:-P
Back to the stone age it is!
I'm all for getting to the bottom of what SBF did, but he hasn't been convicted of any crime yet. It's important that we go through the process before applying punishments.
It's pretty easy for people with power and influence to not give a shit about what the rest of us have to deal with, when they never need to experience it.
I must admit: if TSA pre-check is an example of what people with power & influence get away with, then I can simply not be convinced of your case.
Cruel might be a bit of a stretch. He can read and do some sketching. Bit of home maintenance. Have a crafternoon or two.
Why not? He has stated that he intends to earn the money again to pay back the creditors.
Speaking more generically, people released on bond need to be able to have the resources necessary to form a proper defense, and also to try and avoid their entire life being destroyed by an arrest that may or may not lead to a conviction.
There are height and density limits, so among the few options is to go down.
Not a whole lot of coverage that I'm finding, though there's a brief mention in this Palo Alto Weekly article (2018):
<https://paloaltoonline.com/news/2018/01/12/groundwater-spurs...>
If you search "palo alto basement remodel" you'll find a heck of a lot of contractor / services pages (enough to frustrate me looking for actual news coverage or mentions).
Perhaps such a state does exist? Sibling comment seems to indicate California might not be one of them.
As for crawl spaces, they’re really common on older homes up here (central FL); I have one.
It's definitely possible to have basements, but it's something only the exceptionally wealthy would even bother with.
There's tons of basements in Oklahoma, you're starting to get out of the expansive soil areas I was talking about at that point. You're then also needing to worry about the frost line so your foundations would need to be deeper anyways.
I’ve heard people in Oklahoma say that basements can’t be built because the soil has too much clay, yet I’ve seen them in older homes there.
I’m starting to think that “basements can’t be built in X state” is some kind of pervasive urban myth.
Really wealthy people in Texas might have a basement; its not impossible! Some really old homes before slab-style construction might have basements as well. Or they might be living in the high deserts out in West Texas. But like easily 99.9% of homes built in the majority of Texas do not have basements. If I were to ask everyone I know if they knew anyone who had a basement at any time in any home they ever lived in, the answer would probably be "no" almost every time. Finding a home built since the 1940's in this area that's less than $10M with a basement is practically finding a unicorn. Except its an expensive unicorn needing constant maintenance.
or is it that two secret rich people put up much more and the parent’s house thing is basically a distraction?
No, its up to the court. There is no “bond company” involved here.
Not sure how it works for amounts this large, but the above applies to your everyday DUI/assault/etc (at least here in VA). And even if the house was worth $25 million, they would essentially be giving it to the bondsman, which I doubt it what happened.
The rich truly do play by different rules, even when they’re charged with crimes.
Usually, registered bail agents sign as sureties, they don't actually pay the bail up front and get it back.
Correct.
> Does that mean only a fraction of the bond value needs to be the security?
Correct.
> If so, is that not bullshit?
It seems to mean “lots of people’s mental model of what ‘$X bail’ means is wrong.” But that ignorance doesn’t make the actual system bullshit.
Personally fleeing doesn't really matter, because signing as a bail surety makes the court itself your agent for service of process, and default judgement is automatically available. (They do have to provide a copy of notices at the sureties last known address, but they don't have to actually serve notice on them.)
Now, if all the assets of SBF and his sureties are out of reach of the US government, that would be a problem.
I guess we pay, somehow.
This part is incorrect - his parents and 2 other individuals with ‘significant assets’ signed on his bond.
We probably haven't heard of most of the 99% of billionaires that aren't in the top ten. And if we haven't heard of them, it would not make a lot of sense to be certain that "it is known" of all of them where they got their wealth.
Last year, if you didn't Google them, did you know who Bernard Arnault, Mukesh Ambani, or Gautam Adani were? In the case of Adani, I had never heard even of his company, which apparently is one of the largest in the world.
(The point of this post was mainly to use the phrase "99% of billionaires")
As one example of some discovered - https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2014-05-08/three-mys...
1. Pledge the full amount of the bail yourself. You get this back if the accused shows up in court, you lose it of they flee.
2. Pay some percentage (usually X%) to a bail bondsman. You never get that money back, and if the accused flees, the bail bondsman will try to get the money from whomever signed the bond (as the bail bondsman is on the hook). The bail bondsman may also engage a bounty hunter to try to catch the accused.
Obviously, with a bail amount this large, my guess is there is no bail bondsman that has that much to put up. So there should be $250 million that someone pledged for this bail. I'm still confused as to where that amount came from.
