Hacker News Reader

Comment by MichaelCollins | Hacker News Reader

So if I've got this right, these journalists took "charitable grants" of money to toot their horns for the giver, who's ostensibly charitable acts amounted to giving money to journalists to say how charitable they were?

I guess none of them stopped to think "if you guys are so charitable, then why are you giving this money to journalists like me, rather than to charitable causes?"

View on HN

No, you haven't gotten it right.

Sam Bankman-Fried donated money to a wide variety of causes, the vast majority of which weren't journalists. If you want to read more about where he donated, here's the article where the quote comes from: https://www.vox.com/future-perfect/2022/8/8/23150496/effecti...

Very helpful, here's a more accurate way of making the same point:

>"if you guys are so charitable, then why are you giving this money to political candidates and PACs, rather than to charitable causes?"

SBF wasn't just giving money to political candidates and journalists, he was giving it to a wide range of causes. The FTX Foundation was spending a lot of money on global health and welfare, for example: https://ftxfoundation.org/global-health-welfare/

Obviously those gifts don't excuse SBF's massive fraud! But it's not as if SBF was only donating to political candidates and nothing else.

Donating your customers' deposits isn't charity, it is fraud.

Right, but this was before the fraud was exposed; at the time the recipients had no way of knowing it was fraud. Obviously nobody would accept money from SBF now that the fraud has been exposed.

So I don't think the journalists did anything particularly wrong here. (Unless you think crypto is so sketchy that they should have treated _anyone_ connected to crypto as presumably fraudulent -- in which case, fair, I guess.)

Lots of journalists literally think they're a charitable cause. And much of "charity spending" is for puff pieces to increase funding for the charity, after all.

"charitable grants" is some nice Newspeak for bribes

Reply on news.ycombinator.com