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?
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?