure, opportunity cost is real, but seriously nobody should ever lose their life for money.

Think about it this way. Money is people's time. SBF stole billions of hours of people's personal time. Effort, savings, sweat, tears all bundled in what we call money. Why shouldn't he repay them with his own time in jail?

That doesn't really repay them anything.

What happens if they money was someone else's means to pay for their health care?

Money is made up - that doesn't mean it doesn't have consequences.

As warning, not as victim blaming, I'd like to point out that you should never ever risk money that you can't afford to lose on high-risk investments. Especially not extremely high risk stuff like cryptocurrencies, NFTs and similar scams.

I am of the mindset that non-violent offenders, should not suffer a life penalty regardless of their alleged crime. They played a game and lost, they should not lose their head as well.

A game with whose stakes?

Hear me out, what if we allowed people to access health care regardless of who has how much money?

While your direct point is valid (for the US), you're missing the general point.

Money can be tied to life changing/life threatening events or situations in many more scenarios.

The archetypal scenarios are people losing college money, retirement savings, downpayments for their kid's apartments/houses, etc.

There are many ways in which money is very, very real.

Anyone who still clings to this "fiat" thesis is just detached from human reality.

He stole billions of possible retirement money. Of course he should go to prison for life.

How will wasting his life behind bars help bring restitution?

Making him grind out restitution at $1/hr on hard labor would do it.

Contrary to popular belief, prison is not entirely about reforming people but part punishment as well as protecting society from repeat offenders.

Also, he chose to open himself to the dangers of wasting his life behind bars when he enganged in incredibly illegal activities. It's not hard to not do that.

True. The focus should be as much on rehabilitation and restitution.

DPR is rotting for life, for contracting a hit on an entirely fictional person and mostly conducting a very upstanding market. I never thought that was fair, but US laws are US laws.

I'm not familiar with what you are referring to, however I would argue that attempted assassination <> losing custodial funds.

DPR == Dread Pirate Roberts == Ross Ulbricht (Silk Road operator)

DPR =/= Ross Ulbricht, at least not in reality.

FBI agents who were proven to have access to that handle are also in prison for it. There's no 1:1 "Ross is DPR," and that's part of the problem.

I think being faced with this or having your kids faced with this probably elicits all kinds of stress responses and coping mechanisms.

I could totally see myself engaging in nervous laughter if one of my kids fucks up this badly. I could also see twisting my worldview to make my kids innocent in my own mind, as a form of denial, unconditional love for the kids, etc.

From press reports it seems possible those parents did a poor job raising him, that the apple didn't fall far from the tree, but I think also we shouldn't rush to judgement or draw conclusions where another explanation might suffice.

Maybe this is a case of the apple and the tree?

Maybe they already got their millions secured away in some untouchable country and don't really care what happens at this point.

They were already quite well off, now their son is in trouble.

"My son is going to prison but I have secured my millions so it's fine" is generally not a thing.

The number of self-absorbed parents who care about their children only as accessories to their own lives, to be embraced when useful and ignored when inconvenient, is staggering.

I think that it is a thing for a shockingly large percent of parents. Historically children were the retirement plan (in addition to labor for the family). That type of thinking is fairly common.

> Historically children were the retirement plan

They still are. It's just that the retirement plan has been socialized to the level of the nation state. The labor of the young takes care of the old. This is literally true in the case of social security which is funded by taxing current productive labor.

This isn't necessarily bad, because it's the way it's always been. But it is something like a multi-generational ponzi scheme. It can work for a very long time, but eventually, the last generation is left holding the bag with no one to pass it onto.

> This isn't necessarily bad, because it's the way it's always been.

I'm not sure this sentence make any sense. The same could be said about slavery. Is slavery not necessarily bad because it's the way it's always been?

You're right, that sentence is bad.

Maybe I should have said it isn't obviously bad or some new, modern evil that we just invented. It's how human social groups that take care of their non productive elderly have always operated.

