Sam Bankman-Fried’s esteemed Stanford parents face their own reckoning
mercurynews.com
mercurynews.com
A few commenters were pretty gullible; they couldn’t imagine people lying about why they quit their jobs.
> No evidence has emerged yet to link Bankman and Fried to their son’s alleged crimes, and their level of legal culpability depends on their knowledge of the alleged fraud, Barhoma said.
That HN thread you linked to has multiple people providing good explanations why an emeritus professor retiring is nothing like “quitting” and they are right. They have plenty of reasons to not want to optinally teach classes they didn’t have to teach, at a minimum helping their son in crisis.
That’s hardly a suggestion of guilt
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2022-12-13/sam-bankm... explicitly says
> “Bankman-Fried, his parents, and other FTX and Alameda employees used FTX customer funds for a variety of personal expenditures, including luxury real estate purchases, private jets, documented and undocumented personal loans, and personal political donations,” the CFTC said in its complaint.
https://www.nytimes.com/2022/12/12/technology/sbf-parents-ft...
> The couple’s careers have been upended. Ms. Fried, 71, resigned last month as chairwoman of the board of a political donor network, Mind the Gap, which she had helped start to support Democratic campaigns and causes. Mr. Bankman, 67, has postponed a Stanford class he had been scheduled to teach in the winter, and he’s recruited a white-collar criminal defense lawyer to represent him.
My guess is that the idea of complicity must not sit well with folks who rub shoulders with criminals.
SBF was well regarded by the media and was in control of an alleged billion dollar company.
Why wouldn’t the parents think it’s normal to get a nice home in the Bahamas? Were they supposed to be digging into his financials and software architecture that allowed Alameda to pull unlimited funds?
I don’t see how any of their expertise would even contribute to this scam. It’s simple enough what he did… just not tell anyone he’s using FTX assets to cover reckless Alameda gambling.
Do you really think he confessed to his academic parents who built their careers on risk management?
Which one of us is being naive here? This didn’t take a family of experts to pull off.
This reads like a tabloid, no thanks.
I also wonder if it provides some excuses to do whatever it takes to be successful… “for the charitable causes”?
His parents were on the FTX payroll and contributing to the business.
It is not clear that MIT has any involvement with FTX operations
Either the poster went to MIT and has a grudge because it’s not everything they expected it to be, or they wanted to go to MIT but couldn’t.
It’s a constant punching bag here. For example, there was recently a long thread about them closing public access to some buildings (a relatively minor news story all things considered).