How the media is gaslighting for SBF (FTX and Sam Bankman-Fried pt.4)

SBF’s business empire imploded and FTX, once the second-largest crypto exchange, is now bankrupt.

I explain the story, the rumours, the ugly and the potential future of Sam Bankman-Fried and FTX.

Part 4: I looked at a recent New York Times (NYT) article (read: puff piece) that came out right after the FTX case (read: fraud) was exposed.

🙏🙏🙏 Thanks for watching! 😊

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🧩 Background:

Sam Bankman-Fried aka SBF is the Founder of FTX and Alameda Research which filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy in the US. FTX used to be the second-largest cryptocurrency exchange and allegedly handled $15B in assets on the platform.

Alameda Research was a crypto hedge fund and made varying investments mainly focusing on cryptocurrencies.

FTX raised $1.8B in total investments with a $32B peak valuation from Tiger Global, Softbank and Sequoia.

- SBF’s net worth went from $26B at the peak to zero.
- His parents are both professors at Stanford Law School
- He went to MIT and graduated with a physics degree
- He was a strong political donor, mostly to democrats in the US
- He was the second-largest individual donor to Joe Biden in the 2020 election cycle
- He donated $40 million to the Democratic Party during the 2022 US midterm elections
- He closed a $135M deal to rename the Miami Heats Stadium
- He got Naming Rights to the Esports Organization TSM in a $210M Deal
- Kept talking about effective altruism and donating all his wealth. He also donated to charities
- He lived in a penthouse in the Bahamas with about 10 roommates
- Allegedly, Bankman-Fried was dating coworker Caroline Ellison (CEO of Alameda)

And:

- Allegedly: They used user deposits for trading via Alameda
- Allegedly: They took extreme risks and lost a lot of user money or just wasted it on non-investments
- Allegedly: They had no real organization or board meetings
- Allegedly: SBF constantly used drug patches to keep his brain dopamine high
- Allegedly: They only bailed out crypto companies because they held FTT to prevent them from dumping it (but not all buyouts held any FTT so it is a rumour)

BANKRUPTCY COURT filing quotes:

- “Never in my career have I seen such a complete failure of corporate controls and such a complete absence of trustworthy financial information as occurred here.”

- “Implementation of Controls: the implementation of accounting, audit, cash management, cybersecurity, human resources, risk management, data protection and other systems that did not exist, or did not exist to an appropriate degree”

- “Many of the companies in the FTX Group, especially those organized in Antigua and the Bahamas, did not have appropriate corporate governance. I understand that many entities, for example, never had board meetings.”

- “The FTX Group did not maintain centralized control of its cash. Cash management procedural failures included the absence of an accurate list of bank accounts and account signatories, as well as insufficient attention to the creditworthiness of banking partners around the world.”

- “The audit firm for the Dotcom Silo was Prager Metis, a firm with which I am not familiar and whose website indicates that they are the “first-ever CPA firm to officially open its Metaverse headquarters in the metaverse platform Decentraland”

- “At this time, the Debtors have been unable to prepare a complete list of who worked for the FTX Group as of the Petition Date, or the terms of their employment.”

- “employees of the FTX Group submitted payment requests through an on-line ‘chat’ platform where a disparate group of supervisors approved disbursements by responding with personalized emojis”

- “management practices included the use of an unsecured group email account as the root user to access confidential private keys and critically sensitive data for the FTX Group companies around the world, the absence of daily reconciliation of positions on the blockchain, the use of software to conceal the misuse of customer funds”

🌐 Sources:

Twitter, obviously.

[WasFakestCenturyAesthetics]

good point - "at times romantically involved" is like "a little pregnant"

thx for the efficient German content

[ragotmarvel]

The mainstream media headlines about this debacle clearly indicates a huge alleged "conflict of interest" overlapping from this companies to the involved recent filed bankrupt company FTX (allegedly).

[Kawiboy]

Best explanation of GasLighting I've heard my Friend 💪👏.. Well done as always 👍 Appreciate ya ✌️😉

[Michiel_de_Jong]

This advertorial in the NYT was paid in Crypto, ... is my guess.

[johnhio]

Thanks for entrusting your crypto with us, our friends at Alameda reseaAAAANd its gone...

[pretorious]

The "people" and the government/media have never been more disconnected.

[Roundbeargames]

It's pretty obvious who stole customer money and why they're acting this way.

[Tleilaxu_Mentat]

"At times romantically involved"==groveling way of saying they were non-exclusive fubus, that's all.

[thorsrensen]

I have not met anyone who understood how they could make suck a big swindel number.

[clusCS]

Oh man ... I almost thought the same when I read the article ! Thanks for doing this great analysis !! Well done ...

[theresachung]

This is insane. This guy broke the Chinese wall between customer money and proprietary investment. This is TOTALLY illegal.

But NYtimes? Have NO idea what's going on.

[mkulak]

Now you have one follower more on twitter ^^
PS. Amazing video

[tutcity]

Appreciate your obviously well research comments and descriptions of what you found. A great consolidation/distillation of the important facts. One request I have is to change the lighting of your face. The hard contrast is difficult to view for an extended amount of time. Keep up the great work!

[FranconiaFriend]

That little acting bit around 14:15 was great, you should throw more of that in.

[flewdefur]

Great series of videos. I always enjoy your presentation style.

[tallgirlhappyme]

⏩ *What no one is talking about:* Did NO ONE do their *due diligence before investing* with him?!

FTX had *NO board, NO CFO, only annual "audits"...* it's RIDICULOUS that people *handed over millions of dollars* over to SBF and the other INEXPERIENCED young people who worked with him. Was their *annual report* just *completely made up?!*

[elquixote]

SAWS....You are toooo intelligent for this subject.

Anyhow, in my opinion, it was a project created by the FED/IRS, CIA, HONG KONG CHINESE AND DEMOCRAT PARTY (the republican party are too dumb to think of any ideas), to bottom line, for the IRS, how they can combat the loss of taxes. WHAT ELSE? As for the LOST funds, they have a happy home in a Chinese Bank in Hong Kong. It's going to be a great movie. Sam and that girl in Love. HOW PRECIOUS.

[legalcoffee]

At minimum, he pitched high returns that he did not know he could deliver in order to outbid his competition, he received currencies from people in trust, he failed to abide by the terms of the contracts he entered into with his depositors, and he failed to follow established best practices for running corporations, managing risks, and compliance. So, at minimum, he/the FTX companies appear to be grossly negligent (possibly criminally negligent). If he is allowed to “get away with this” with that excuse of “I didn’t know - sorry I lost it all”, it will pave the way for a lot of similar business practices - a probable outcome is that no one will trust anyone anymore which will severely impede economic stability and societal progress.

[ulwen]

An SBF video without a single mention of forest nymphs. I'm starting to think this guy isn't Patrick Boyle.

[brunodosreis]

Banks should always be able to return funds for 100%. They charge for services so they should just build a business model around that and also be required to put up their own money before the funds start coming in. They just want to make money over poor people’s backs without any personal risk.