>Bailhe remembers it the same way: “We had a great meeting with Sam, but the last question, which I remember Alfred asking, was, ‘So, everything you’re building is great, but what is your long-term vision for FTX?’”
>That’s when SBF told Sequoia about the so-called super-app: “I want FTX to be a place where you can do anything you want with your next dollar. You can buy bitcoin. You can send money in whatever currency to any friend anywhere in the world. You can buy a banana. You can do anything you want with your money from inside FTX.”
>Suddenly, the chat window on Sequoia’s side of the Zoom lights up with partners freaking out.
>“I LOVE THIS FOUNDER,” typed one partner.
>“I am a 10 out of 10,” pinged another.
>“YES!!!” exclaimed a third.
>What Sequoia was reacting to was the scale of SBF’s vision. It wasn’t a story about how we might use fintech in the future, or crypto, or a new kind of bank. It was a vision about the future of money itself—with a total addressable market of every person on the entire planet.
>“I sit ten feet from him, and I walked over, thinking, Oh, shit, that was really good,” remembers Arora. “And it turns out that that fucker was playing League of Legends through the entire meeting.”
It’s a sight to behold to see the mechanizations these parts of the economy go through to ascribe to skill and vision what is purely luck and confidence. Truly sophisticated allocators of capital.
Especially with Elon, who is the definition of failing up and getting lucky (see Zip2, Tesla, Space-X). Just having capital was enough to have actually intelligent people flocking to him. When Elon makes decisions (see PayPal, Twitter) they are shit.
Elon Musk has lied for 27 years about his credentials. He does not have a BS in Physics, or any technical field. Did not get into a PhD program. Dropped out in 1995 & was illegal. Later, investors quietly arranged a diploma - but not in science.
Note: You may have to refresh a couple times, because as Twitter slowly collapses under Musk's leadership, it is now randomly unable to serve some Tweets reliably (been a user of Twitter for a long time, this is the first time I've ever seen this happen at this scale). I had to refresh the page a couple times to get past the "This tweet is unavailable" error.
I've seen this before and find it hard to believe because if Musk is proven to have truly faked his degree...I expect every big news outlet to be having a field day with the story, but this Twitter post appears to be only source of allegation at this point.
The better question is: why is Elon lying about it, and shouldn’t we care about that? Not having a degree is not evidence of a character flaw. Lying about having one to everybody for over two decades indicates a deep sociopathy.
Fact is that the myth of Elon Musk depends on him being a nerd with technical and scientific chops. Claiming to have degrees and to have been accepted into a PhD at Stanford is the foundation of that myth. It’s the height of fraud.
Turns out the Federal Reserve and ZIRP was the real magic behind the valuations and dumb money the entire time. Everyone else was just riding the wave of cheap capital.
> Turns out the rich and powerful of Silicon Valley aren't super smart and wise folks to be looked up to.
> They're just regular people, a lot of them ignorant, that got lucky.
This becomes immediately clear the first time you meet them. They're just a herd operating in a situation of high risk and uncertainty by following what the rest of the herd is doing. That's why, periodically, they all run off a cliff together like lemmings.
> What Sequoia was reacting to was the scale of SBF’s vision. It wasn’t a story about how we might use fintech in the future, or crypto, or a new kind of bank. It was a vision about the future of money itself—with a total addressable market of every person on the entire planet.
But like, it’s not even a story about how he might accomplish that goal. It’s literally just saying “my vision is to facilitate every financial transaction in the world.” You’d think it would take more than that to impress those partners.
As is we needed more proof that venture capitalists are clowns.
Oh well. Extract money from these fools and hopefully don't be an FTX, make something that is useful to society. The more they lose on ventures, the more their capital is redistributed, hopefully to either competent people, or people that need it.
We've banned this account for using HN primarily for ideological battle and ignoring our requests not to do that and also not to post flamewar comments.
Your account has been hovering in bannability for a long time, and yes, an anti-Semitic trope (let's call it what we all know it is) is enough to push it over the finish line.
