Sam Bankman-Fried Has a Savior Complex–and Maybe You Should Too
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https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33672924
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33573636
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33543718
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33527047
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33568141
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33554271
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33551288
Maybe enough with this. Hacker _News_, please
Or, the world will simply run out of trillion dollar ideas for the VCs to make their money back on, and eventually your 1% of good investments don't cover the 99% of shit anymore, and you have to improve your due diligence, and become more of an ordinary investor?
So we have the cofounder of Skype to thank for this mess huh?
Well...
Corporate governance, accounting, and all the other boring stuff should literally be the first things which you should look at when assessing whether to fuel or not an exchange.
They could not possibly have looked at any numbers any deeper than what FTX told them.
Never forget that.
>That’s when SBF told Sequoia about the so-called super-app: “I want FTX to be a place where you can do anything you want with your next dollar. You can buy bitcoin. You can send money in whatever currency to any friend anywhere in the world. You can buy a banana. You can do anything you want with your money from inside FTX.”
>Suddenly, the chat window on Sequoia’s side of the Zoom lights up with partners freaking out.
>“I LOVE THIS FOUNDER,” typed one partner.
>“I am a 10 out of 10,” pinged another.
>“YES!!!” exclaimed a third.
>What Sequoia was reacting to was the scale of SBF’s vision. It wasn’t a story about how we might use fintech in the future, or crypto, or a new kind of bank. It was a vision about the future of money itself—with a total addressable market of every person on the entire planet.
>“I sit ten feet from him, and I walked over, thinking, Oh, shit, that was really good,” remembers Arora. “And it turns out that that fucker was playing League of Legends through the entire meeting.”
"HOLY SHIT WHAT A VISIONARY 10 OUT OF 10"
Clearly SBF will truly be the first trillionaire
Turns out the rich and powerful of Silicon Valley aren't super smart and wise folks to be looked up to.
They're just regular people, a lot of them ignorant, that got lucky.
Enough with the pedestals.
Elon Musk has lied for 27 years about his credentials. He does not have a BS in Physics, or any technical field. Did not get into a PhD program. Dropped out in 1995 & was illegal. Later, investors quietly arranged a diploma - but not in science.
Edit: Here's a link to the sources with everything: https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/1zPeWaaCZHqfq0tnkPwc6...
[1] https://www.dailykos.com/stories/2022/11/17/2136976/-Blockbu...
Fact is that the myth of Elon Musk depends on him being a nerd with technical and scientific chops. Claiming to have degrees and to have been accepted into a PhD at Stanford is the foundation of that myth. It’s the height of fraud.
That sequence of events is basically the magic formula.
> They're just regular people, a lot of them ignorant, that got lucky.
This becomes immediately clear the first time you meet them. They're just a herd operating in a situation of high risk and uncertainty by following what the rest of the herd is doing. That's why, periodically, they all run off a cliff together like lemmings.
But like, it’s not even a story about how he might accomplish that goal. It’s literally just saying “my vision is to facilitate every financial transaction in the world.” You’d think it would take more than that to impress those partners.
Except that these are professional financiers. I don't get it.
Oh well. Extract money from these fools and hopefully don't be an FTX, make something that is useful to society. The more they lose on ventures, the more their capital is redistributed, hopefully to either competent people, or people that need it.
What hurts my brain is that theoretically this investment strategy is sound, but the implementation of it looks like: FTX. It's horrific. It's like total war logic. Logically it works, probabilistically it's reasonable, living it is grotesque and insane.
Either way, the forward is 0. I'd rather see a company run itself aground by paying its employees and slowly bleeding money than to see it fail due to mis-valuation of its holdings. The former is unfortunate, but the latter is an embarrassment for all stakeholders.
As the show 'Silicon Valley' started the era with harmless satire, they made it real with this FTX big tent clownshow.
Every paragraph dripping with absolute glib, lack of self awareness.
"Compassionate To The Core" ... my god man I fell off my chair, got back on, and then fell off again ...
I suggest there exists no author who could have created such an inane story that makes 'Wolf of Wall Street' seem like a Dilbert cartoon.
Reality itself is much, much more entertaining than anything Netflix or god forbid even Scorsese himself could ever contrive.
Spend enough time on this world and you realize that the absolute crazy shit out there would never be made into a movie because nobody would believe it's real.
Make me an action flick of the guy who fought for three sides in WWII: Finnish Winter War, the Nazis, the Americans, only to have him die fighting in Vietnam and I'll tell you a movie that will be a complete box office flop because nobody would think this person actually existed.
> ... "Compassionate To The Core" ...
The elites are truly out of touch with the reality. Some are unhinged. It is baffling.
Just the other day, some exec, who worked with Musk at Tesla, wrote that him acquiring Twitter was the part of a master plan to fix the climate: https://archive.is/uSz6I
Read also: The Michael Scott theory of social class (2021), https://danco.substack.com/p/the-michael-scott-theory-of-soc...
He's always talked about criminal and unethical behavior in an understated and humorous way in his column, and as a private individual, should be exempt from the slimy methods of character assassination used on politicians.
Matt did call him out months ago on about how cynical his take on crypto was.
Saying he was describing a scam.
And that raised many red flags for others on SBF's ethos.
SBF prolly noticed his error and took efforts to cozy up to Matt afterwards. Hard to resist liking a billionaire who spends on you. It's a superpower that few are immune to in this capitalist world.
I think Levine was just saying, "this is a sensible answer to give as a trader operating an exchange where you want a healthy dose of cynical thinking like this instead of pure idealism".
Nobody listened to or remembered the interview until a couple of people pointed out how prophetic it was with hindsight.
Levine found SBF pleasant to talk to and he's amused by financial chicanery.
At the time he said it sounded like a Ponzi, and SBF agreed, but after FTX blew up, it turned out to be so much more.
They didn't have an accounting department. Reporting makes it sound like they didn't even know what real accounting is. SBF was quoted as rejecting the concept of books. As Levine wrote more recently, their alleged balance sheet was mostly "magic beans" and cobwebs. None of this was part of the interview.
So that is to say, I heard it, but I didn't realize the significance. And Levine is probably the best explainer and journalist in the financial space today.
What an excellent way to rationalize any psychopathic move you might want to make for money. Not saying SBF is a psychopath, 'cause I don't know enough about him, but this rationale could be used to justify almost anything: stealing, lying, fraud...
EA is notably less interested in answering "where should money come from" and "what impact does the manner in which I earn money have".
Says who?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Earning_to_give#Earning_to_giv...
Are they giving it to themselves somehow? At best I can imagine they get their name on a school or something, a nice thing but hardly the same as still having the 100 million or whatever bucks in their pocket.