Why Is No One Asking SFB What Happened to the $3.3B He Borrowed?

That's reporting. The likely interpretation of that piece of reporting is crystal clear to the intended readership. (I.e., the money is probably gone.)

[For people who really want to nerd out: If you read all available public filings, the stories in the financial press are much easier to understand accurately. However this one is not subtle.]

Yes.

Reading the bankruptcy filings and seeing what the accountants are finding is probably more productive than listening to the self-serving statements of a crook.

https://youtu.be/AfmBdKoqq1o

"The bankruptcy filing states that Paper Bird owned 75% of FTX International.1 However, that does not make it part of the FTX bankruptcy. In fact, Paper Bird filed for its own bankruptcy, the same date at FTX did, with separate counsel: Adam Landis of Landis Roth & Cobb while the lead attorney for FTX is James Bromley of Sullivan & Cromwell."

And really, the whereabouts of those loans should be very high up the list of things people are interested in - if nothing else, 10 digits somewhere safe sure is a nice bucket of grease to facilitate a disappearance to somewhere without extradition.

> “You misplaced $8 billion?” I ask.

> “Misaccounted,” Bankman-Fried says, sounding almost proud of his explanation. Sometimes, he says, customers would wire money to Alameda Research instead of sending it directly to FTX. (Some banks were more willing to work with the hedge fund than the exchange, for some reason.) He claims that somehow, FTX’s internal accounting system double-counted this money, essentially crediting it to both the exchange and the fund.

> That still doesn’t explain why the money was gone. “Where did the $8 billion go?” I ask.

> To answer, Bankman-Fried creates a new tab on the spreadsheet and starts typing. He lists Alameda and FTX’s biggest cash flows. One of the biggest expenses is paying a net $2.5 billion to Binance, a rival, to buy out its investment in FTX. He also lists $250 million for real estate, $1.5 billion for expenses, $4 billion for venture capital investments, $1.5 billion for acquisitions and $1 billion labeled “fuckups.” Even accounting for both firms’ profits, and all the venture capital money raised by FTX, it tallies to negative $6.5 billion.

> Bankman-Fried is telling me that the billions of dollars customers wired to Alameda is gone simply because the companies spent way more than they made. He claims he paid so little attention to his expenses that he didn’t realize he was spending more than he was taking in. “I was real lazy about this mental math,” the former physics major says. He creates another column in his spreadsheet and types in much lower numbers to show what he thought he was spending at the time.

Now, by structuring these as "loans" to SBF, for him alone to increase his (already overwhemling) majority control, meant he'd unethically levered up the enterprise into a "heads SBF wins even more, tails everyone else loses everything" precariousness. Losers at risk from such an arrangement would include, and eventually now have included, customers with custodial funds that should never have been at any risk at all - but were so commingled across purposes & entities under SBF's shoddy self-dealing & criminally-negligient management that they were de facto contributors to these unwise sweetheart insider loans.

So at least $2.1B, & perhaps up to ~$3B, of this "loaned" value (in cash & other tokens) may have made its way to Binance, and thus we wouldn't expect it to be in SBF's current pockets. It was still taken inappropriately, though. And, the magnitudes further make SBF's claims of not knowing the details of either Alamedas or FTX's balance sheets not credible. Honest people generally don't send $3B of value through themselves, to elsewhere, without at least some sense of the stocks & flows involved.

However, perhaps after those loans, the large venture investments into FTX are reported to have sent around $300M cash (of the raised funds) to SBF. He's also described that as repaying him for acts like buying out Binance with personal funds, almost as if he hadn't been loaned billions from FTX to do that. That money looks instead more like a VC's willingness, in a suitably hot deal, to let the founder take some value out to have more-diversified wealth. I'd expect the debtors to especially chase that cash money, to see where it landed, for possible recovery by SBF's victims.

Another missing question from recent interviews: when SBF does his, "I've got nothing, now" or "maybe $100k" act, ask him: why hasn't he declared bankruptcy?

He borrowed ~$3B from FTX/Alameda-related entities, in order to lever-up further into FTX. If he presumably per the debtors-in-management team still owes his associated-entities $3B+, and has "nothing", he should be in bankruptcy.

SBF is a very smart person with a now-documented history, during his ascent, of blatant misrepresentations about weighty matters & a flexible view of ethics.

When such a person claims "oops, I kept poor records & didn't manage the staff or complicated legal entities I'd chosen & didn't pay close attention", but then slowly & vaguely describes past actions in the most self-exonerating ways possible, the presumption should be that the post-fall accounts are retroactive fabulations. The character 'hapless-Sam' is just as much a self-aggrandizing fiction as the character 'hyperethical-and-hypercompetent-Sam' was.

And even if fully true, "I was a reckless gambler bad with math even when I was selling people on the idea I'd hedged out all the gambles and was brilliant at math" only helps explain, but does not excuse, criminal deception.

Government investigators are not in a habit of validating every bloggers empty rhetorical questions.

The author is complaining in the comments ZeroHedge copy-pasted their post without permission. ZH should feel bad for spreading babbling gossip and impotent rage more than anything.

https://www.mollywhite.net/etc/ftx-contagion

Considering that part of the money went to you-know-who, it’s no surprise that those groups don’t ask any tough questions.