"... an anti-Semitic trope (let's call it what we all know it is) is enough to push it over the finish line."
What a huge assumption and massive misinterpretation by you. Holy hell.
You seem to be projecting that I must be Kayne West? I wasn't casually referencing Jewish people. Did I suggest ANYWHERE about Jewish people? No. I didn't. You made the assumption and then ban me on it.
I was being literal when I said to look at who has captured the mainstream media for your answers - and I didn't suggest nor was hinting at looking through a racial lens. Who would you put that as if asked that?
Do you know who I would put that as? If you look at the actual advertising revenues of MSM in the U.S. - it's something like 80% of ad revenues coming from the pharmaceutical industry; I'm sure if you search my comment history for "big pharma" you'll see plenty of distaste from me for that industry.
2) No "this is your final warning" message?
Firstly, as far as I remember I have only seen 2 of your "requests" replies in the past - and I remember the one email thread/interaction we had awhile ago.
I don't always check to see for responses to my comments, or not necessarily thoroughly if I do glance at comment history.
Don't you think it'd be the responsible, reasonable, and the fair thing to do is warn a person by email and/or confirm they have seen them - especially since there aren't Notifications as part of the HN interface? Don't you find it problematic in UI/UX that this isn't the case - that it's a failure in design to not highlight important messages from you?
3) I hope you'll unban me as I'm formally requesting here, especially as your premise for what "push[ed] it over the finish line" was a wrong assumption on your part.
I have Jewish ancestors and my grandfathers fought in both world wars - and I'll withhold the rest of my commentary as to how offensive your assertion is.
Otherwise now that I know you've requested/"warned" 5 previous times - and now that I know I'm "hovering in bannability" - I'll tone everything down.
I'd also highly recommend implementing a new mechanism to guarantee a commenter sees your comments/warnings. Maybe some kind of a 'prompt' or 'notify' flag that you hit that alerts to an unavoidable message to see your comment - or just everyone gets notified of your comments?
Maybe it'll make whomever you're warning take your requests/warnings more seriously as well - but at minimum it will guarantee they've seen it, and then there's a much higher probability they'll check their behaviour if they've actually seen your messages.
If flags set by you then perhaps a required confirmation by the user that 'yes, I've seen this warning/request' - and disabling commenting features until they click that they've seen it? That way you can also have a record and a situation can't arise where they claim they didn't see the majority of them - like I am claiming now, however that is the truth.
I hope you'll acknowledge your mistake and undo the action you took based on that mistake.
I'm sorry I misinterpreted you, and have unbanned you now.
Please make sure you're up on the rules at https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and stick to them from now on. I believe you that you didn't intend your comment the way I took it, but it's not surprising that I (and others) would have misinterpreted it, given that (1) it was an edgy one-liner on a divisive topic in a flamewar thread and (2) your account's history of breaking the site guidelines leads one to certain priors. If you start being scrupulous about staying within the guidelines and posting substantive comments, such misinterpretations will be far less likely.
When it comes to internet comments, it's important to realize that your intent doesn't communicate itself—you have to encode it in your message. Otherwise readers will fill in the blanks with their own version of your intent. No doubt there will be a broad spectrum of different interpretations, but when thousands of readers are looking at your posts, the extreme ends of that spectrum are bound to be represented. In other words, by statistics alone, some people are going to assume that you meant something shocking, and they will be the ones most likely to reply. This is how we end up with the sort of misunderstanding that shocks the original commenter ("What a huge assumption and massive misinterpretation by you. Holy hell.")
I'm not telling you this to reargue the current case but to make a general point for the future: the burden is on you as a commenter to disambiguate your intent (https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...). If you apply that principle in the future, then at least this sort of misunderstanding will be mitigated.
> No, just no. Why is the MSM putting out constant puff pieces about this guy?
Just to be clear, this is the archive of a puff piece published on the Sequoia Capital website: they were talking up their book. They took it down when they wrote their investment in FTX down to $0 (from over $200mm). It was neither published recently nor by a MSM outlet.
