> Never in my career have I seen such a complete failure of corporate controls and such a complete absence of trustworthy financial information as occurred here.
which seems likely to be an understatement.
This is explicitly not the case. The new management has not found hundreds of millions (billions) in cryptocurrency assets. Some other assets have surged in value and that may allow FTX to make some customers "whole" (meaning, they will not lose much money in an environment where otherwise maybe they would have strongly profited), but this isn't the same thing.
That isn't to say that 'all the money was there' or that the conduct wasn't deeply criminal and unethical, but a huge part of the shortfall was really just terrible books.
https://d1e00ek4ebabms.cloudfront.net/production/7ab64a3b-6c...
This is even from the article you reference: "FTX has benefited from a recent rise in crypto prices, Dietderich said. Its total recovery would be valued at $6.2 billion based on crypto prices from November 2022, when it filed for bankruptcy after traders pulled $6 billion from the platform in three days and rival exchange Binance abandoned a rescue deal."
To be clear, they also gambled with normal FTX customer funds. People who were just buying cryptocurrency through ordinary means and not trying to do sophisticated trading. It was simple theft. You can say they thought they'd make the money back plus some, but I think a lot of Ponzi scheme heads think the exact same way.
Someone associated with the case said that just because it was possible to recover most of the money he stole doesn't mean he didn't steal it. Crooks routinely go to jail even when the cops recover the money or goods.
That could paper over any problems until the problems became big enough to sink them.
He also made and then lost a crazy amount of money at Jane Street during election night before he started all this. He was a gambler.
my big takeaway from that is that the books, when they existed, were a complete shitshow. the money ended up all being there, but it was so scattered that it's taken all this time to find it. an investment here, a forgotten wallet there. they lost billions the way normal people lose dollar bills or car keys.
ofc that doesn't mean there wasn't fraud happening. the fact that they intentionally faked reserve balances and treated alameda like a piggy bank and did gymnastics to hide it can't be ignored. but even that still smacks of hubris to me more than a Bernie Madoff type scam.
it was like sbf didn't think it would be an issue because he genuinely believed that it would never be an issue. eg "people just want to believe there's a reserve, so let's show them one. we don't actually need it tho because we're actual geniuses." or maybe "no one will ever look because we're in the Bahamas and the Bahamas loves us, needs us." or it could be simply "money solves all problems and we have infinite money".
tldr: gambling addict gambled to the end and the house always wins.