Sam Bankman-Fried Manifesto Reads Like The Unabomber Crossed With Sweet Valley High

Lifestyles of the Rich and Callow.

Let’s check in on Sam Bankman-Fried, the frizzy-haired weirdo and disgraced cryptocurrency big shot who nonetheless looks like he runs a weekly Dungeons and Dragons game at an assisted-living facility.

It has been almost a year since SBF, as he is known because his full last name takes too goddamn long to type, was arrested in his tropical evil genius lair (a condo in the Bahamas) and extradited to the US to face charges after his cryptocurrency exchange FTX collapsed like a Chinese weather balloon after a missile hit, taking something like $8 billion in real money with it.

A federal judge let SBF out on bail, slapped an ankle monitor on him, and sent him to home confinement in his parents’ house in Palo Alto. Now the New York Times reports that during those months, SBF wrote a 15,000-word manifesto formatted as one long-ass Twitter thread. And in this Internet-age In Search of Lost Time for idiots, SBF apparently laid down rambling self-justifications for his actions, blamed FTX’s collapse largely on an ex-girlfriend he had made part of his executive team (and we thought we had a couple of toxic exes), and generally engaged in enough self-pity to power the sun.

All of which is fine if you leave your jumbo-jumbo-sized tweet in the Drafts folder. But SBF for some reason sent his to a YouTube influencer he’d become friendly with, and she shared it with the Times, and as the underpants gnomes might say, ???????

Like, does this sound like someone you should be sharing your potential legal defense strategy with:

Mr. Bankman-Fried gave Ms. Fong the documents in late January. It was not clear what he expected her to do with them. Ms. Fong, who lost money in the collapse of the crypto company Celsius Network, said she sympathized with FTX’s victims and was skeptical of many of Mr. Bankman-Fried’s claims.

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Go To Jail, Crypto Weirdo Sam Bankman-Fried, Go To Jail FOREVER

Sam Bankman FREED On $250 Million Bond, Has To Live With Parents, Be Their Butler

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This woman sounds like she could potentially be a witness, should prosecutors decide to call any victims of the alleged fraud to testify about the effects of SBF’s alleged crimes on their lives, and he’s trying to suck up to her and get her on his side before the trial. Nothing suspicious about anything there that a lawyer might make a to-do about witness tampering over during a criminal trial. 

As for the ex-girlfriend:

He described her as ill equipped for the job he gave her as head of Alameda, claiming she had cried during a meeting with him and refused to institute trading strategies that would have protected his businesses from a market crash.

“She continually avoided talking about risk management — dodging my suggestions — until it was too late,” he wrote in a document titled “Alameda’s Failure to Hedge.” “Every time that I reached out with suggestions, it just made her feel worse. I’m sure that being exes didn’t help.”

Workplace romances, amirite? They can be great. Or they can be toxic and volatile, particularly if the work involves running a Ponzi scheme that is stealing billions of dollars from trusting investors with your ex. This is especially true if you’re too dumb to realize you’re running a Ponzi scheme, as SBF appears to have been, according to another recent piece from New York magazine that recounts remarks SBF made about his business at a conference before the FTX collapse:

After a moment of contemplation, Levine said, “I think of myself as, like, a fairly cynical person. And that was so much more cynical than how I would’ve described [crypto] farm­ing. You’re just like, ‘Well, I’m in the Ponzi business and it’s pretty good.’”

Bankman-Fried said that was a reasonable response. “I think there’s like a sort of depressing amount of validity …” he said, trailing off.

Whoa, almost had a moment of self-awareness there!

Also from SBF’s manifesto, according to the Times:

[H]e criticized some of his closest colleagues, interspersing his arguments with photos from his high school years and stock images of popcorn and a garden maze. Every few pages, a key moment in the narrative is accompanied with a link to a music video by Alicia Keys, Katy Perry or Rihanna.

Oooo, neat, we didn’t know LiveJournal was still a thing.

Apparently SBF was too clueless to realize what a privilege it was to be out on bond, even if he had to wear an ankle monitor and not leave the house. Plenty of people caught up in America’s nightmare of a judicial system don’t even get that. All he had to do was sit on his ass, play with the puppy his folks bought him, maybe binge-watch old episodes of “The Golden Girls” on Hulu.

But no, SBF engaged in some light witness tampering and leaked personal papers of his co-defendants in a transparent effort to blame everyone else for his alleged crimes. Which is why the judge in his case revoked his bond last month and sent him to jail to await trial. Bummer. We wonder if his parents finished installing a pickle ball court at the house for him anyway. If nothing else, it will make a nice sunny spot for the dog to take naps.

[New York Times / New York Magazine]

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