My guess is he was not required to post full collateral, i.e. the only collateral here is the home, and then Sam, his parents, and two others posted essentially an unsecured guarantee for the full $250M, such that the government could recover up that amount from any assets held by any of those parties. While unsecured, note that the government probably has priority over any creditors and could and would seize any assets of those parties per the guarantee.
Without a trial and witnesses testifying, most shenanigans will remain unknown. This is why the odds favor he takes a plea or has an unexpected medical issue.
A surety bond is basically a loan, through a bail bondsman. The bail bondsman has insurance in case you don't show up.
A property bond is where the court gets a lien on your property. It sounds like this is what happened.
(Nothing against Stanford or professors, but academia pay peanuts and def. far away from a 9-10 figure net-worth)
Obviously not relevant in the context of $250 million.
I would guess that their net worth was north of $10M just based on those earnings, subsequent investment, and their house (which is apparently worth $3M+).
Of course, SBF has had some incredible arbitrage wins over the years, and he presumably offered his parents the opportunity to run a million or two through his money making machine. If they were more conservative with their gains that he was, they could easily have $20 or $50 million. I agree it's unlikely that they have 10 figures, though.
Sureties don't have to be bail agents / bondsmen.
Approximately this, though only SBF and his parents are on the hook for the full amount, the other two for a lesser amount (TBD in the main bail doc.)
No funnier than money itself really -- both are just bits of paper, backed by some guarantee the government will ensure their value.
LOL, it really is FTX all over again, with shills and everything!
The reason FTX was a scam is not because they weren't sending gold bars to investors.
This is one of the rare instances where general population outrage at this deal (read the NYTimes comments) is warranted. There are tons of poor folks who sit around wasting in jail, waiting for their trial, because they can't make bail. But this appears to be the case where the bail is "nominally" $250 million, but nobody had to guarantee that with reasonably equivalent collateral. I could be misunderstanding what collateral was put up, but the only thing that was mentioned was his parents house (which even in Palo Alto isn't $250 million).
FTX said: "Don't worry we have collateral ... lol jk!"
SBF's parents said: "Don't worry we have collateral ..."
Your bit about "but fiat isn't real" is true to some extent, and you could even go deeper and argue that nothing is real because we don't know if the universe is real or whatever. But honestly, in a practical context, there's a huge difference between:
I have 100 million in the bank, source: bank statement
and
I think I have 100 million in the bank, source: trust me
If that is what happened then you are right about it being funny money, and hilarious that they duped the court like they did their investors.
Yes, I think that's exactly what happened.
I think we need to look further into FTX's Tokenized Stock Offerings, as that's what the SEC has been honing in upon, among other things.
https://news.bitcoin.com/report-suggests-ftxs-tokenized-stoc...
FTX was selling stock, claiming it to be backed 1:1, which was likely being used as collateral for further speculation, or as locates for short sales, despite never actually holding the shares they claimed to.
Crypto is unregulated and is a whole thing, but claiming to have stocks you don't have is a way to really piss off the ultra-rich.
SBF has been charged with the following crimes in a U.S. federal court.
Conspiracy to commit wire fraud on customers
Wire fraud on customers
Conspiracy to commit wire fraud on lenders
Wire fraud on lenders
Conspiracy to commit commodities fraud
Conspiracy to commit securities fraud
Conspiracy to commit money laundering
Conspiracy to defraud the United States and violate the campaign finance law.
No one put up collateral beyond his parents home, and only SBF and his parents are on the hookfor the full $250M, the other two sureties are exposed for a smaller amount.
This is all public record in the court documents.
But whether SBF is out on bail doesn't affect what comes out at trial. If you're saying that SBF is effectively extorting those other individuals, on threat of revealing their secrets, then their pretty dumb extortion victims, since nothing stops SBF from continuing to demand massive investments of their money such as this one.
Anyone catch the AMC -> APE reverse
Let’s name the FTX tokenized stocks
I didn't say the government guarantees a particular value. I said it is backed by a government guarantee, and that is what ensures it has value (i.e., it is worth what is written).
