Amazon’s already greenlit an FTX miniseries
theverge.com
theverge.com
https://www.businessinsider.com/sam-bankman-fried-100-millio...
The scale of political giving and media donating involved is certainly curious, worthy of more exposure. Somehow I doubt that's an angle Amazon is interested in exploring, i.e. Bezos seems to do a lot of that kind of thing as well, but who knows?
Pt1: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zTFhnpf-IE0
SBF will next week speak at New York Time conference, together with Mark Zuckerberg, Volodymyr Zelenskyy, Mike Pence, Benjamin Netanyahu, Ben Affleck, Eric Adams, and others. And yeah he is apparently still coming.
https://www.nytimes.com/events/dealbook-summit#speakers
https://twitter.com/SBF_FTX/status/1595512579417378837?cxt=H...
[1]: https://deadline.com/2022/11/apple-deal-michael-lewis-book-c...
I still think it would be a great movie, but it never had the same relevance.
There have been repeated attempts to get a movie out of it so I assume there must be some good reason for the repeated failure.
>...not based in reality
Epstein has been investigated for 20 years, during one of his trials the judge's son was killed by a pizza delivery guy, assassinated after opening the door, Epstein was only caught in 2019.
In the 2008 crisis only one guy went to prison, and he was an Egyptian.
In the HSBC carter money laundering investigations, no one went to prison.
Kerpeles (Mt Gox) didn't go to prison, Michinsky (Celsius) didn't go to prison, and they didn't donate to the current president or members of the board investigating them.
On the other hand both Do Kwon and Kumbhani are fugitives (Terra and Bitconnect).
Now look at who are SBF's and Ellison's parents and who they worked with, and look at who took donations from SBF's mom before FTX and who took money from SBF, and look at what the media are writing about SBF and how they never seem to mention the words fraud or crime or any of these, and if you don't want to put 2 and 2 together after this, then well... there are people who believe in ghosts and others who believe in UFO's and vampires and Santa, so you don't have it that bad, but please realize that your inability to see the truth when it stands 2 inches in front of your face (I assume blindness so I won't call you a shill), does not mean that the truth is not standing 2 inches in front of your face (as I said we're all humans and some believe in gremlins and fairies so it happens to anyone).
>politically partisan
French so I really don't care about American democrats or republicans, and SBF and his guys donated to both so..
I haven’t heard any claims that SBF has blackmail material. The donations he made are now embarrassing for their recipients and he has no capacity to make future donations. I think he’s going to jail, it will just take some time for justice to work.
I'm not sure why you think people should have gone to jail in 2008. It was people doing a shitty job. That's not illegal. Similarly, MtGox was hacked. And, IIRC, people loaned Celsius money they then lost, not embezzled.
HSBC seems horrible, but I'm not sure they were able to identify individuals who violated the law beyond a shadow of doubt. It was one of those "everyone can point the finger at someone else" things. But, more importantly, they were still a financially large/successful company. So they could pay a fine and continue operating with new rules in place. Part of paying that fine is an agreement protecting the executives. I agree that happens too often.
I don't see how SBF fits into those. He doesn't seem to have blackmail material. It's not like everyone at FTX can claim it was someone else who did it (he's admitting it to reporters!) because it's a giant enterprise. It's not like FTX cannot be shut down because it's too big to fail/too big to jail.
But, yeah, the news doesn't report people are accused of crimes before formal indictments. Formal indictments wait until the charges are in place. Right now, they are still reconstructing just how much money SBF stole.
But I'll put my money where my mouth is. I'll totally bet that he goes to jail.
As I said before that, we will be given by the media a good enough reason why he didn't do anything wrong.
>the news doesn't report people are accused of crimes before formal indictments
Did you seriously just say this? The media spent years saying false things about multiple politicians with 0 evidence.
Like come on at this point if you can't see the corruption then you never will but it's become so obvious it's like they're not even trying to hide it.
I'm willing to bet money SBF ends up in prison.
I've never heard the NEWSmedia accuse a politician of violating a specific law with zero evidence. Any examples of it done flagrantly? (I'm sure some reasonable errors slipped through). But even then, it's purposefully much harder for political actors to prove libel or slander suits.
Also there's still the criminal charges to come after this. I don't really understand why he's not already in prison.
[0] https://twitter.com/SBF_FTX/status/1595512579417378837?t=Mx-...
*edit: phrasing
If you borrow $100,000, the bank owns you. If you borrow $100,000,000, you own the bank.
The bigger you are, the longer it takes the establishment to bring you down, if they ever do.
If I were the prosecutors, I would let him keep hanging himself with on the record interviews for as long as possible. Everything he says seems to make the case easier to win.
The FTX dam broke a few weeks ago and so far the media generally seems unenthusiastic about covering the story. Most people I've mentioned it to haven't heard of it yet; that's the media's fault.
I don't think the media turned into a mob until after the book, as you said.
It's not like it's difficult to find FTX in the news anyway.
https://usatoday.com/story/money/2022/11/17/ftx-collapse-ceo...
https://usatoday.com/story/opinion/2022/11/19/ftxs-collapse-...
https://usatoday.com/story/sports/nba/2022/11/22/miami-dade-...
I tend to agree. I've never spoke of theranos or EH with friends or more specifically my wife. The other day she brings it up...
