Every round Anthropic raises twists the knife deeper in SBF. If only he could have survived the downturn his Antropic investment alone probably could have papered over the other loses.
It is probably just a coincidence, but it's darkly funny how well this lines up with the strategy described in a rather infamous LessWrong post. The title is "Solutions to the Altruist's burden: the Quantum Billionaire Trick", but you probably know it by a different name. The author is one Roko Mijic.
Yeah, not a total coincidence of thinking style. I just don't think it's likely that SBF was literally thinking about Roko's post as he did the crimes.
It's not the same due to the Law of Large Numbers. The risk involved in many small 51% bets is very different from the risk in a single all-or-nothing 51% bet.
>"Every round Anthropic raises twists the knife deeper in SBF. If only he could have survived the downturn his Antropic investment alone probably could have papered over the other loses."
Things working out in the end doesn't make what he did not a crime at the time. He was a common paper hanger, albeit with billions instead.
>Morally speaking, no. Practically speaking, it does. He would not have seen jail time.
It's literally exactly what Shkreli got 7 years for, even after repaying investors. If you defraud money from someone and put it back before they find out, it's still a crime. Fraud is about intent more than anything else, and they proved it for SBF.
Practically speaking I think everyone involved would've had a good incentive to brush it off behind closed doors and not rock the boat. Crypto is entirely based on vibes (there are very few - if any - legitimate applications) and rocking the boat would cause losses across the entire industry.
He went to jail because his autism wouldn't allow him to be duplicitous like a CEO doing evil things has to be and he attracted too much negative attention.
Yes but investors being whole and profitable would almost certainly have not resulted in jail time. He probably would have even had enough unquestionably personal returns to pay back any misappropriated funds in a negotiated settlement, if they even come to light at all.
Let's not pretend there aren't multitudes out there doing similar things who never get caught. SBF was just more egregious and untimely w/ his actions.
One doesn't need to go more than 2 feet into the mire of meme coins before finding the detritus of 6000000 rug pulls. Just that these guys never get prosecuted.
Yeah, but they're not playing with institutional money. They're not messing with people that have world-leaders on speed dial. Crypto gets away with what it does because when you enter an explicitly laissez-faire side of life, expect people to act laissez-faire. The rest is fraud/laundering/illicit activity tracking, which is why KYC requirements were passed right on schedule.
> In the early days of FedEx, Smith had to go to great lengths to keep the company afloat. In one instance, after a crucial business loan was denied, he took the company's last $5,000 to Las Vegas and won $27,000 gambling on blackjack to cover the company's $24,000 fuel bill.
Some who take on unreasonable risk will be among the most successful people alive. Most will lose eventually, long before you hear about them if they keep too many taking crazy risks.
Who is a great genius, and is who is just winning at "The Martingale entrepreneurial strategy"?
You know, it only just now occurs to me to wonder if the blackjack story is the public sanitized version of "how I got $24k because I'm not allowed to tell you the real version"
What this version of the FedEx story doesn't mention is that Fred was already stiffing his pilots on their salaries. Taking the last money in the company and deciding that the best use for it was the blackjack table in Vegas and not paying his employees ... worked well, but it was a gamble, let's be clear, not a calculated decision - like you say, not the decision of a "great genius". It goes a different way, and you have "FedEx founder decides to go gambling, leaving his employees without paychecks".
The casino is an extremely rational savings model if you expected to constantly be robbed and want to convert small (and thus not worth robbing) income streams into occasionally large sums of money to be spent rapidly. I.e. say you are a north korean worker in China/Russia and you occasionally get small change to spend on cigarettes, you could gamble it every 'paycheck' and eventually buy a phone to escape with the winnings.
Filipinos have a more predictable low-loss version of this call Paluwagan.
It can also be a way to evade capital controls. You know you'll lose, but otoh you also know you'll probably not lose _everything_ and you buy in with RMB and cash out in HKD.
I think it's really objectionable to refer to this as an "SBF moment".
It's not just about surviving a downtown and unforseen circumstances with some luck (like the sibling talking about FedEx barely making it). Tesla, for example, was famously extremely close to bankruptcy.
But SBF got into the situation he was in due to his egregious fraud. The accounting at FTX was a criminal joke, with multiple sets of books, bypassable controls, outright fake numbers. My guess is that if SBF had survived that particular BTC downturn that his extreme hubris and willingness to commit fraud would have eventually done him in - downturns always happen at some point, and his brazenness in his criminal enterprise showed no signs of learning from mistakes.
Sure, all hugely successful companies have a ton of luck involved. But I think it's a mistake to pretend that SBF was just done in by bad timing, or that all companies do what he did. His empire collapse was pretty inevitable IMO if you look at what a clown show FTX was under the covers.
Lol, tether, bitfinex are examples that came to mind. A lot of the OG crypto instutions got to where they are by "faking it till they made it" long enough to actually make it.
Does no one still remember that tether continually stalled audits FOR YEARS in the face of increasing scrutiny?
Correct. Companies go bust all the time, for market timing reasons that are mostly out of their control. But going bust is different from going bust and stealing billions.
Whether by negligence or intent, FTX was arranged so that they couldn't go bust without stealing.
It's a slightly different context, but Apple probably would have gone out of business if Microsoft hadn't needed them so badly to exist due to antitrust. Hard to imagine how different the world would have been now if that had happened.
yeah, had CZ not made those tweets... He only had to weather another 2 months of the BTC bear market. BTC began to rebound in Jan 2023. Of course hindsight is 20-202
Fraud is only called fraud if you get caught and defraud the wrong people. Corporation-on-consumer fraud is generally OK and a lot of businesses we consider "legitimate" do it as standard practice. Fraud against investors and "the rich" can still be papered over and forgotten if everyone ends up richer in the end. SBF just got unlucky.
