He's still posting on Twitter as though this is going to blow over. I don't get it. Is there a chance nothing is going to happen? What kind of advice is he getting?
"“People can say all the mean things they want about me online,” he said. “In the end, what’s going to matter to me is what I’ve done and what I can do.”
He has also found other ways to occupy his time in recent days, playing the video game Storybook Brawl, though less than he usually does, he said. “It helps me unwind a bit,” he said. “It clears my mind.”
Shortly before the interview, Mr. Bankman-Fried had posted a cryptic tweet: the word “What.” Then he had tweeted the letter H. Asked to explain, Mr. Bankman-Fried said he planned to post the letter A and then the letter P. “It’s going to be more than one word,” he said. “I’m making it up as I go.”
So he was planning a series of cryptic tweets? “Something like that.”
But why? “I don’t know,” he said. “I’m improvising. I think it’s time.”"
I think that based on his enthusiasm to invest in Elon's takeover of Twitter he thought he was a big dog. He thinks he's a celebrity billionaire. He's still calling people to invest in his companies, which is like lighting money on fire because it's all going to be withdrawn immediately.
He is clueless.
Well there is people who would still invest in him with the condition of tighter control / regulation despite already losing money in this shitshow :-D. But it's probably just a crazy coping mechanism for being involved:
I would pay to hear some of these conversations of him asking for more money right now. I wonder if people just start laughing or try to tell him the truth.
It appears that he may have upped his dosage. And him acting like he can recover is from the drugs. To act like this after clearly committing crimes visible by tens of millions of people, and just getting torn apart for it online. I wish I was this confident!
I don't understand how he could hope to raise money if his idea is "We return it to the people I stole from." I have no doubt that, like Adam Neumann, there is some circumstance where VCs would give him another turn, but it would be because those VCs thought they could make money, not because they want to donate their money to make SBF's victims whole.
Im not defending him, but you can imagine a situation where a lot of conversations are happening in the background whilst wild speculation takes off online.
From the balance sheets circulating, there are still a lot of assets there. Some of it is fantasy but some of it is real but various levels of liquidity.
Im sure FTX, Sam and everyone associated is looking at how they can turn an $8 billion hole into a $3 billion hole.
I don’t think he or FTX are coming back because the reputation is destroyed, but I don’t see this ending in an $8 billion total loss.
I am tempted to put my money where my mouth is and buy some FTT for a somewhat positive announcement soon, but maybe that’s just degenerate gambling!
1. His tweet thread made me throw up in my mouth a bit. Blaming it on "liquidity" is laughable. Liquidity problems would be like "I own a lot of real estate and it would take me a long time to sell". Alameda's problem was a huge chunk of its balance sheet was FTT - it was fundamentally impossible to ever liquidate those tokens without guaranteeing to tank the price of FTT. Never mind the whole issue that customer funds were never legally his to loan to Alameda in the first place, regardless of crypto regulations or lack thereof. What happened to customer funds was simply theft.
2. I'm not a psychologist, so I don't necessarily want to misuse the term "sociopath", but I have seen this trait in some people that is closely linked to a lack of conscience. That is, I would have never been able to do what SBF and gang did by stealing customer funds to prop up Alameda. And it's not because I'm some wonderfully moral person, it's because I would have become physically ill with guilt and lack of sleep. This is also why I'll never be able to run a large company or handle billions of assets - it would just be too much stress for me. There is a fine line between needing to have a healthy detachment from consequences you may cause, and being a sociopath. The more I hear from SBF just the more I'm convinced he's not on the "healthy detachment" side of things.
I'm so frustrated right now that he's still not arrested while in the sister thread a bicyclist was arrested for touching a car that was hiding its license plate.
The government is doing the opposite that it should be doing.
He paid fealty to the regime and tens of millions of dollars of bribes and protection money to the ruling class.
Provided he told all the right people to get out while the getting was good, he's got good reason to be confident. I bet he knows about a lot of skeletons in closets too, although people tend to wind up not killing themselves in prison when they try to use that kind of leverage against the mob, so he'd be well advised to take his flailing about the wrists with a sauteed lettuce leaf if it came to that.
"I’m meeting in-person with regulators and working with the teams to do what we can for customers." https://twitter.com/SBF_FTX/status/1592604699693580289
"So what can I try to do? Raise liquidity, make customers whole, and restart." https://twitter.com/SBF_FTX/status/1592710177152995328