"What do you know about Elizabeth Holmes? She just had a baby and is going to jail for 15 years"
The pregnancy / child / jail is what made my wife interested. I told her that I didn't have much information on the subject other than the company said they could do x, pulled in a ton of cash, and couldn't do x. She then proceeded to watch every documentary / book / article she could find on EH and Theranos.
It was the pregnancy topic that made my wife interested. Not the amount of money or fraud, pregnancy which is something she can relate to.
He's already being prevented from leaving the country (note, the country is the Bahamas where he had been living for years). He doesn't have access to FTX's accounts. It seems like it's harmless to leave him out until proven guilty.
The FBI and the Bahamanian government are still trying to figure out how to timeshare who interviews him when. The prosecutors are still working on understanding the full scope of damage done. Heck, there are lawsuits moving forward on where the primary forum for FTX's bankruptcy is, let alone who gets to throw him in jail first.
Keep in mind that the CEO brought in to clean up after Enron was also brought in to clean up FTX and try to organize the bankruptcy. The first thing he said to the court was he needed more time because this has the worst books he's ever seen and he doesn't even know what FTX owns. Like, he cannot find the paperwork and is trying to reconstruct some of their ownership from "third-party materials".
At least in the US, there are laws against multiple prosecutions. So if the prosecutors came at him with an easy case, they could accidentally give him immunity from the other related cases. So they have to build a big one before they actually prosecute. Imagine the uproar if he was prosecuted and punished for stealing $10MM and that kept him from being prosecuted for the rest of everything. Or if the prosecutors hinged everything on his cryptographic signed orders and it turns out the keys were taped to his monitor and, boom, reasonable doubt, so he walks.
It takes time. That's frustrating. But that little bit more time now had better be enjoyed. He's not getting out of jail for decades once he goes in.
We publicly crucify people all the time, even when no crime has been committed. Just look at the treatment of Elon Musk versus SBF. SBF commits likely crime, gets almost no negative press. Elon Musk buys a company and people go onto national news and declare that he needs to be investigated for every crime under the sun.
If people were consistent I'd be more okay with how SBF is being treated, but they're clearly not. As SBF donated heavily to media organizations it's obvious that they're treating him with kid gloves because of those donations.
Repeat and rinse for every new episode, until people get tired of the series and they cancel it, which then leads to the final episode where it all blows up, SBF sits down looking defeated, says sorry and then some financier goes, that’s alright, honest mistake, here’s 300mil let’s start up FTX2 fade to black.
But sure, throw money at a glamorous rationalization of basic fraud instead.
Why do you think that's the way it would go? Did you think that e.g. Dopesick or The Dropout showed Purdue or Theranos in a positive light?
Oh well. I guess an international ponzi scheme involving politicians and journalists just isn’t newsworthy.
We have no evidence any politicians or journalists were compromised. (Journalists at no-name outlets writing puff pieces is unfortunately banal.) That makes this a crypto story, and one whose victims are particularly unsympathetic at that. Those have a niche. But they aren’t mainstream.
Plenty of people hopelessly throw money at politicians. Most get no remuneration. Again, there is a paranoid subculture that assumes every donation brings legislative power, and for them, this is a relevant story. Most do not because, in most cases, it does not.
Those people throw tens or hundreds of dollars. Not tens of millions of dollars. Big difference.
> Again, there is a paranoid subculture that assumes every donation brings legislative power
No I don't believe the $3 Bernie was asking for would bring any legislative power but $30,000,000?
Nope. I’ve been close to New York, California and Wyoming federal politics for a short bit. There is always someone throwing big money in a bill market. They get suave dinners and photo shoots. But nobody takes what they’re saying seriously. Enough is done, in private, to keep the dollars rolling. But for powerful incumbents, there are more big donors than swing senators. (The non-swing guys can’t push the margin. But they still get dollars, because the point is the photo shoot.)
And there is a certain class of people so naive that they think any individual would give hundreds of millions to a politician with nothing but just good intentions, and that any politician would warrant such a donation purely through being outstanding and Jo able politicians.
Of course I don’t. They’re just raised outside power. They think money buys influence through donations. It doesn’t. They’re being played, and there will eternally be a joker in their seat.
I'm not really a fan of WSJ or NYT but calling them no-name outlets is a bit much.
But SBF should be thankful for Musk. Twitter's upheaval is more important to most people, and that seems to be sucking up most of the "look at this business" attention. And Musk was a bigger deal beforehand. (I mean, Musk is still a bigger deal. But I just meant in terms of as a multiplier on the underlying story.)
Ontario Teachers writes off FTX stake, citing potential fraud https://www.bnnbloomberg.ca/ontario-teachers-writes-off-ftx-...
This is a US$182 billion fund.
There are narrative solutions to this. For example, telling the tale from the perspective of a fictional low-level employee. They start out with the narrative we were all fed. And then gradually discover the truth. (Whether they get corrupted or turn whistleblower would be a stylistic choice, though it’s telling no FTX employee blew any whistles.)
This is something every agent and every producer is on top of like flies on shit. The chance for someone with no big-name access or connections of getting anywhere with it is about zero.
https://www.theguardian.com/books/2022/nov/14/ftx-crypto-kin...
Exact same happened with the GameStop fiasco.
Will they have nudity in their show about FTX? Who knows?