Hacker News Reader

Comment by memish | Hacker News Reader

Sam's explanation:

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.”

https://www.nytimes.com/2022/11/14/technology/ftx-sam-bankma...

View on HN

This NYT puff piece is a shame. It doesn't mention the fraud committed of using users' funds, servers wiped out, etc.

And put this in the context of the NYT writing negative pieces for 10 years on almost every tech founder.

EDIT: A Twitter thread on how SBF is well-connected with the New York Times.

https://twitter.com/JagoeCapital/status/1592311592875597826

It's almost as if NYT is extremely biased

NYT reporter have an hour with SBF.

https://twitter.com/yaffebellany/status/1592353938099302401?...

Nothing about fraud or crime.

https://twitter.com/TrungTPhan/status/1592349684471037955?s=...

then someone on Twitter found the connection between SBF and WEF, his aunt.

"As for the WEF, its ties with Bankman-Fried extend to his family as well. His aunt, Linda P. Fried, an epidemiologist who serves as the dean of Columbia University’s Mailman School of Public Health, is listed on the WEF’s website."

https://nypost.com/2022/11/14/how-world-economic-forum-other...

SBF seem to have a lot of connections with the elites of our society.

This FTX fiasco look more and more like Thaneno.

> Thaneno

Autocorrect of theranos?

typo. Elizabeth Holmes's company.

Why would they send such an inexperienced reporter to interview someone like this who has manipulated even experienced people?

Are you overlooking the obvious: that it is not a very good newspaper at some things?

Or that the NYT and the connected elites have an agenda?

https://twitter.com/WakeToBitcoin/status/1591542267742937089

The whole debacle reeks of someone who is used to being the smartest person in the room and using it for manipulation. Unfortunately he has reached a point where intelligence is no longer needed to see the end result (thousands cannot withdraw from their accounts), and no amount of manipulation is going to change that.

The nonsensical tweets are like watching a sociopath short-circuit when he gets caught in his own trap.

I'd rather like to know why sophisticated people were easily manipulated by him, but he seemed to set off alarm bells all the time in unsophisticated people(like myself, but also many others)

I have a theory that certain successful people have a very acute ability to grasp opportunities while downplaying downides/risks, which sometimes can be a very successful life strategy. The average person may be more in tune to these risks as our life depends on only a few paychecks of runway before homelessness.

What alarm bells, specifically? I didn't see it. He was someone who had passed through well-known institutions like MIT and Jane Street, with a family reputation he would have wanted to protect, had a team around him with known pedigree (which plays into them wanting to preserve their reputation), was obviously smart having been math olympiad as a kid, and talked the talk of Bill Gates-esque altruism. I found FTX and SBF less suspicious than all the other crypto personalities, at least.

One alarm bell for me was that he was pitching a product that is a Ponzi scheme that doesn’t bear any scrutiny.

How did you know it was a Ponzi before this info came out? Looked like a regular crypto exchange to me.

Imagine, someone whose parents are both Stanford professors might have a family connection to other highly successful professionals.

This post just sent me on an interesting web crawl. Summarizing what you said, alongside some other interesting discoveries:

His aunt works at the World Economic Forum [1]. The World Economic Forum was promoting his organization, FTX. [2] He was the second largest donor to Biden's 2020 campaign. He was also the second largest donor to DNC primary campaigns [4]. He had a stated intent of spending up to $1 billion on the 2024 election [5]. The NYTimes, which generally has an overwhelmingly negative stance on crypto/tech/billionaires, is now running puff pieces on him. [6]

It will be an interesting test of our legal system. It's increasingly looking like FTX was simply a giant scam/fraud, but SBF is extremely well connected and buttered all the right bellies.

---

[1] - https://web.archive.org/web/20221112024919/https://www.wefor...

[2] - https://www.weforum.org/people/linda-p-fried

[3] - https://www.wsj.com/articles/its-a-close-race-for-ceo-suppor...

[4] - https://www.opensecrets.org/elections-overview/biggest-donor...

[5] - https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/2022-election/crypto-billio...

[6] - https://www.nytimes.com/2022/11/14/technology/ftx-sam-bankma...

This makes me think he's going to get away with it.

Worth adding that “negative pieces for 10 years” is not an opinion. It was official NYT editorial policy (original tweet now deleted)

https://twitter.com/KelseyTuoc/status/1588231892792328192

> 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.”

I'm glad he found a way to unwind after committing fraud and gambling away billions of dollars from innocent people. This guy is out of his mind. Why is he not in jail yet?

I'm glad he found a way throw in a promo for the game he owns.

FWIW parent comment isn't exaggerating — FTX acquired Storybook Brawl this past March: https://www.geekwire.com/2022/storybook-brawl-developer-acqu...

(SBF is infamously an avid, but poor, League of Legends player, and has been seen online playing League post-blowup; his Storybook Brawl comment seems pretty self-serving.)

I can’t understand what that means.

It means that this person is liar and probably a sociopath who will continue lying to every person who listens to him.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com