It's fucking wild that this guy keeps talking, because either we're watching this guy continue to incriminate himself in ways that are going to really hurt him a court of law, or he's actually going to get off lightly in which case his confidence is just disgusting. He genuinely thinks he can just continually say in front of everyone "These assets I just totally invented are worth billions" and no amount of argument affects him. And that he hasn't done anything wrong when we literally have testimony from his employees about exactly how stole the money. "If I just say illiquid enough, it'll all be ok". No. At some point this guy is going to be in a court and have to come up with a coherent answer why he's describing stuff he made up as illiquid billions, and it better be good.
He simply doesn't have even a passing relationship with the truth. It just seems that at some point in the years of idiot VCs handing him money and servicing him orally, he started to actually believe he can just make up reality.
> he started to actually believe he can just make up reality.
Yep, I believe he truly believes his own BS. Like probably the rest of the crypto scene.
And, like, well, increasingly huge portions of the whole damn country and world these days? It's a make-your-own-self-serving-facts world.
But yeah, I think he truly thinks he's some kind of a victim here, of some kind of a takedown of a solvent FTX that wasnt' doing anything different from most everyone else in the space (that might very well be true?!? it's a space built on BS and playing fast and loose). And probably truly feels bad for those who got screwed by it. He just doesn't see how it's anything he's responsible for. Isn't this the way all those people getting rich got rich, isn't this just how it's done? Isn't that "disruption"? He may not be wrong.
Did you not see his two spreadsheets labelled "JUST AN ESTIMATE" that clearly show he is right? I would love to know the thought process behind his decision to make this post.
Presumably the thought process is something along the lines of "No one is going to look at this, only count the liquid stuff and make the very obvious point we were underwater even at the peak of the market".
If SBF actually tries to go to trial and gets deposed in the lead up, then every one of these interviews, blog posts and tweets are just more documents his attorneys will give him to study in preparation. He will have to ensure every answer he gives is consistent with these prior statements. Does anyone think SBF can do this. If he plans to testify at trial, then he will have to go through this drill again. First SBF says "I fucked up." Now he is saying the implosion was due to factors outside his control.
What is with his parents. Is he locked in his room playing video games. Do they have any idea what he is doing. I think he has a brother close to his age. How can these people stand by and let a family member make such idiotic choices.
This is why the Silicon Valley people advising Zuckerberg have opted to keep him from having to testify in a federal trial on multiple occasions. Being truthful is not something these kids can do well and anyway the truth is far too dangerous for "tech" companies.
Obviously I am only referring to the civil cases. In additon to ones files by the SEC and CFTC, SBF has been named in numerous others as well. For example,
IMHO, SBF is a shining symbol of a much larger problem that has been borne out of if not at least faciltated by the now crashing "tech" industry. What percentage of the top FTX creditors who curiously want to remain anonymous in the FTX bankruptcy are connected to this so-called "tech" industry. The media is suggesting there are some major "tech" industry proponents on the list. Internet-based surveillance and advertsing services disguised as "innovation", a "business model" and even as a utopia-like economic future for once healthier societies is a like a virus every bit as harmful as COVID. IMO.
Hmm so "testimony" is a bit firm, maybe it's referring to something I haven't seen yet but I read that as referring to the backdoor: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6DezodR9hNI
If it is the backdoor, then to be honest his own statements on it make him look more guilty of it than anything else. Here's a transcript from that interview:
Tiffany Fong: There was something about a backdoor that allowed you to execute commands that could alter the companies financial records without alerting others. That this was put in place, I think that was a Reuters article which made it seem like you secretly were moving money in the background.
SBF: Wait and this is something that I would be doing?
TF: It kind of said that SBF put like a secret backdoor so that secretly he was moving funds to Alameda and it was undetected and that this was something that you put into place potentially. I mean that's how it read
SBF: Well that's interesting because that's definitely not true I don't even know how to code, is the honest embarrassing answer. I certainly wasn't, like, building some backdoor into the system, I could barely use the system.
