L’homme le plus généreux au monde vole 10 milliards

This is the story of the youngest billionaire
in the world who loses ALL his fortune and risks prison… because of a tweet.
No wait, it's even weirder than that.
This is the story of the most generous man in the world who steals 10 billion
from his clients. The case begins with the utilitarian philosopher
Peter Singer – but the League of Legends video game plays a central role – as well as
… amphetamines and improbable sexual fantasies .
And throughout, we're going to rely on the exceptional investigative work of
– and I promise you I'm serious – Autism Capital, an anonymous twitter account
. I promise you this will all make sense
in the next few minutes. But before that – the basics.
Over the past 2 weeks FTX, the second largest crypto exchange in the
world, has imploded. Nothing too shocking so far. If you
follow things from afar, it seems like any company that ever writes
the word “bitcoin” on their site inevitably ends up going into spontaneous combustion.
But FTX was meant to be special – because its founder was special.
His stated goal was to earn billions to GIVE billions – to
causes like pandemic prevention and global warming: But above all, Sam Bankman-Fried had a
reputation as a genius trader.

He lived for his work. He was sleeping in his office. His
ambition was limitless. We all know the crypto world is
full of sharks – but Sam was supposed to be this aquatic dinosaur who eats
sharks for breakfast. Take for example, Kevin O'Leary, an investor
who had put money in Sam's box. His investment made zero.
And yet, when asked if he would invest with Sam again – he answers yes without
hesitation. The guy should be furious. We lied to him,
we betrayed him, we robbed him. And despite that, he can't help but
respect the intellect. So what happened?
If Sam was so smart, how did he lose it all?
How did he convince some of the most sophisticated investors in the
world that his box was worth 32 billion? Do we really live in a world
where such a box can be vaporized by a tweet?
And… what was this story of league of legends, amphetamines and harem
…? To understand what happened
at FTX, you have to understand the legend of Sam Bankman-Fried, as it has
been counted to us for several years.

So let’s start our investigation with this
article, which is a pure gold mine. Already there is the title: “Sam Bankman-Fried
has a savior complex – and maybe you should have one too” – it is
worthy of a cosmo cover. Then there's the release date, which is
only a few weeks before FTX's total implosion.
But above all, there is the source: Sequoia Capital. One of the most prestigious investment funds
in the world. Sequoia has been around for 50 years and has an
impressive track record: Apple, Google, Instagram, Paypal, Whatsapp and even YouTube.

It's the kind of fund so prestigious
that if you want to invest in them – you can't, unless you're already super rich.
In short, they are not brats – yet they saw nothing coming. Sequoia injected
$214 million into FTX. But what's most awesome is the story
of how they decided to invest. We set the scene…
In 2021, Sequoia is hosting a Zoom call with Sam.
“Sam was answering questions in a relaxed manner.

As usual, he spoke
in whole paragraphs on extremely complex subjects .
Until the last question comes up: “what is your long-term vision
?”. It's the cliché question of any job interview – and apparently also
during a 200 million conversation with one of the biggest investment funds
in the world. Good to know ! “That's when Sam told Sequoia
about his super app idea: 'I want FTX to be a place where you can do
whatever you want with your money.

You can buy bitcoin. You can
send money in any currency, anywhere in the world. You can
buy a banana.'” All of a sudden, the chat on the Sequoia side
explodes with euphoric messages from the associates.
“I LOVE THIS FOUNDER” types a partner. (all caps)
"I'm 10 out of 10," sends another. “YES!!!”, exclaims another.
(all caps PLUS 3 exclamation marks) And right after, the article reveals that
throughout the call… Sam was busy playing League of Legends on another
screen. If it was on a random news site,
it would be a funny anecdote – but there, it is written on the investor's site.
They tell us: “the guy gave us a collective orgasm on a Zoom call…
while he was playing a video game”.

They don't see it as a lack of respect,
or a concentration problem – they see it as *further evidence* of
his intellectual overkill. Besides, this may not be the
last time we're going to talk about collective orgasm in this video – but I'm getting ahead…
Before that, we have to talk about a legendary anecdote in the article by Sequoia: the
famous “premium of Kimchi”. Sam began his career as a trader
at Jane Street, a big name in the financial industry.
Still according to Sequoia, he is excellent: “The other traders admired him: he
was so comfortable with trading that the others came to watch him work,
as one might follow a professional gamer on Twitch.”
If he had stayed at Jane Street, he would have become very, very rich.