Please, don't delete it. Even though you ended up ranting against a wrong piece of news (in terms of the timeline of events), your thoughts and takes on it were still interesting enough to ponder. And you admitted the mistake in a reply too, so people can easily see it.
There are hundreds of puffs pieces praising him in the MSM all the way till the day of the collapse, most of them VERY recently.
They are trying to shift blame and cover their butts.
The pivot now seems to be blaming CZ(the lazy China angle) for everything despite the obvious cause being the low effort diligence done by SV VCs and MSM themselves for recommending so many people into his trap.
Worst was how little oversight there was, Bankman Fried purposely deleted records and didn't hire anyone internally for simple tasks like accounting.
No surprise why, he was writing himself personal loans of billions while trying to bribe his way out of trouble both overseas and in the US.
Against better judgement (and advice of counsel, presumably), this guy is still running his mouth to the media. If you had a disgraced former crypto CEO who was still willing to speak at your finance conference, wouldn't you keep him on the docket? I certainly would.
Matt Levine says he's a fan, and that makes sense to me - Levine was pretty well respected as a journalist before he interviewed Fried, but it probably gave him a huge bump in interest when he did and even more now.
Ah, then whoever I'm quoting from HN who said that was mistaken, or I've remembered it incorrectly. I don't think it changes the point - he's good for Levine professionally; he'll never run out of material for his column at this point.
Saying that the mess is good for him to write about now is completely different than insinuating he was promoting FTX this spring, especially while simultaneously taking the position that he exposed it (which is mostly hindsight).
He's always talked about criminal and unethical behavior in an understated and humorous way in his column, and as a private individual, should be exempt from the slimy methods of character assassination used on politicians.
I'm sure I could have said it better. I listened to the Bankman-Fried episode of Oddlots when it aired not because I had any idea who Bankman-Fried was, but because it was an episode with Levine on it. I think he's the best financial writer working today bar none. So I'm not trying to cast aspersions on Levine.
Matt did call him out months ago on about how cynical his take on crypto was.
Saying he was describing a scam.
And that raised many red flags for others on SBF's ethos.
SBF prolly noticed his error and took efforts to cozy up to Matt afterwards. Hard to resist liking a billionaire who spends on you. It's a superpower that few are immune to in this capitalist world.
Are you referring to Levine defending Bankman-Fried's answer on yield farming?
I think Levine was just saying, "this is a sensible answer to give as a trader operating an exchange where you want a healthy dose of cynical thinking like this instead of pure idealism".
>but it probably gave him a huge bump in interest when he did and even more now
Nobody listened to or remembered the interview until a couple of people pointed out how prophetic it was with hindsight.
Levine found SBF pleasant to talk to and he's amused by financial chicanery.
At the time he said it sounded like a Ponzi, and SBF agreed, but after FTX blew up, it turned out to be so much more.
They didn't have an accounting department. Reporting makes it sound like they didn't even know what real accounting is. SBF was quoted as rejecting the concept of books. As Levine wrote more recently, their alleged balance sheet was mostly "magic beans" and cobwebs. None of this was part of the interview.
I listened to it at the time because although I'm not a regular listener to the Bloomberg Oddlots podcast, I've actually been subscribed for years and pick out the occasional episode and saw that Levine was on it. I had zero idea who Bankman-Fried was at the time, and was very amused by the whole thing. I assumed he was some sort of fringe ne'er do well who was willing to come on and talk about how scammy the whole ecosystem was, and I didn't actually realize that he was a big deal until some time later and I was shocked at how matter-of-fact he was about the whole thing.
So that is to say, I heard it, but I didn't realize the significance. And Levine is probably the best explainer and journalist in the financial space today.
Fair point. I guess we’ll have to see how it goes. I imagine it’s going to be him saying how this was all just a big oopsie doodle in excel because he was too tired from playing LoL, and everyone around him will laugh and not ask any real questions, like who his parents are.