He then goes on to describe how he used the UI, but didn't work with the underlying system and dips into a "long and almost boring story" about a little oopsie where they were wrong about the size of Alameda's balances. At this point Tiffany seems to have been distracted enough to press him on the back door (presumably the Alameda "fuck up" confession seemed more interesting).
I dunno, I feel like if you're asked about using some sketchy-sounding functionality and using it to skim money, and you answer "Well I certainly didn't BUILD that!" then jingled your keys for a few minutes, it’s pretty clear you were involved somehow
Honestly, I believe he really believes he did nothing wrong, and really feels bad about anyone getting financially ruined.
I think he was kind of an idiot, in an environment where lots of people were getting rich behaving in unethical and illegal ways, and getting away with it, while convincing themselves they weren't doing anything wrong. That whole "scene" created it's own version of reality in which they could do whatever they want and make up their own facts and deserved only victory... which sounds kind of familiar for the USA and much of the world in general these days.
Lack of reality based thinking coupled with adhd stimulants that on initial intake create a euphoria and makes you feel even more grandiose. That's when reality based thinking goes completely out the window.
He has no objective capability anymore to be self aware, and it's made worse with prescription drugs.
When the feds come knocking on your door asking about several billion dollars going missing, and you let yourself do the talking via blogs and interviews versus your team of lawyers, you have absolutely lost your mind. Certainly don't add adderral or alcohol, or anything to the mix. Go into a small dark room and smoke some weed you junkie crook. Keep quiet, your inner circle already ratted on you. Have some respect for the $250 million your parents scourged up to bail your stupid ass out, reprehensible fuck.
When you see how people behave in fields like this where the common social contract ethical standards and law hasn't quite caught up to whatever the new constructs are, it doesn't inspire confidence in an innate morality capacity
Pretty clear evidence of a lack of remorse (well he has remorse he lost the bet but not for being a fraud) and acceptance of his crimes even during the judicial process. He's gonna go away for a long time.
If he just shut his mouth it would be difficult to judge his thoughts. However his-Adderall fueled posts betray him.
Doesn't look good when yet again here he expresses wishes to reboot the fraud. It's a pretty clear signal as soon as this guy gets out, if he is in fact a criminal, that he will do as he says.
This is really misleading as it ignores the main fraud FTX committed: commingling user funds. Exchanges should never put their users' assets at risk and FTX's T&C said they didn't. If you deposited 1 BTC on their exchange, they were supposed to store that 1 BTC for you.
If they had done that, there would be no issues. If users leave, you just give them back what they owned and no one loses money.
Yes, the core criminal claims (commingling funds, funnelling money to Alameda through unaccounted margin, using software to hide things from the balance sheet) are just totally unaddressed.
As long as you don't actually lose the money while doing those things, though, no one really notices and no one outside of prosecutors office even cares.
Pragmatically (but not legally) the complaint is he lost the money. His world crashing around him revolves around that. So he has the wrong, but understandable viewpoint that the legal complaint is that he lost the money.
Even if you don't lose people money, lying about how you're using it is a crime and you can go to jail for it.
Ask Martin Shkreli. He never lost any investors money, but still got 7 years in prison because he lied about what he was doing with their funds and used profits from some investments to cover losses from others.
To be honest you don’t really do those things if you had a legitimate business, he commingled finds because he ran out money. He ran out money because he was making poor risky bets. Over a long enough time horizon his bad trading was going to realise losses, and as we’ve seen, he was going to cover it up.
If FTX had 100bn in the bank, he would’ve kept going until the whole 100 was gone trying to chase the losses.
For fun, I recommend opening the SEC's case against SBF [1] and searching "tweet" and "television." They are building their case every time he opens his mouth.
This is why if you ever find yourself in any kind of serious legal matter, take your lawyer's advice and stop talking. It doesn't matter how smart you think you are. Prosecutors will use your words against you.
I agree that [dishonest] lawyers will twist your words against you.