But Sam
doesn't just want to be rich – he wants to make an astronomical fortune.
So he quits and floats back and forth for a few months – before he
hits the big time. At this time, a bitcoin costs 10k dollars
in the US – but 15k in Korea. This 50% surcharge is called “the kimchi premium”.
The opportunity is this: Buy a bitcoin on a US exchange
for $10k Send it to an exchange in
Korea Sell it for $ 15k Send the money back to the US
Start over It's essentially $5k free money
– with zero risk since you buy and sell bitcoin in the same day.
But from an operational point of view, it is extremely complicated. It is not so
easy for a foreigner to move millions of dollars in and out
of a country like Korea every day. Especially if all that money is flowing through crypto exchanges.
In the eyes of the banks, this looks dangerously like money laundering – and therefore the
accounts are constantly blocked. As a result, he never really manages to
make the scheme work in the Korean market , because of capital controls.
But in Japan, it does.

The additional cost is only 10%. But since Sam turns over a
lot of money – 10% profit A DAY, that's huge. Sam created an investment fund
to execute this strategy. He calls it “Alameda Research”. Remember that
name, it will play a crucial role in his downfall… The initial success of Alameda gives
Sam another idea: he thinks crypto exchanges suck and he thinks he can
do better.

He therefore founded FTX, the famous crypto exchange
which is at the heart of this affair. To describe the rise of FTX, blogger
Mario Gabriele uses the analogy of a speedrun.
In just 3 years, the company is valued at 18 billion. In other words, Sam is shattering
the records of what until now was considered rapid growth. In 3 years, the
competing exchange Coinbase was worth only 400 million and even Slack was worth less than 4 billion.
Even crazier is the efficiency of the company.
As of June 2021, FTX manages a monthly transaction volume of 224 billion with only
82 employees – that's almost 3 billion PER EMPLOYEE.
In comparison, Coinbase manages only 56 billion transactions with… 2780 employees.
This is a quarter of transactions with 30 times more people.
But that's not the most amazing yet. Apparently, in 2021, FTX has just 6 programmers.
These 6 people were responsible for coding, on their own, a platform on which
10 billion turns a day. So apparently it's not just Sam
who has a brain the size of a Toyota Yaris, but also his employees.
So concretely, what does FTX do? It is an exchange, on which you can
buy and sell cryptos.

After crypto exchanges, there are tons of them.
FTX stands out for being better overall, more stable, and with more products and
features. It attracts the majority of the most sophisticated traders who
turn large volumes. In particular, FTX is becoming known for its
highly advanced risk management. Basically, here's how it works: if
you deposit $1000 on FTX, they allow you to borrow money to
buy say $10,000 worth of bitcoin. This means that if bitcoin goes up just
10%, you double your initial bet – that's the point of investing with a loan.
But if Bitcoin drops 10%… you've lost all your money. And if it drops
20 or 30%, you've lost MORE than you invested – so in theory it would be up
to FTX to cover your losses. To avoid this, FTX will automatically sell
your bitcoins before that happens. It's called an automatic liquidation.
This way, FTX protects itself from potential losses for its clients – and it allows them to lend
their clients a lot of money to make absolutely mind-boggling bets.
For example, FTX initially offers up to x101 leverage.
This means that if you deposit €10,000, you can buy up to 100x
more crypto, or 1.01 million.

Ultra risky, considering that if the crypto in question drops 1%,
you lose everything – but possible in theory thanks to FTX's algorithms.
They are obviously not the only ones offering to buy cryptos with leverage
– but their system is said to be the most robust.
In short, FTX offers a truly innovative product for its industry, which customers love
and which generates in a few years 1 billion dollars per year, just in commissions.
Result, Sam weighs 24 billion at 30 years old – and he has the means to attack the
mainstream market. FTX is spending 135 million to
name a basketball stadium in Miami after it. They stick their logos on baseball umpires' jerseys
. They offer themselves the biggest star in American football for an ad.
[put a short excerpt from the commercial with Brady] Sam finds himself on the cover of magazines,
including Fortune, which predicts that he is “the next Warren Buffet”.
By the way – rule number 1 for any entrepreneur: never let a journalist
call you something like "the next Warren Buffet".