Absolutely. Sucks for everybody else speaking, though, because this conference has now, for all practical purposes, been renamed "The SBF Shitshow Conference"
I guess you're going for the vested interests or conspiracy angle, but it's not necessarily reasonable, e.g. I'd love to hear more from him, I had no interest in FTX or this "SBF" guy until it crashed.
Sequoia capital published this. That should be in the title. Without knowing that this was a real article published by real people at Sequoia a couple of months ago, this reads like a try-hard troll. No! It’s real! (Sequoia is like the Stanford of venture capital and is one of ftx’s biggest investors)
Not silence. Sequoia posted a letter declaring that their FTX investment is $0 and that this is not a notable fraction of their portfolio. FTX may have been a theoretically sound investment for Sequoia because many venture investments are marked to $0, and FTX got to huge-or-zero much faster than any other investment. A company that slowly goes to $0 is equally bad but worse for time-value.
What hurts my brain is that theoretically this investment strategy is sound, but the implementation of it looks like: FTX. It's horrific. It's like total war logic. Logically it works, probabilistically it's reasonable, living it is grotesque and insane.
Either way, the forward is 0. I'd rather see a company run itself aground by paying its employees and slowly bleeding money than to see it fail due to mis-valuation of its holdings. The former is unfortunate, but the latter is an embarrassment for all stakeholders.
I keep telling people you don't drop hundreds of millions on something without glancing at a few numbers first. They had to know something wasn't quite right but infused him with their cash anyways.
Apparently when another VC firm (Social Capital) suggested to create a board before going through with their investment, they received a plain&clear "f*k you".
Corporate governance, accounting, and all the other boring stuff should literally be the first things which you should look at when assessing whether to fuel or not an exchange.
Effective altruism is just nonsense. Giving money "away" is so vague that it's obviously tax discounts. Away to whom? Will give money blindly really help solving problems or keeps them alive? A lot of questions pop up.
That’s a pretty funny take, and suggests you have no familiarity with EA, because it’s explicitly an approach to giving money away while taking exactly these questions into account.
Why are you holding forth on something which you clearly know absolutely nothing about? I say this as someone who thinks that effective altruism is broken.
Can someone explain this trick to me. How can I benefit from a tax break on money that I gave away? given that I don't have the pretax money anymore either (you'll recall earlier in the story I gave it away..).
Are they giving it to themselves somehow? At best I can imagine they get their name on a school or something, a nice thing but hardly the same as still having the 100 million or whatever bucks in their pocket.
This article is the absolute crescendo of the overture of all of the rubbish of the last era of Valley shenanigans in a masterfully written dumpster fire of a puff piece.
As the show 'Silicon Valley' started the era with harmless satire, they made it real with this FTX big tent clownshow.
Every paragraph dripping with absolute glib, lack of self awareness.
"Compassionate To The Core" ... my god man I fell off my chair, got back on, and then fell off again ...
I suggest there exists no author who could have created such an inane story that makes 'Wolf of Wall Street' seem like a Dilbert cartoon.
Reality itself is much, much more entertaining than anything Netflix or god forbid even Scorsese himself could ever contrive.
>Reality itself is much, much more entertaining than anything Netflix or god forbid even Scorsese himself could ever contrive.
Spend enough time on this world and you realize that the absolute crazy shit out there would never be made into a movie because nobody would believe it's real.
Make me an action flick of the guy who fought for three sides in WWII: Finnish Winter War, the Nazis, the Americans, only to have him die fighting in Vietnam and I'll tell you a movie that will be a complete box office flop because nobody would think this person actually existed.
> Every paragraph dripping with absolute glib, lack of self awareness.
> ... "Compassionate To The Core" ...
The elites are truly out of touch with the reality. Some are unhinged. It is baffling.
Just the other day, some exec, who worked with Musk at Tesla, wrote that him acquiring Twitter was the part of a master plan to fix the climate: https://archive.is/uSz6I
'But, right there, between a bright yellow sunshade and the crumb-strewn red-brick floor, SBF’s purpose in life was set: He was going to get filthy rich, for charity’s sake.'