But I disagree with your advice to "stop talking". We need everyone to keep talking. We need to change the justice system. It needs to be more transparent, more honest, better at quickly getting to the truth.
I don't necessarily know what the solutions are, but I am going through a court case Pro Se right now and have seen first hand what a cess pool it has become, and it makes me sad for our country, and we need to start fixing it.
A justice system will never be about the truth, because the truth does not bring justice: justice is a human attempt at realising what most would call karma. You do a bad thing, we try to make you suffer: the truth doesn't matter, because there's no absolute "good" and "bad" -- it's all perception. Lawyers are not truth seekers, they're playing a game, and to represent oneself in pursuit of the truth is a fools errand.
I've served on a jury, I agree the modern model for justice is broken, but the problem is not an absence of truth, it's much more fundamental.
"FTX US remains fully solvent and should be able to return all customers’ funds. FTX International has many billions of dollars of assets, and I am dedicating nearly all of my personal assets to customers."
A theory going around a few weeks ago about his apparent inability to STFU is that his defence will be that he was affected by ADHD meds that impaired his judgement and made him impulsive, and have continued to do so even post collapse. I doubt lawyers could come up with anything better than this, really.
Does establishing impaired judgement due to ADHD meds require that he demonstrate continued impaired judgement regarding the specifics of the case? Can’t he just buy every old GameCube game that comes to mind on eBay and live bet the Las Vegas Raiders like the rest of us? “My client can’t possibly be guilty. He spent $80 dollars on a complete in box copy of Luigi’s Mansion and didn’t play past the first boss.”
>A theory going around a few weeks ago about his apparent "inability" to STFU is that his defence will be that he was affected by ADHD meds that impaired his judgement and made him impulsive, and have continued to do so even post collapse. I doubt lawyers could come up with anything better than this, really.
Doesn't seem far fetched honestly. He really reminds me people who took one too many adderall doses and suddenly think everything is a great idea.
Do ADHD meds differ from, say, alcohol from a legal perspective? My understanding is that being drunk is never a defense. The meds are something he chooses to consume as an adult so it seems like he should be compared to an unmedicated standard. But IANAL.
So am I reading this right: If I have $1m of Tesla stock, and I borrow $1m to buy crypto, that’s zero “net borrowing,” because the stock is “liquid” so I can just repay the loan at any time. Then they both go down by 50%. Now I need more “liquidity,” i.e. to borrow more money, which apparently grows on trees.
Yup. And even as I read my own comment, I can hear someone saying, “The long-term thesis remains sound!” and “Lots of other funds had similar losses!” and “How were we supposed to know, it was a perfect storm!” Meanwhile building bubbles upon bubbles upon bubbles.
He's smarter than a lot of people think. He may very well be the smartest in the room despite appearing dumb.
The problem is even a smart person dressed as a clown will be recognized as a clown. At some point you can claim not to be wearing clown clothes until you are blue in the face but no matter how dumb the person is you're talking to they won't believe it. He must hope he can convince 1 in 12 people he is not a clown.
IANAL but my understanding is that there is a law that allows the victim to sue for the proceeds. My understanding is also that if you have sophisticated legal isolation to protect the funds (say your parents are Stanford lecturer lawyers), it's effectively unenforceable.
First amendment means he can speak about it and it would castrate news companies if third party entities could not profit from reporting on crime.
SBF may have hit a ceiling of punishment. What are they going to do? Add another lifetime jail sentence? Another billion dollars he cannot possible repay?
No, but they will likely see topline coverage in big media - and then their takeaway of that topline may well be “SBF wrote a blog saying FTX was solvent and administrators could refund customers but haven’t”
You might be right. I've talked to both sides of my family and realized I was in a tech bubble and no one knew who the hell the guy was though. I doubt the average 35+ y/o person outside of tech even knows what FTX or SBF is.
I don’t know - here in the U.K. it’s getting fairly significant coverage on BBC, Sky News etc. The Today Programme on Radio 4 (which is the “definitive” establishment news programme) has been covering it quite a lot.
