Steve Jobs had a talent for telling stories and getting people to believe them.

Yeah even if one thinks negatively of Jobs, comparing SBF to young Jobs is a joke.

SBF founded FTX in 2019 when he was ~27 years old. At that point he had gone to MIT and done some arbitage stuff. More than I've accomplished but I mean, I'm not really seeing anything that ticketed this guy for stardom.

By age 27, Jobs had founded Apple Computer and was one of the major players in launching the whole personal computing industry.

I mean, even if we feel negatively about Jobs, we can also point to a pretty wide range of accomplishments he helmed. Even outside of Apple. He was one of the founders of Pixar, purchasing it from Lucasfilm. Also famous for a certain brand of charisma or at least persausiveness. One can not think very highly of him, but also see why investors would be like let's give this guy some money, perhaps lots of money.

I don't think highly of Elon Musk but I have zero difficulty understanding why people would think he's a genius sort of guy and give him money. Even I have to admit he's been at the helm for some wild achievements. Also certainly a charismatic guy in some ways. Not going to have a shortage of money thrown at his next venture.

But SBF?

Again... what was anybody seeing in this guy? Must have just been "right place right time" when the crypto hype wave was cresting.

It’s also that he was naive enough to put himself out there as a kind of figurehead of sorts of the crypto movement. So the others were probably like “ok if you insist…”

He was also surfing high on his messiah complex with a kind of 2020’s version of white man burden which the public was enamoured with.

Can u comment more on this "white man's burden" that was prevalent in 2020 as you describe it?

I meant 2020’s as a decade, and the concept is Effective Altruism, the idea that a bunch of geeks sitting in a gaming chair behind a computer screen know better what to do with charity money than the people actually doing it on the real world.