What an excellent way to rationalize any psychopathic move you might want to make for money. Not saying SBF is a psychopath, 'cause I don't know enough about him, but this rationale could be used to justify almost anything: stealing, lying, fraud...
I've been wondering about this for years. If VCs make thousands of bets, knowing that most of them won't work out but a tiny number will be huge and more than make up for it.... won't people eventually learn how to game this system and hoover up the money for 99.9999999% or 100% useless purposes, instead of just 99%?
Or, the world will simply run out of trillion dollar ideas for the VCs to make their money back on, and eventually your 1% of good investments don't cover the 99% of shit anymore, and you have to improve your due diligence, and become more of an ordinary investor?
103 comments
[ 2.5 ms ] story [ 187 ms ] thread>That’s when SBF told Sequoia about the so-called super-app: “I want FTX to be a place where you can do anything you want with your next dollar. You can buy bitcoin. You can send money in whatever currency to any friend anywhere in the world. You can buy a banana. You can do anything you want with your money from inside FTX.”
>Suddenly, the chat window on Sequoia’s side of the Zoom lights up with partners freaking out.
>“I LOVE THIS FOUNDER,” typed one partner.
>“I am a 10 out of 10,” pinged another.
>“YES!!!” exclaimed a third.
>What Sequoia was reacting to was the scale of SBF’s vision. It wasn’t a story about how we might use fintech in the future, or crypto, or a new kind of bank. It was a vision about the future of money itself—with a total addressable market of every person on the entire planet.
>“I sit ten feet from him, and I walked over, thinking, Oh, shit, that was really good,” remembers Arora. “And it turns out that that fucker was playing League of Legends through the entire meeting.”
"HOLY SHIT WHAT A VISIONARY 10 OUT OF 10"
Clearly SBF will truly be the first trillionaire
https://youtube.com/watch?v=wz-PtEJEaqY
Turns out the rich and powerful of Silicon Valley aren't super smart and wise folks to be looked up to.
They're just regular people, a lot of them ignorant, that got lucky.
Enough with the pedestals.
Edit: Here's a link to the sources with everything: https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/1zPeWaaCZHqfq0tnkPwc6...
[1] https://www.dailykos.com/stories/2022/11/17/2136976/-Blockbu...
Fact is that the myth of Elon Musk depends on him being a nerd with technical and scientific chops. Claiming to have degrees and to have been accepted into a PhD at Stanford is the foundation of that myth. It’s the height of fraud.
That sequence of events is basically the magic formula.
> They're just regular people, a lot of them ignorant, that got lucky.
This becomes immediately clear the first time you meet them. They're just a herd operating in a situation of high risk and uncertainty by following what the rest of the herd is doing. That's why, periodically, they all run off a cliff together like lemmings.
But like, it’s not even a story about how he might accomplish that goal. It’s literally just saying “my vision is to facilitate every financial transaction in the world.” You’d think it would take more than that to impress those partners.
Except that these are professional financiers. I don't get it.
Oh well. Extract money from these fools and hopefully don't be an FTX, make something that is useful to society. The more they lose on ventures, the more their capital is redistributed, hopefully to either competent people, or people that need it.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30197457 (Feb 2022)
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26116840 (Feb 2021)
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22274517 (Feb 2020)
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21195104 (Oct 2019)
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19815709 (May 2019)
Your account has been hovering in bannability for a long time, and yes, an anti-Semitic trope (let's call it what we all know it is) is enough to push it over the finish line.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
"... an anti-Semitic trope (let's call it what we all know it is) is enough to push it over the finish line."
What a huge assumption and massive misinterpretation by you. Holy hell.
You seem to be projecting that I must be Kayne West? I wasn't casually referencing Jewish people. Did I suggest ANYWHERE about Jewish people? No. I didn't. You made the assumption and then ban me on it.
I was being literal when I said to look at who has captured the mainstream media for your answers - and I didn't suggest nor was hinting at looking through a racial lens. Who would you put that as if asked that?
