Sam Bankman-Fried's farcical fundraising effort
axios.com
axios.com
Part of me thinks that maybe SBF actually is as bewildered as he sounds, about why it all came apart. Whereas Bernie Madoff knew he was presiding over a Ponzi scheme and was only surprised that it lasted as long as it did, SBF might have actually believed that he was as great at business as his media puff pieces said.
Like a person pre-2008 who believes they can afford this mortgage because the bankers are willing to lend them the money, and why would they do that if I couldn't afford it, SBF may have believed he must be great at business, because Sequoia and SoftBank and the rest were loaning him money in huge amounts, and they all had lots of experience in the space.
None of which means he wasn't guilty of fraud, but he may actually be a bit of a tragic figure, in some ways.
We wonder how a college graduate could be surprised at having accumulated $100k in education debt, as it's very simple arithmetic and doesn't occur in an eyeblink. But for them the money is incidental to their goal of education and probably career. For SBF, the currency (fiat, crypto) is the goal itself. It really doesn't compute. We see some people also pursue their path in a Wile E Coyote fashion, we see these days that they don't fall if they don't look down. (Boris Johnson finally looked down. Other countries' former leaders may not have looked down ever.) I wouldn't rule this out. Though he could be utterly clueless, once again hard to square with his education and socialization.