It always ends badly.
For example, Inc had called Elisabeth Holmes “the next Steve Jobs” and… ouch.
[insert TV news clip describing Holmes' recent conviction]
Ha no, forget it: in another article, the same Fortune magazine that was
in decidedly great shape, announces that he is "the next JP Morgan".
The reason: JP Morgan, the founder of the famous bank, had bought up many
rival institutions that had failed during the Panic of 1907, which had allowed him to
enrich himself, while avoiding a more global crisis.
Sam, in fact, is spending a good part of 2022 buying up
bankrupt crypto projects. His fans see it as a noble effort to avoid a contagion effect that would
crash the price of cryptos. Critics suspect it's more of an
opportunistic way to buy out competitors at a discount. Remember the title of the
Sequoia article? "Sam Bankman-Fried has a savior complex
– and maybe you should have one too"
This refers to the last essential element of Sam's legend – his involvement
in a movement called "Effective Altruism ".
The movement has its roots in the philosophy of Peter Singer, a utilitarian philosopher.
To put it very simply, effective altruism assumes that we can calculate the impact
of each dollar, and that our moral duty is to give money where it helps
the most people.

So where normal people give money
to clear their conscience, or because their uncle has such and such a
disease, or because the girl with the WWF t-shirt has a nice smile… the effective altruist
will explain to you that's a mess. Instead, you have to calculate where your
donation will do the most good – and the answer most often is to fight malaria.
Unsurprisingly, this philosophy isn't incredibly popular with normal people,
who keep writing checks to save cute puppies at the local
shelter. Effective altruism is to
normal charities what Linux is to Windows. It's a geek thing. As a result, the
largest communities of effective altruists are found around Silicon Valley.
Unsurprisingly, a guy like Sam is drawn to this philosophy. These beliefs date from long before he
was involved in cryptos. Sam's parents are lawyers and
teach ethics. He was brought up in utilitarian philosophy from
an early age. Sequoia's article, which continues
to deliver decidedly bar gold, describes conversations at the family dining table,
where a 12-year-old Sam debates the morality of abortion with his parents.
The same article describes an encounter with Will MacAskill, one of the founders of the
modern version of the movement, which allegedly took place at MIT years before Sam founded FTX.
Many people will question the sincerity of Sam's altruistic beliefs – and you can
see why given what happened next.
But, from everything I've read, it seems that he was immersed in this environment long
before he became rich or had anything to be ashamed of.

This is not just
an afterthought justification. Fairly clear evidence is that most
of the early employees of Alameda and FTX were recruited directly into the
effective altruist movement. Is it possible that he lied
from the start, knowing that years later he would need a cover
for his crimes? Possible, but unlikely. There have been plenty of scammers in crypto,
and apart from Sam, no one has needed effective altruism to break through.
FTX's clients generally didn't care about his beliefs. It seems much more likely to me that his
beliefs were sincere at first – but his actions gradually drifted away.
However, there is one area where I totally agree with the cynical interpretation – and
that is on political donations. Sam was Joe Biden's second-biggest
campaign donor, sending a total of $40 million to US Democrats.
What is wrong with this is that these political donations are contradictory
to the principles of effective altruism. Sam is supposed to wonder how many lives
his $100 bill can save – but clearly the 10 million given to Biden would have
bought quite a few mosquito nets to save African children from malaria.
This is even clearer when we see phase 2 of his plan.

Sam started to
openly ask for MORE regulation for the crypto community.
The trick is that, thanks to his political connections, he would be able to influence
regulations favorable to FTX – and unfavorable to its great rival, Binance.
And that's where he finally made the miscalculation that cost him everything… Sam's empire was finally destroyed
by a tweet. Let me explain:
On November 6, a new character appears in our story. He tweeted:
“As part of the sale of our FTX shares last year, Binance received the equivalent
of approximately US$2.1 billion (in BUSD and FTT). Due to recent revelations,
we have decided to liquidate all remaining FTTs.”
Yes, I know it sounds like incomprehensible jargon – but don't worry
– we'll pull out our French – Crypto dictionary and get through it together.
First, who is cz_binance? Changpeng Zhao is the CEO of Binance,
FTX's biggest competitor. Everyone just calls it “CZ”.
Binance is therefore a crypto exchange competing with FTX.
In 2019, Binance had invested in FTX.