Do you know who I would put that as? If you look at the actual advertising revenues of MSM in the U.S. - it's something like 80% of ad revenues coming from the pharmaceutical industry; I'm sure if you search my comment history for "big pharma" you'll see plenty of distaste from me for that industry.
2) No "this is your final warning" message?
Firstly, as far as I remember I have only seen 2 of your "requests" replies in the past - and I remember the one email thread/interaction we had awhile ago.
I don't always check to see for responses to my comments, or not necessarily thoroughly if I do glance at comment history.
Don't you think it'd be the responsible, reasonable, and the fair thing to do is warn a person by email and/or confirm they have seen them - especially since there aren't Notifications as part of the HN interface? Don't you find it problematic in UI/UX that this isn't the case - that it's a failure in design to not highlight important messages from you?
3) I hope you'll unban me as I'm formally requesting here, especially as your premise for what "push[ed] it over the finish line" was a wrong assumption on your part.
I have Jewish ancestors and my grandfathers fought in both world wars - and I'll withhold the rest of my commentary as to how offensive your assertion is.
Otherwise now that I know you've requested/"warned" 5 previous times - and now that I know I'm "hovering in bannability" - I'll tone everything down.
I'd also highly recommend implementing a new mechanism to guarantee a commenter sees your comments/warnings. Maybe some kind of a 'prompt' or 'notify' flag that you hit that alerts to an unavoidable message to see your comment - or just everyone gets notified of your comments?
Maybe it'll make whomever you're warning take your requests/warnings more seriously as well - but at minimum it will guarantee they've seen it, and then there's a much higher probability they'll check their behaviour if they've actually seen your messages.
If flags set by you then perhaps a required confirmation by the user that 'yes, I've seen this warning/request' - and disabling commenting features until they click that they've seen it? That way you can also have a record and a situation can't arise where they claim they didn't see the majority of them - like I am claiming now, however that is the truth.
I hope you'll acknowledge your mistake and undo the action you took based on that mistake.
I've also emailed this to you.
Please make sure you're up on the rules at https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and stick to them from now on. I believe you that you didn't intend your comment the way I took it, but it's not surprising that I (and others) would have misinterpreted it, given that (1) it was an edgy one-liner on a divisive topic in a flamewar thread and (2) your account's history of breaking the site guidelines leads one to certain priors. If you start being scrupulous about staying within the guidelines and posting substantive comments, such misinterpretations will be far less likely.
When it comes to internet comments, it's important to realize that your intent doesn't communicate itself—you have to encode it in your message. Otherwise readers will fill in the blanks with their own version of your intent. No doubt there will be a broad spectrum of different interpretations, but when thousands of readers are looking at your posts, the extreme ends of that spectrum are bound to be represented. In other words, by statistics alone, some people are going to assume that you meant something shocking, and they will be the ones most likely to reply. This is how we end up with the sort of misunderstanding that shocks the original commenter ("What a huge assumption and massive misinterpretation by you. Holy hell.")
I'm not telling you this to reargue the current case but to make a general point for the future: the burden is on you as a commenter to disambiguate your intent (https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...). If you apply that principle in the future, then at least this sort of misunderstanding will be mitigated.
Just to be clear, this is the archive of a puff piece published on the Sequoia Capital website: they were talking up their book. They took it down when they wrote their investment in FTX down to $0 (from over $200mm). It was neither published recently nor by a MSM outlet.
There are hundreds of puffs pieces praising him in the MSM all the way till the day of the collapse, most of them VERY recently.
They are trying to shift blame and cover their butts.
The pivot now seems to be blaming CZ(the lazy China angle) for everything despite the obvious cause being the low effort diligence done by SV VCs and MSM themselves for recommending so many people into his trap.
Worst was how little oversight there was, Bankman Fried purposely deleted records and didn't hire anyone internally for simple tasks like accounting.
No surprise why, he was writing himself personal loans of billions while trying to bribe his way out of trouble both overseas and in the US.
https://www.nytimes.com/events/dealbook-summit#speakers
He's always talked about criminal and unethical behavior in an understated and humorous way in his column, and as a private individual, should be exempt from the slimy methods of character assassination used on politicians.
