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Comment by JohnBooty | Hacker News Reader

    Take an idiot that needs to feel important, tell him he's a "boy genius"

This points to something I've always wondered about SBF: why did anybody think he was a genius?

I know very specific reasons people think Musk, Jobs, Gates, Zuck, and others are geniuses even if I don't agree in every case.

But... SBF? What did he even allegedly do (or preside over) that seemed smart or unique? It was... a crypto exchange. They had their own coin. Uh. Those are not unique things. I don't get it.

But your comment made me think. Maybe it was just an empty bubble of perception. VCs pretended he was a genius so they could use him, and told everybody he was a genius, so everybody thought he was a genius even though nobody could point to why they thought that way.

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There was a puff piece from Sequoia[0] that tries to make the case that he is an altruistic genius and it hasn’t really aged well.

[0]: https://web.archive.org/web/20221027181005/https://www.sequo... (wayback machine is needed because sequoia has taken it down)

The crypto crowd needed a genius, and he kinda fit the image, so they went with it. It’s not that different to any other political movement; leaders are made by others, not themselves. It’s natural for us to focus on the person itself as if they are the ones getting all the benefits but all the crypto scammers benefitted from having an “altruistic crypto king” as a media figure.

He went to MIT and was employed at Jane Street, this doesn’t mean he was a Steve Jobs talent but he is certainly high IQ.

I know a few MIT grads and they're plenty smart but nobody is calling them geniuses and throwing billions of VC at them, so I'm wondering what was different about SBF.

He had a pedigree, I guess, and made some... money doing the arbitage thing. But also a lot of people do that? There seems to be no real intrinsic reason why this guy would be seen as a star.

I guess it was just kind of a "right guy right place right time thing" thing.

Totally agree. The ferocity of hustling and always be selling on the one hand and dually the reflexive need to hyperbolically market or brand someone as exceptional category X with the implication the bestower also has brilliant insight is gotten stupid. When the currency becomes BS you can bet tomorrow can only bring hyper BS.

I'm reminded of the Johnny Carson line after dealing with crazy entertainment types: I'd give my bottom dollar for a regular person right now.

I'm still reading the fawning biography Going Infinite, and even Michael Lewis thinks there was a lot of "right guy right place right time" involved. Heck, even SBF thought so. Lewis' origin story is that SBF noticed how efficient Jane Street was and how inefficient crypto markets were and assumed that somebody would inevitably bring greater efficiency to crypto, so he thought, "Hey, why can't that somebody be me!?"

I'd use Steve Wozniak over Steve Jobs when describing talent.

Steve Jobs had a talent for telling stories and getting people to believe them.

Yeah even if one thinks negatively of Jobs, comparing SBF to young Jobs is a joke.

SBF founded FTX in 2019 when he was ~27 years old. At that point he had gone to MIT and done some arbitage stuff. More than I've accomplished but I mean, I'm not really seeing anything that ticketed this guy for stardom.

By age 27, Jobs had founded Apple Computer and was one of the major players in launching the whole personal computing industry.

I mean, even if we feel negatively about Jobs, we can also point to a pretty wide range of accomplishments he helmed. Even outside of Apple. He was one of the founders of Pixar, purchasing it from Lucasfilm. Also famous for a certain brand of charisma or at least persausiveness. One can not think very highly of him, but also see why investors would be like let's give this guy some money, perhaps lots of money.

I don't think highly of Elon Musk but I have zero difficulty understanding why people would think he's a genius sort of guy and give him money. Even I have to admit he's been at the helm for some wild achievements. Also certainly a charismatic guy in some ways. Not going to have a shortage of money thrown at his next venture.

But SBF?

Again... what was anybody seeing in this guy? Must have just been "right place right time" when the crypto hype wave was cresting.

It’s also that he was naive enough to put himself out there as a kind of figurehead of sorts of the crypto movement. So the others were probably like “ok if you insist…”

He was also surfing high on his messiah complex with a kind of 2020’s version of white man burden which the public was enamoured with.

Can u comment more on this "white man's burden" that was prevalent in 2020 as you describe it?

I meant 2020’s as a decade, and the concept is Effective Altruism, the idea that a bunch of geeks sitting in a gaming chair behind a computer screen know better what to do with charity money than the people actually doing it on the real world.

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