Why did they invest in their own competitor
? Because crypto is a gigantic orgy where everyone puts money
in everyone. But in 2021, FTX decides to buy back the
shares owned by Binance. They pay in part with the BUSD token, which
is a stable coin equivalent to 1 dollar – so essentially it's cash.
But they pay another part in FTT. FTT is a token created by FTX and whose value
is linked to the performance of FTX. In this tweet, CZ announces his decision to
sell his remaining FTTs – and thus get rid of his remaining ties to
FTX.

He wants to quit the big orgy. He explains that his decision was triggered
by “recent revelations” – intentionally vague wording but one
that people who follow crypto fully understood.
The revelations in question come from an article published a few days earlier on
the Coindesk site. The article says it had access to a balance sheet from Alameda,
Sam's investment fund – and reveals that Alameda's assets are largely
composed of this famous FTT, the token invented by FTX.
Why is this a problem? Because Alameda is a huge
crypto fund. The article reveals that their position is fragile. If Alamada
has any problem, they will be forced to sell massive amounts of FTT,
which will drive down the market price. So on the surface, CZ's tweet seems
logical: he realized that FTT's price was vulnerable, so he's going to sell
to reduce his risk.

But in a tweet the next day, he will
reveal other motivations. I love this tweet. He starts
super rationally: “The liquidation of our FTT is just a
matter of post-sale risk management.” But *in the next sentence* he contradicts himself
by explaining that it's not really “just a matter of risk management”,
but that he feels personally betrayed by Sam.
“We have been supportive in the past, but we are not going to pretend
to have sex after the divorce.” The ‘divorce’ here is the redemption
of Binance shares in FTX. The divorce analogy is pretty crazy in the context of a
$2 billion deal. CZ positions himself as an abandoned lover.
“We are not against anyone. But we will not support people who
lobby other industry players behind their backs.”
There we almost fall into the schoolyard diputes. ‘You talked to something
behind my back, you’re not my girlfriend anymore! CZ refers to Sam's efforts
to approach US regulators and influence the creation of rules favorable
to FTX and unfavorable to Binance. From there, everything will go very quickly.
There is an overall loss of confidence in the FTT. People start selling. Not
necessarily CZ himself, who had announced that it would take him several months – but
rather the other FTT owners who say to themselves that it doesn't smell good.
Alameda tries to buy back as much FTT as possible to maintain the price, but it's not enough
.

The price falls. People are starting to worry about
FTX. FTT is a token invented by FTX. It is common knowledge that FTX and Alameda
are interdependent. If Alameda owns so many FTTs, maybe FTX too? In
this scenario, if the price of FTT crashes, it could ruin FTX.
As a result, many of the customers who have deposited at FTX to trade crypto are asking
to withdraw their money. Sam steps in to restore trust
: “A competitor is trying to
hurt us with false rumors There is nothing wrong with FTX.
Client assets are safe.” “FTX has enough to cover all
of our clients' deposits. We never invest our clients' assets.”
There are two problems with these tweets. 1) People don't believe it, and the withdrawals are
still going strong. FTX customers withdraw 5 billion from the platform.
2) Turns out he COMPLETELY LIED ! FTX does NOT have enough to reimburse
everyone and they have REALLY invested their clients' assets.
FTX is forced to pause withdrawals. Sam deletes his previous tweet after
only a day.

His official position changes. Yes, FTX has
enough money to reimburse its customers but just… not right away. It
lacks liquidity, the money is invested elsewhere – but I promise we have it somewhere.
However, the next day, huge announcement : Binance will fully BUY FTX.
Sam's tweet is worthy of the [ __ ] of the greatest politicians:
“The circle is complete. The first FTX investor will also be the last: we have
an agreement with Binance for a strategic transaction”.
Translation: “I am totally bankrupt. I don't have my clients' money, so
I'm going to give my box (*which was worth billions two weeks ago*) to CZ for
0 dollars, and in exchange he's going to reimburse my clients to save me 'go to
jail". At this point, there are two reactions.
On the one hand, CZ is seen as a Machiavellian genius who destroyed his biggest rival with a
tweet – and bought him off for a pittance.
On the other hand, Sam very briefly gives himself the image of a guy who has just sacrificed
his own fortune to save his clients.