The futurology trackers have "breakdown of intergenerational solidarity" as a possibility with no given time frame. It really didn't occur to me how implicated the nation state is in this until you pointed out the fact (in retrospect, glaringly obvious) that this function of family life has been subverted by government.

Do you mind dropping a link to what you're referencing? I haven't heard of it.

But yeah, I do see it as a potential systemic problem. Because the care for the old has become so massively socialized, we also find ourselves in a situation where it becomes individually advantageous to not do the personal sacrifice of having and raising children. Not only is having children a huge financial burden, but it's also a huge time commitment. And when you don't get to primarily benefit from you own children's productivity, that burden isn't as highly rewarded as it has been in the past.

I think we're starting to see this break down in many first world countries that don't have a replacement birth rate. I could see the reactions being one of...

1) start penalizing the childfree. There's a long history of this solution going back to as far as ancient Rome, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bachelor_tax.

2) increase the social reward for having and raising children. We already do this to some extent, e.g. the child tax credit.

3) develop non family oriented baby mills. Basically state run institutions that raise (and possibly even incubate with artificial wombs) children at an industrial scale. Brave New World is a classic example of this taken to the extreme. We already do this to some degree with public schools and face increasing calls to expand it with free preschool. If we can figure out how to produce healthy, well adjusted members of society with the greater efficiency of 1 adult "parent" to 30 children, like we do in school, rather than 2 parents to 1-5ish children, then we'll probably do it. Currently, it doesn't appear that we can do that, judging by the outcomes of orphanages.

It appears on here, for example, under the "Wildcards":

https://espas.secure.europarl.europa.eu/orbis/sites/default/...

The last generation will have a lot more to worry about than who will take care of them in retirement.

That's exactly the point. The last generations will have done their jobs supporting their elder predecessors, but won't have anyone to come after them who will take care of them.

Left holding the bag.

The last generation will be too busy trying to backpedal their way out of existential doom to take care of their elders. Assuming they make it out of the cradle at all.

But aren't his parents pretty successful lawyers who are pretty well of on their own? There are usual family pathologies and unusual family pathologies, and this looks like the latter.

I’ll rephrase. There are too many parents who don’t care about their kids or what happens to them. This tendency goes up a bit, I think, if the kids are not necessary for retirement or care when old age sets in.

Maybe he never was their favorite son anyway.

Oh I think it's the opposite.

I think they thought of him as the second coming of Jesus himself, and he felt he had to do extraordinary things to live up to that image (which of course is impossible).

I think he secretly hated it and that's why he trashed his own hypocrisy in some interviews, saying that the charity talks were all an act and not true.

And I also think that's a big part of his "I'm stupid / I fucked up" line of defense. Yes, he may think it helps his case (but is he actually that naïve?) But the main goal is to tell his parents "see, the genius you thought I was is actually a complete idiot, what do you make of that?!?"

I think he's happy to suffer if that makes his parents suffer more.

(Of course that's all speculation and pop' psychology and as such isn't worth the electrons it's typed in; but it's a possibility.)

I'm glad you have great parents, but I think you vastly underestimate how much many parents do not care about their children, and will sacrifice them for their own well being.

Most caring parents would aggressively caution their children from heading down the path SBF went, especially if they're smart, educated parents.

There are no "boy geniuses" out there like many lead SBF to believe he was, people from prestigious backgrounds know this better than anyone. There are some really smart people out there, but anyone being propped up the way SBF was is being setup.

I don't have any sympathy for SBF, but a lot people whose names we'll never know where more than happy to set him up to think he was himself an unstoppable genius because that helped them sell a product and they know that it will also help focus all the blame.

His parents are Stanford law professors, so they are smart and educated. But doesn't mean that their child has to listen to them or to behave in an ethical manner.

That's the thing. You can do everything you can to educate your children and teach them right from wrong, but at some point they are free-thinking adults. Of course you would be distressed if they end up taking the wrong path, but underlying that you would know that you did your best and it's not your fault.

You'd be surprised.

They must live in ivory towers and don’t understand exactly how bad this is..