>"FTX co-founder Sam Bankman-Fried’s $250 million bail package is one of the largest in US history, but it doesn’t mean he actually has to put up that kind of money. At Bankman-Fried’s bail hearing on Thursday in federal court in Manhattan, both the prosecution and defense agreed that the former billionaire’s assets have “diminished significantly.” Bankman-Fried has said he may have only $100,000."[1]
>"The $250 million personal recognizance bond approved by the judge was secured by the equity in Bankman-Fried’s parents home in Palo Alto, California, which is almost certainly not worth anywhere near that amount. But outsized bonds are more a means of establishing harsh financial consequences for bail-jumping and are often backed by assets worth only around 10% of the stated amount."[1]
Further:
>"In addition to Bankman-Fried and his parents, the bond must be signed by two other people of “considerable means,” one of whom can’t be a relative, by Jan. 5"[1]
So it's like that he left today with nothing more than the equity in his parents house pledged and now has until the 5th of the new year to find the other non-family signatory as well as the rest of the funding.
They aren't. The parents as surety for the full amount, the security claim on the home, and the two additional sureties for a smaller amount TBD are the approved requirements for the bond.
His parents signed the $250M bond, two others are to sign lesser bonds in amounts to be agreed.
Yes, they stand surety, but only the home secures the bond. (That is, the court has—or will have, their is time to post it—a recorded legal property interest in the home until the bail is no longer needed.)
Wait what? How does that work? I thought if the bond was $X, that literally means you either (a) give the court $X, cash only or (b) sit in jail until trial.
How can his bond be set at $250 million, yet the court somehow isn't just making him sit in jail until and unless he either goes to trial and is found not guilty, or he coughs up $250 million?
For typical bail amounts i.e., $50k, the intermediary usually demands 10% of the $50k from the defendant (and his friends) as a deposit, but maybe SBF found an intermediary willing to make the pledge to the court for a deposit significantly less than 10% of the 250M.
What bondsman has $250M? Even if they did, why would they ever agree to this?
Isn't getting $2M from a defendant on a bail bond less than even the interest you could probably get by just putting your $250M in, say, a Treasury bond over the same timeframe?
For that matter, who's willing to bet $250M at 99-to-1 payout odds that a smart guy like SBF won't be able to disappear and pop up in Dubai or somewhere with no extradition to the US? (Remember SBF probably had the means, motive, opportunity and moral character to siphon a couple hundred million worth of BTC into a wallet there are no records of. And he knew for a long time FTX was going to collapse and he was probably being investigated.)
It is exactly a bond for bail, yes.
> sign over the $2M house to get the bondsman to post $250M bond.
No, there is no bondsman, the house is pledged directly to the court as security, his parents are additional surety for the $250M, and two other people are signing lesser bonds.
Why does he get to do this, while someone with a $50,000 bail has to either put up the entire cash amount, or pay 10% in interest to a bondsman?
This is an odd phrase.
So what happens if SBF disappears? Do the parents lose their $2M house? Lose their $2M house and become $248M in debt? Go to jail?
What keeps the whole family from simply going on a sudden vacation to Dubai and letting the court take their house? Losing one's childhood home is sad, but stolen Bitcoins can still buy a very nice replacement.
The amount is large enough that even with 1% or 0.1% they could probably pay a professional bounty hunter to tail him for a week, reducing the odds of him escaping.
There is no “bond money”. The $250M he and his parent signed for, including the lesser amount the other sureties are also on the hook for, doesn’t get collected by the court unless their is a failure to appear. The security interest in the home is the only thing actually transferred.
The simple answer is that you are wrong, that's not how bail and bail bonds work, and its much more complicated than that. Essentially, money bail is a pre-declared failure to appear penalty, and bond is whatever the court accepts as a sufficient promise to pay, which can include purchasing a contract from an official bail agent, having other individuals agree to be on the hook for payment, providing somr property to the court, either physically or a legal claim that allows them to seize it for nonpayment, or a combination of these.
If SBF tells the judge "Your Honor, I'll sign a paper that says I'll be $250M in debt if I don't show up, but my family can only come up with $2M right now" why did the judge agree and let him out?
What's the fundamental difference, besides just the number of zeros?
‘He was released on bail for a $250 million bond — “the largest ever pretrial bond,” apparently — secured only on his parents’ home in Palo Alto, where he will be living.
’SBF will surrender his passport and remain in home confinement with electronic monitoring — he’ll wear a bracelet. He will also be required to undergo regular mental health evaluation and treatment. No financial transactions over $1,000 except legal fees, no new lines of credit, and he can’t start a business. Also, no firearms.
’That is: Sam lost all his money in crypto, and has moved back into his parents’ basement.’
https://davidgerard.co.uk/blockchain/2022/12/22/ftx-sam-bank...