For example, the Autism Capital twitter account,
which would later play a crucial role in unearthing juicy details about
FTX abuse, was positive at the time: “Very proud of the maturity of this decision.
Not risking client assets in battle. Swallow your ego and make the
right strategic decision to keep building. Good job, Sam.”
Suffice to say, the honeymoon is not going to last – because only 2 days later, Binance
announces that they are abandoning the deal. The quote that will go around the most is:
“The problems are beyond our ability to help”.
It's official, FTX is kaput. Only 5 days after the start of the saga, they declare
bankruptcy. After a few days of silence, Sam starts
what looks like a nervous breakdown live on Twitter.
He simply tweets the word “what”. Then a few hours later, the letter
H. A few hours later, the letter A. All the way people are screaming “WHAT
THE [ __ ] ARE YOU MAN? YOU JUST INCINERATED BILLIONS OF DOLLARS, AND YOU MAKE REBUSES
ON TWITTER ???”. The conspiracy theories begin. For example,
some believe that Sam is deleting his old tweets to make
damning evidence disappear.

He posts a new letter with each deleted message to hide
the decrease in the number of tweets. This theory turns out to be wrong – but
there really isn't a good explanation for his behavior. He looks like he just
lost it. Finally, he spells “what happened”
– “what happened?” But in his subsequent tweets, he does
n't *really* explain what happened. The boy genius who spoke in "
whole paragraphs" to his investors while playing League of Legends is unable to string together
a sequence of coherent tweets. It's vague, redundant and doesn't quite understand where
he's coming from. After that it is understandable. In his situation,
I don't think I would be very lucid either. I don't think I'll be able to
get out of bed. But whatever the case, we will have to
turn elsewhere for explanations.

People have been worried
about FTX's ties to Alameda for years. Isn't it a little weird that
the same guy owns the marketplace AND the most active investment fund on
it? For example, there were long-
standing suspicions that FTX favored Alameda on certain trades, or gave them access to
confidential data about what other traders were doing.
The reality was much worse than that. People believed that Alameda was ultra-profitable
thanks to an unfair advantage over other FTX users…
But in reality, Alameda was losing huge amounts of money – and drawing on
FTX users' money to cover itself. According to an excellent investigation on the site
“milkyeggs”, (yes, between Milky eggs and Autism Capital, the names of the sources of my
videos are improbable. But check out the incompetence of the New York Times on the
subject, and you will see that the best sources in this case are actually
anonymous accounts with weird names) – in short, according to milkyeggs Alameda's reputation for excellence
was totally undeserved.

"Alameda was an incredibly
disorganized and poorly managed company." The story would be this:
Sam had only worked in finance for 4 years before founding Alameda. He was
proficient in trading, but his experience was limited.
In 2017, his hit on Japanese bitcoin really happened – but was probably
more modest than he let on. For example, the Sequoia article claims
that this operation made him a “billionaire”. And in The Generalist article, which
is based on an interview with Sam, the profits are valued at 10 million a day.
But on the other hand, someone who was at Alameda at the time gives a figure
of 10-30 million TOTAL. This is consistent with this video from Nas
Daily, which went to meet Sam in the Bahamas, and gives the given figure of 20 million
in total. [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SQm-CphJlgo&ab_channel=GoogleTricks%5BYongZhi%5D
1:51 yeah from this simple idea he made a
1:55 total of 20 million dollars]
So the total was probably a 20 million – which is impressive, it's
true, but still far from the billion that Sequoia imagined.
Worse, the source who was there at the start of Alameda suggests that this money was then
lost on other investments.

According to Milkyeggs, making money
trading crypto in 2017 was quite easy. 4 years of experience at Jane Street was
enough to be a hit – but since then the most sophisticated traders from the traditional markets
have come on board and the competition has gotten much tougher.
Sam and his cronies were just not equipped and they started
losing money on Alamada. This theory is supported by what we
know about the character of *Caroline Elison*. Caroline had spent only 19 months at
Jane Street, before landing at Alameda.

She quickly became the manager
of the investment fund. Was she qualified enough?
These excerpts have been doing a lot of Twitter – and, indeed [sigh]. To make up for the losses, Alameda reportedly
started taking on more and more risk – which worked pretty well as
crypto was only going up, but is n't a particularly sophisticated strategy.
That's pretty much what any dork does who puts in money in
bitcoin or Doge when it goes up – and freaks out when it goes down.
And in 2022, precisely, the market fell through . Alameda lost a lot
of money, especially in the Luna crash.
Worse, they started spending a lot of money buying up other
bankrupt crypto projects – because they knew their position was vulnerable. If these
projects failed, falling prices would have killed Alameda. So it wasn't a
brilliant plan to buy out cheap rivals a la JP Morgan – it was an attempt
to survive by masking their own weakness.

