Hacker News Reader

Comment by nicpottier | Hacker News Reader

The lengths he does to blame CZ and Ray is pretty telling. He really seems to still be in massive denial. The idea that he could still raise billions to make customers whole and that this pesky chapter 11 technicality is getting in the way also seems insane.

This reads as if he wrote this himself with no legal supervision. Is he under oath with these statements?

View on HN

"raise billions to make customers whole" also still means fraud; he's taking investor money and giving it away. The purpose of invested funds is to improve the business, with a long-term goal of returning more than you were given to investors. Not doing that is the definition of securities fraud.

> "raise billions to make customers whole" also still means fraud; he's taking investor money and giving it away.

I think the means "take investor money, make customers whole, thereby restore FTX, raise the company value and then pay back investors", which is not fraud. That being said, I wouldn't put it beyond him anymore to publicly suggest defrauding investors.

Given the apparent identities of the investors, it's unlikely that he was misrepresenting his plans to them.

Anything you say can and will be used against you in a court of law.

He opened with,

"I would like to start by formally stating, under oath: I fucked up."

This dude's lawyers are either fucked in the head or nonexistent.

At one point in the saga, he fired his lawyers because they were telling him to shut the fuck up and he didn't want to. Whatever lawyers he has now are probably still telling him to shut the fuck up, and he's completely ignoring their advice right now. Great idea, by the way, when you're facing criminal charges.

I wonder if he has some kind of personality bias stemming from being raised by a couple of lawyers. Kids often rebel against the immediate ancestor generation, could this be him lashing out at all things lawyer-like, "disrupting" it and doing things "his way?"

SBF is not the first person who thinks they are smarter than their lawyers. It even fits the pattern of "physics person dismissive of other fields" (e.g. https://xkcd.com/793/)!

I dunno if we need to go too far into the particulars of his life to explain it. When Popehat was talking about the legal troubles of people in Trump's orbit this came up a lot (and a lot of those people were lawyers!).

> "physics person dismissive of other fields"

This reminds me of an old physicist-lawyer joke:

A physicist goes to see a lawyer. He knows that above all the lawyer is interested in getting his money. So the physicist not wanting to be taken for a sucker walks into the room and fires right away: - Hi, how much do you charge?

The lawyer fires back: - $400 for two questions. What is your second question?

Also, a good chunk of this is him essentially insulting one of the more respected and high-performing law firms out there. He's gonna have a fun time trying to get some other firm to help him...

Do lawyers really take anything like that personally, on behalf of other lawyers? I find that hard to believe...

It's just business sense: if the previous guy drops the client like a hot potato, it's a pretty strong hint that they're trouble. Although in SBF's case you don't really need to rely on subtle hints to find that out.

lawyers in California are in a register, available to others in the profession. Over time, law practice diverges significantly, and the norms of those specialties are partly cultural and partly for saving-face or other sorts of soft-values. The truth is that half of what lawyers do involves serious-life-changing winners or losers, so there is a thick skin of indifference among many. With all that said - certain specialties of generally-rivalrous groups do keep careful track of the opposition names and faces, probably less careful track of ally names and faces. Some of those lawyers have a very, very good memory for these things. $0.02

> This dude's lawyers are either fucked in the head or nonexistent.

The latter, the first batch quit already: https://futurism.com/the-byte/sam-bankman-fried-lawyers-quit...

Not sure who's representing him now.

He's a guy who believes he's way smarter than he actually is. He's confused luck with skill and thinks he understands things better than everyone else.

He doesn't consider the bad case scenarios because in his mind, he'll have planned for them. But he is in this scenario. Which is a bad case. That he didn't plan for. That is bad because of his attitude and lack of planning.

He thinks he can somehow fast-talk Congress into thinking he didn't commit a crime.

He's going to go to jail thinking that the jury fucked up by finding him guilty. If they just understood, they'd realize he's better than everyone and deserves to be free and rich and to use your money.

To a certain point, he got special treatment like almost no other in recent memory. From top people/investors too.

I think this is taking him way too seriously.

He’s an active drug addict and career criminal. His ramblings about how it was someone else’s fault and he just needs someone to give him a little more money because his plans were sound make just as much sense coming from a white guy with impressive parents as they do coming from anyone else.

How do you see that I'm taking him seriously?

I'm basically calling him at best an average guy who believes he is brilliant because he got lucky and who now believes his own press release.

Your first two paragraphs could describe one founder I know as well... So far he and his pals only burned 800 million or so, and didn't defraud anyone as far as I can tell.

Compared to some of the confessions he has made in other interviews, I don't think anything here is too bad.

Regarding the "I fucked up" line, I'm not sure that is damaging at all (except possibly the tone; who knows how that will play with a jury).

His lawyers may intend to argue that he was merely made mistakes, and therefore had no intent to defraud anyone.

According to a NYT article, he was insisting that billions in funding came in 8 minutes after filing for Chapter 11, but of course, couldn't give any details, or any reason why someone would give such funding:

>>In a letter to former colleagues last week, he said he regretted filing for bankruptcy, claiming that “potential interest in billions of dollars of funding came in roughly eight minutes after I signed the Chapter 11 docs.”

>>He presented no evidence for that claim, and in any case, FTX was no longer his company to run.

https://www.nytimes.com/2022/11/29/technology/sam-bankman-fr...

Well, I heard that there was a Nigerian royal with a long-lost inheritance -- all he needed was for SBF to have access to the FTX bank account and the funds could have been wired postehaste!

"Potential interest". That's not actual money; that's not even "I'm interested in giving you money". That's "I could be interested in giving you money". That plus an actual $6 will get you a cappuccino.

It's "i claim to have billions to save you, but due dilly and all. shoot me a zip of all your books records and everything else inside the kimono so I can scoop all the juicy intel on my competitors before the window to exclusive access ro that data shuts."

Good catch, I was overstating SBF's claim there. Still, knowing his penchant for lying, even that much ("potential" interest) is probably a self-deluded exaggeration.

"Is he under oath with these statements?"

These are notes, not testimony. We do not know what questions would have been put to SBF. He was arrested so the scheduled hearing never happened.

Note it is rare to see anyone prosecuted for lying to Congress, and even more rare to be convicted. Remember this one:

https://archive.nytimes.com/www.nytimes.com/books/97/06/29/r...

The maximum sentence for perjury or 18 USC 1001 is only 5 years anyway.

Even if SBF could raise billions to make his victims whole, he could still be convicted of wire fraud and other charges. Fraud that is unsuccessful or results in no loss is still a crime. SBF is trying to deflect attention away from what he has done. Is it working.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com