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Comment by tootie | Hacker News Reader

The guy who says regulations are dumb has no idea what he spent his money on or even how many employees he has. This guy is almost worse than Elizabeth Holmes.

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I have a feeling he will come out worse that Elizabeth Holmes because it feels like a complete fraud and pilfering of their client's money for their own spoils. While Elizabeth ran a known fraud she didn't quite pilfer the money to completely enrich themselves like the FTX crew did.

And what will change because of this? Not much, the (VC) grift continues. People don’t want to accept that the VC model works while there’s a qualitative change in technology, which worked in the 2010’s and there hasn’t been any in a while. Maybe the new AI generative models bring something new

Oh it seems that people accepted that and thought Blockchain is the new technology and here we are...

The golden age of VC was curiously correlated with a decade of free money and runaway equity prices. Like buying a plane ticket and thinking you're a bird.

Also at least Elizabeth wasn't stupid enough to give an interview to Vox where she admitted everything was a fraud and then told the regulators to fuck themselves.

SBF's parents are both Stanford law professors, they or someone really needs to tell the kid to just stop talking.

And his girlfriend (Alameda CEO) Caroline Ellison's dad is Gary Gensler's former boss at MIT.

That's not true - people should stop mindlessly parroting it.

Glenn Ellison is the department head of the Econ school, Gary Gensler worked in the business school. In any case, department heads aren't the "boss" of the rest of the professors in any sense familiar to the corporate world. They're just professors with administrative responsibilities and the point-of-contact to the Dean's office.

https://economics.mit.edu/people/faculty/glenn-ellison

https://web.archive.org/web/20210415164859/https://mitsloan....

For a certain sort of prospective law student, I’m sure this makes Stanford even more appealing. You’ll be able to learn from not one but two professors who helped their own son cop a federal plea deal!

Should be a cakewalk given FTX’s campaign donations.

Also Elizabeth didn't do this:

Michael Lewis, who is famous for writing The Big Short and Moneyball, has reportedly been embedded with the bankrupt crypto exchange’s former CEO Sam Bankman-Fried for six months and will pen a book telling the inside story.

maybe this is some 4D chess narcissism of wanting to be on the big screen while you serve time?

At least Holmes had the courtesy to target Henry Kissinger, the DeVos family, and the Murdochs for her swindle.

He was tight with the regulators and literally advising congress, yet they had no idea what he was doing and gave his operation a veneer of authenticity, so he's correct on that point.

I'm the last person to defend Holmes, but at least she was trying to produce something.

SBF's prison sentence should be at least five times what Holmes gets.

She put people at risk of undetected cancer. SBF accepted money from suckers.

Like the Ontario Teachers Pension Fund?

(As I said: not at all a Holmes defender.)

Yes, they are suckers. This sort of principal-agent problem is exactly why defined benefit pension plans ought to be phased out and replaced by defined contribution plans.

Yes. Institutions are notorious suckers.

He was saying the opposite, one of the biggest supporters of regulation in the space, and reportedly had several one on one conversations with Gary Gensler of the SEC and was the second largest donor to Joe Biden

He admitted in what he thought was a private conversation that that was all a public front but that his true opinion is "fuck regulation"

He recanted all that in his latest interview and said that all that was basically a lie for him to build legitimacy. Whether you believe him based on his other lies is of course the tricky bit.

> fuck regulators

> they make everything worse

https://www.vox.com/future-perfect/23462333/sam-bankman-frie...

He’s pro crypto regulation (keep competitors out of his space), and fuck any regulation that might reveal his massive fraud.

Yeah he's not pro regulation is pro _regulatory capture_.

His lieutenant was a major Republican donor.

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