It was probably around this
time that Sam began tapping into funds from his users on FTX to bail out
Alameda. Technically, these were “loans”.
But remember that automatic position liquidation story that was one
of FTX's strengths? Alameda was exempt from this rule. It means that if they
made losing bets on the platform, it was up to FTX to cover.
Question: why take this risk? Why not let Alameda die?
There are several possible explanations. The simplest is that Sam was protecting
his reputation as an awesome trader. If the background that made her legend crashes, it does
not care. But on a deeper level, it is possible that
FTX has already loaned Alameda so much money that they would have gone bankrupt if
Alameda imploded.

Lost for lost, Sam doubles or quits and tries to recover on
his clients' funds. Even stranger, some theories
assume that FTX was dependent on Alameda. On the one hand, Alameda accounted for a
sizable share of mega-growth trading volume on FTX – which justified
its fundraising at exorbitant valuations .
More importantly, if the assumption is that Alameda was losing money, that means
there was someone on the other side of those trades who was MAKING money.
And since Alameda was mostly active on FTX, that means a lot of traders were
on FTX JUST because they were making a lot of money – which came from
Alameda's losses.

So the math was:
1) lose money on Alameda to boost volume on FTX
2) use those growth numbers to raise a lot of money from investors
3) Loan that money to Alameda to boost the volume even more volume
4) Starting over At some point, investors' money
was replaced by user funds. This exact point is not entirely clear,
even to Sam himself. And his explanation basically boils down
to… …our accounting was rotten [shrug]!
And if there is one point on which we can believe it, it is on this.
At the beginning of the end, Sam tried to raise 8 billion to save FTX – and for that
he circulated this kind of travesty of a balance sheet.
I do not have the words to describe this document, with I will borrow those of the excellent
Matt Levine at Bloomberg: “It is an Excel file filled with the moans
of ghosts and the howls of tortured souls.

If you stare at it for too long, you'll go
crazy." The other absolutely COLLECTOR quote comes
from a certain John J. Ray, III – a guy so mysterious that no picture of
him is supposed to exist on the internet. Following the bankruptcy, he is
responsible for unraveling what happened at FTX.
And in this totally official document, he injects this paragraph worthy of the best
rap battles: “Never in my career have I seen such a
complete failure of a company's controls or such a total absence of
reliable financial information.

This situation is unprecedented, from the compromised integrity of
foreign systems and regulations, to the concentration of power in the hands
of a very small group of individuals who were inexperienced, unsophisticated and potentially
compromised.” Sequoia's article, which does everything to
present Sam as a maxi-geek, describes his group of college friends like this
: "They like to discuss math, physics,
computer science, linguistics, philosophy and logic – for the fun – in
alcohol-free parties.” So the good news is that alcohol
doesn't appear to have played a role in FTX's implosion.

But on
the other hand AMPHETAMINES! "There's nothing like regular use
of amphetamines to make you realize how stupid the majority of human experience
, unmedicated, can be" Yes this is a real tweet from Caroline, on
his real Twitter account. As a reminder, she was the leader of Alameda.
A source cited by Autism Capital claims that Sam himself used a patch, which
constantly injected him with stimulants. At first, it seemed a bit far
-fetched.

Are you sure of your source ?
But they went to investigate and… yeah yeah yeah.
Zooming in on a photo of Sam's desk, they spot what looks like the packaging
of a medical – and turns out to be the package insert for a medicine in patch form
called Emsam. Incredible but true, Emsam is a
prescribed drug for Parkinson's disease. Sam clearly didn't have Parkinson's disease,
but this kind of drug has another, less official use as a stimulant.
Potential side effects include hypersuality, compulsive shopping and…
compulsive gambling.