I mean, he is insisting that FTX and Alameda aren't really dead, and are still solvent...
> FTX US remains fully solvent and should be able to return all customers’ funds. FTX International has many billions of dollars of assets, and I am dedicating nearly all of my personal assets to customers.
He claims that FTX US is still viable, in part because his “personal” Robinhood shares (that have been seized by DoJ, and are part of a multiparty ownership battle, as a result of the skethcy loans funding the purchase) are available to backstop FTX US customer losses.
Yep something I keep seeing in his interviews and posts is that he will talk enthusiastically and at length about how some external events caused FTX difficulties, but will ignore or hand-wave some actions that he actually did.
The impression I get from them isn't "oh this is a really unlucky guy" though, it is "oh this guy is quite a skilled manipulator".
Sure seems like a Adderral high right? Like bro, the feds are building a case against you. Shut the fuck up, and only talk to your lawyers.
He’s high as fuck on Adderral right now. The Adderral high can make you feel like the dumbest shit you are doing is the most brilliant thing in the world.
I mean I made the same joke as others about stimulant high, but, also..
It feels like he's trying to salvage his reputation with people like us, or at least some of the web3-adjacent people who hang out on forums like this; this stuff won't convince lawyers or a jury or people who analyze for fraud. But it might convince people who were/are crypto enthusiasts and looking to see legitimacy restored and reputations untarnished.
The sheer schadenfreude generated from the wunderkind that still appears to be under the impression he'll be able to talk his away into a better position.
Last week right after he pleaded not guilty, he filed an objection in the FTX bankruptcy case arguing that the Robinhood shares he purchased with money borrowed from Alameda are his personal assets. Of course as we know Alameda was "borrowing" from FTX (without FTX telling customers).
If one accepts that Alameda's cash was comprised in part of FTX's cash then it appears SBF wants to pay for his legal defense with shares he and Zixiao Wang bought using money from FTX customer deposits.
What are the chances he changes his plea between now and October. Eventually he will have to apologise. Maybe he'll do so from prison when he is finally denied 24/7 internet access.
>Last week right after he pleaded not guilty, he filed an objection in the FTX bankruptcy case arguing that the Robinhood shares he purchased with money borrowed from Alameda are his personal assets.
I don't know if you were referring to the following part of the article, but, in case others are missing the context:
>>Nearly all of my assets were and still are utilizable to backstop FTX customers. I have, for instance, offered to contribute nearly all of my personal shares in Robinhood to customers–or 100%, if the Chapter 11 team would honor my D&O legal expense indemnification.
So here he's claiming that he wanted the Robinhood shares to be available to FTX creditors, even as he's previously made a motion to claim them as his own.
> So here he's claiming that he wanted the Robinhood shares to be available to FTX creditors, even as he's previously made a motion to claim them as his own.
And his claim to the bankruptcy court was that he needed them to pay for his criminal defense, not to have them available to voluntarily backstop FTX US liabilities. (Also, the idea that the proceeds of the property acquired through the dubious backdoor self-dealing FTX international -> Alameda -> SBF loan should go to backstop FTX US customers is... interesting.)
I think I had as much as $30,000 in my new FTX.us account (I was loyal to Coinbase, but inept officials in Hawai'i banned crypto and I was kicked off Coinbase and needed another exchange). So I should be angry.
But I'm not. At least not yet.
Something seems phishy to me. I think SBF might be telling the truth. Or he could be lying. I don't know.
I'm 50/50 on this one though.
FTX.us was a good product. It was snappy and it worked. Until the lawyers took over. SBF says it was fully solvent and I have not seen any proof that it wasn't.
I think you're right that FTX US was likely solvent. But had SBF not been forced to file bankruptcy you can bet he would have gambled all of FTX US to try and bail out FTX Int'l to avoid 100+ years in jail. I think he was just saving that bet for last as it was the most dangerous one.