Matt did call him out months ago on about how cynical his take on crypto was.
Saying he was describing a scam.
And that raised many red flags for others on SBF's ethos.
SBF prolly noticed his error and took efforts to cozy up to Matt afterwards. Hard to resist liking a billionaire who spends on you. It's a superpower that few are immune to in this capitalist world.
I think Levine was just saying, "this is a sensible answer to give as a trader operating an exchange where you want a healthy dose of cynical thinking like this instead of pure idealism".
Nobody listened to or remembered the interview until a couple of people pointed out how prophetic it was with hindsight.
Levine found SBF pleasant to talk to and he's amused by financial chicanery.
At the time he said it sounded like a Ponzi, and SBF agreed, but after FTX blew up, it turned out to be so much more.
They didn't have an accounting department. Reporting makes it sound like they didn't even know what real accounting is. SBF was quoted as rejecting the concept of books. As Levine wrote more recently, their alleged balance sheet was mostly "magic beans" and cobwebs. None of this was part of the interview.
So that is to say, I heard it, but I didn't realize the significance. And Levine is probably the best explainer and journalist in the financial space today.
What hurts my brain is that theoretically this investment strategy is sound, but the implementation of it looks like: FTX. It's horrific. It's like total war logic. Logically it works, probabilistically it's reasonable, living it is grotesque and insane.
Either way, the forward is 0. I'd rather see a company run itself aground by paying its employees and slowly bleeding money than to see it fail due to mis-valuation of its holdings. The former is unfortunate, but the latter is an embarrassment for all stakeholders.
Well...
Corporate governance, accounting, and all the other boring stuff should literally be the first things which you should look at when assessing whether to fuel or not an exchange.
They could not possibly have looked at any numbers any deeper than what FTX told them.
EA is notably less interested in answering "where should money come from" and "what impact does the manner in which I earn money have".
Says who?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Earning_to_give#Earning_to_giv...
Are they giving it to themselves somehow? At best I can imagine they get their name on a school or something, a nice thing but hardly the same as still having the 100 million or whatever bucks in their pocket.
So we have the cofounder of Skype to thank for this mess huh?
As the show 'Silicon Valley' started the era with harmless satire, they made it real with this FTX big tent clownshow.
Every paragraph dripping with absolute glib, lack of self awareness.
"Compassionate To The Core" ... my god man I fell off my chair, got back on, and then fell off again ...
I suggest there exists no author who could have created such an inane story that makes 'Wolf of Wall Street' seem like a Dilbert cartoon.
Reality itself is much, much more entertaining than anything Netflix or god forbid even Scorsese himself could ever contrive.
Spend enough time on this world and you realize that the absolute crazy shit out there would never be made into a movie because nobody would believe it's real.
Make me an action flick of the guy who fought for three sides in WWII: Finnish Winter War, the Nazis, the Americans, only to have him die fighting in Vietnam and I'll tell you a movie that will be a complete box office flop because nobody would think this person actually existed.
> ... "Compassionate To The Core" ...
The elites are truly out of touch with the reality. Some are unhinged. It is baffling.
Just the other day, some exec, who worked with Musk at Tesla, wrote that him acquiring Twitter was the part of a master plan to fix the climate: https://archive.is/uSz6I
Read also: The Michael Scott theory of social class (2021), https://danco.substack.com/p/the-michael-scott-theory-of-soc...
Never forget that.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33549059
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33672924
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33573636
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33543718
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33527047
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33568141
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33554271
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33551288
Maybe enough with this. Hacker _News_, please
What an excellent way to rationalize any psychopathic move you might want to make for money. Not saying SBF is a psychopath, 'cause I don't know enough about him, but this rationale could be used to justify almost anything: stealing, lying, fraud...
Or, the world will simply run out of trillion dollar ideas for the VCs to make their money back on, and eventually your 1% of good investments don't cover the 99% of shit anymore, and you have to improve your due diligence, and become more of an ordinary investor?