Autism Capital are understandably very excited
by their discovery – and Milky Eggs draws parallels with the incredible sums
spent by FTX – such as 300 million in real estate in the Bahamas.
But the blogger Scott Alexander – who is also a psychiatrist, therefore slightly more qualified
– comes to temper the theory. According to him, it all depends on the doses. In
normal doses, even these kinds of exotic stimulants are probably ok – but he admits that in
large doses, it will send you into the stratosphere. At this point in the video,
can Sam be trusted to have carefully controlled his doses? I'll let you
make up your own mind – but given what his accounting looked like, I'm not too
optimistic. The other point Scott mentions is that
one of the main dangers of stimulants is how they affect sleep.
Doped up on amphetites, you feel like you can function on 2 hours of
sleep a night – but that's an illusion and your cognitive functions will rapidly deteriorate
, potentially triggering psychosis.
And precisely, Sam boasted of little sleep : This tweet in particular puzzles me:
“I avoid starting my internal memory if possible.
An advantage of sleeping on beanbags: if I sleep at the office, my brain stays in
work mode, and I don't have to recharge everything the next day.”
But isn't the purpose of sleeping precisely to restart your brain?
Another bizarre anecdote: “Every Sunday, I watch 3
American football matches in parallel while I work”.
This is starting to get weird.

And that's also how he explains the famous
legend of “Sam playing League of Legends during an important call with investors”…
He says he doesn't get pleasure from the game… but it occupies his brain, otherwise it ca
n't stop spinning. And that completely changes the interpretation
of this anecdote. It's not that Sequoia's questions are so easy
for him that he can afford to do something else on the side. He just ca
n't help it. He is unable to do one thing at a time.
So the guy is not in control of his own brain at all. Being a trader – or being the
CEO of a box – is above all about making good decisions.
Do you think a guy who can't calm down without watching 3
football matches at the same time is going to make the best decisions in a crisis situation? Not sure.
There's one final topic on which there's been a lot of speculation – that FTX was
run by a group of 10 roommates in a penthouse in the Bahamas, all of whom
more or less slept together.

The rumor starts from an article on Coindesk,
which launched the whole affair by publishing the balance sheet of Alameda – but on
this one they give few details and it does not seem super credible to me.
What is verified is that a good part of the management team
actually lived together. And that a lot of sources agree on a relationship between
Caroline and Sam – which raises the possibility that that relationship played into her decision
to risk it all to save Alameda. But beyond that, we have something
much more specific thanks to the detectives of Autism Capital, who unearthed
Caroline's secret tumblr. She explains that what she finds
sexiest are the men who "control the majority of the world's governments"
and that "the only acceptable mode of operation for polyamorous couples is to follow
the model 'of an imperial harem' Is Sam the Chinese emperor in
this analogy? Or maybe Caroline herself?
I don't know.

I don't even know if that's important in the case.
FTX explosion is like being on the edge of an endless abyss filled
with weird monsters It's impossible to look away – but
you know deep down that the closer you stay to the vortex, the further you descend madness. Why did I make this video
? Why did I just spend 30 hours of my life sifting through tweets from
someone called Autism Capital? The simplest answer is that I
was captivated by this case. And I know that, for most people,
Sam's downfall is immensely satisfying . s love to see rich and powerful
people being destroyed. All they hope is that the same thing happens
to Elon soon. But for me, the emotions are very different.
I find this story quite tragic. For the innocent people who lost their
money, of course – but also for Sam himself.
Yes, he committed fraud. Yes, he deserved the consequences that will befall
him. My question is how did it get there?
It would be easier if we could tell ourselves that Sam was a bad guy, who had always
been bad. But I think his charitable convictions
were sincere, at least at first.

He was in the effective altruistic movement
years before he got rich or even dabbled in crypto.
And so I would have preferred to live in a world where there is a billionaire named
Sam Bankman-Fried, a boy genius who plays Lol while talking to Sequoia and distributes
his billions to the most worthwhile causes. Instead, we live in a world where Sam
has been corrupted. Corrupted by what? By money?
I do not think so. Yes, he lived in a luxury penthouse in the Bahamas, but apart
from that, he seemed to live for his job.
I believe Sam was corrupted by his own legend. He started to believe in his
own marketing. “I was on the cover of every
magazine, and FTX was the idol of Silicon Valley.
We have become too sure of ourselves and reckless”. But nothing lasts forever.
You can be a genius trader one day – then lose huge amounts when the competition
gets tougher.

You can be sincerely selfless one
day – then betray all the people who trusted you, customers, employees and
even your parents. You can be a billionaire – and lose it all
in one tweet. Every Monday, I send an email with my
best discoveries on psychology , marketing and online business.
The newsletter has been on hiatus for several months, but I will be relaunching it soon, so now is
the best time to sign up or re-sign up.
The link is at the top of the description. And if you want another video about a
prodigious guy who ended up going off the rails, check out this one on Kanye West..

Texto inspirado em publicação no YouTube.