I honestly don't know what to think, on the FTX US issue. Another US-regulated subsidiary of FTX, LedgerX[1], remained solvent and had not let SBF gamble customer assets, and was (somewhat famously) left out of the bankruptcy[2]. And I'm constantly hearing that US regulations are effective at preventing blatant financial fraud, so why would they protect one US-regulated subsidiary but not another?
[1] Though it was created independently of SBF/FTX and only purchased by them. (Note: not to be confused with Ledger hardware wallets.)
The quantity of "he's guilty" comments and tweets are a result of how famously and enormously FTX flamed out and how comically guilty he looks. It's not some unnamed entity (CZ? Binance? The US government?) organising some PR campaign against him.
Re your tweet - are you one of those people who believe a covid vaccine caused that player to collapse? You realise athletes have seemingly randomly or spontaneously collapsed many times before Covid 19 was even discovered - often when they weren't even hit, as Hamlin was.
> Re your tweet - are you one of those people who believe a covid vaccine caused that player to collapse?
No. That would be stupid.
I believe there's a chance that it did. At first, 1%. Now, given that they haven't released his vaccine status yet, and as my Tweet shows have paid for an expensive PR campaign to slander anyone who questions whether there has been a cause (a campaign that has clearly had an effect on you), I have updated my probabilities to believe with 20% certainty the vaccine caused his heart attack. What odds do you give it?
Nahh man, I reckon if you're shoe-horning vaccine stuff into an FTX story you're a bit more antivax than you're letting on, and it sounds like you're out to get more people on your side. The guy took a significant blow to the chest just before it happened, the odds that a vaccine was responsible are about the same as it being caused by what he ate for breakfast, the flavour of gatorade he was drinking or the way he laced his boots up.
I have 1,200 Facebook friends. Not a single one died of Covid. The one who suffered the most, was a 38 year old mother of 2 in top shape who did not get Covid, but had a sudden heart attack shortly after getting the vaccine. She barely survived and has had a long road back in rehab. She is from a prominent family and they were very pro-vax. I think the odds of the NFL player's heart attack being vaccine induced are a lot higher than you think (You did not provide a number, but by your description I guess you guess is <0.001% odds?).
That being said, I am 80% confident it was not caused by vaccine. Why not just release his vaccinated status?
The guy is young and a professional athlete, so assume he was vaccinated. I've also known someone to have heart attack before covid vaccinations were a thing, young person too. Doesn't mean anything. The only reason this is even being discussed is because a bunch of people have leapt on every single high-profile death or health incident and raised hell trying to tie it to Covid vaccinations and doing the "just asking questions" thing to try to make people doubt themselves. Apparently this has worked on you.
My dude, if you think I'm signing up for the thing which made you estimate the probability of something you know nothing about (while also warming up to antivax conspiracy theories) you have seriously misunderstood this exchange.
The more I stare at this "balance sheet", the less sense it makes. All the numbers are positive, but "total" is far less than the sum of the balances! What the hell is a "negative coin balance"? How does a "positive coin balance" differ from a "wallet balance"? And where does the assertion about customer margin "postion" (sic) being under US$250M come from?
I would like to point out an important factor which I think is not only I feel stupid about it. So, firstly, we are talking about the United States, a leading superpower, an essential country for preserving world order; just imagine being an American citizen. It is not that easy to get arrested in another country. You will always feel the privilege of being a first-world country national. Secondly, the US still dominates the financial world. Every transaction in the SWIFT system needs to be confirmed in a very centralized manner. So, you know who is sending money to who, etc. Thirdly, US Army is so big, everywhere from the Middle East to Asia.
So, I’m trying to say that the US dominates this planet in many ways…
And then SBF shows up and says there is a separate country called The Bahamas. It is a different country, with other company registration and other laws. Therefore, It is all different.
He simply doesn't have even a passing relationship with the truth. It just seems that at some point in the years of idiot VCs handing him money and servicing him orally, he started to actually believe he can just make up reality.