While ignorance of the law cannot be used as a defense for breaking it, an organization such as FTX comprises a complex interaction of financial, technological and legal issues. You can easily imagine naive hands breaking multiple laws in their ignorance.
It is also possible that they did things knowingly illegal only after their lack of experience had put them into a situation where they were trying to stabilize a teetering house of cards.
Some things are hard, very hard. In some domains, being clever without being an expert doesn't work.
It is also worth mentioning that the media sources that said how great things were going are also the same ones that are telling us how badly it ended up. I say 'possible' and 'imagine' above because we can't really get a good picture of what happened from reading a few articles. There will be a few good well researched summaries in a few years time. Hardly anyone will be interested by then; besides, the truth will be boringly complicated and nuanced.
It is not so much that he was a "Machiavellian genius," it was that he was basically the main character in Idiocracy; the smartest one in the room, but the room was a circus made for his own entertainment than anything else.
> an organization such as FTX comprises a complex interaction of financial, technological and legal issues.
It is unclear if this complexity was designed specifically to hide blatant acts of fraud or just cover up incompetence. Either way, the lack of transparency does not look good for him.
>It is also worth mentioning that the media sources that said how great things were going are also the same ones that are telling us how badly it ended up.
I am sure the individual investors who got scammed out of their investment(s) due to getting suckered into it by the MSM will be more than forgiving as well.
>There will be a few good well researched summaries in a few years time. Hardly anyone will be interested by then; besides, the truth will be boringly complicated and nuanced.
Until the next fraudster gets propped up and we can all look back to this and hope for the revival of independent, constructive journalism that the internet was supposed to bring over this current iteration of the MSM circus.
>It is unclear if this complexity was designed specifically to hide blatant acts of fraud or just cover up incompetence. Either way, the lack of transparency does not look good for him.
I would strongly suggest neither. I did not intend to imply that this complexity was specific to FTX but rather all organizations in that field. The complexity is a unavoidable result of combining the demands of financial, technological and most significantly legal aspects.
https://www.vox.com/2015/8/4/9095213/police-stops-heien-v-no...
The thing is though, mainstream media kept publishing fluff pieces.
There's no way anyone can say they didn't see it coming. There's a whole subreddit dedicated to making fun of crypto and a website has existed for years now that archives every grift https://web3isgoinggreat.com/. So, yeah, I think the media is just fundamentally flawed and I'm not sure what the answer is.
Between access journalism, hero worship, a narrative formula that's known to sell, and laziness, journalists are all too glad to not only look the other way, but actively curate a reality distortion field on behalf of bad actors.
It's not just that they didn't see through SBF, it's that it never would occur to them to even look. That's simply not what they are optimised to do when they cover this class of person.
Likewise, referring to all journalism as "the news" is making the same fallacy as referring to "the government" as a singular being. Neither are completely monolithic entities with anthropomorphic agency.
Now we hear this (in 2021) but it happened ~3 decades ago:
"On one of Levin’s trips to New York in 1989, Wexner asked him to meet a brilliant young financier who wanted to pitch an investment opportunity.
"Levin had never heard of the man, Jeffrey Epstein, which was odd. After working for Wexner for seven years, Levin knew virtually every player on Wall Street (a few months earlier, Levin says, he met with arbitrageur Ivan Boesky). Levin’s skepticism was confirmed as soon as he arrived at Epstein’s Madison Avenue office. There were no visible signs of a trading operation; just Epstein sitting behind a desk that didn’t even have a computer. “Epstein was trying to explain a currency trade he wanted to do. I have an MBA from Ohio State, and I didn’t understand a word the man said,” Levin recalled. Levin went back to Columbus and reported that Epstein was a fraud. “I told Les, ‘Stay away from him,’ ” Levin remembered. Wexner agreed not to do the trade."
"Levin was shocked when Epstein showed up in Columbus a few months later and announced Wexner had put him in charge of his finances. Levin tried to protest but says Wexner wouldn’t take his calls. Levin couldn’t stand having Epstein as a boss. “He was an asshole. The most arrogant person I ever met,” Levin recalled. A few months later, Levin quit.
"Levin said Epstein taunted him on his way out. “On my last day, Epstein walked into my office and held up a piece of paper. He bragged that Les had given him power of attorney over his money. I worked for Les for seven years and I never had general power of attorney,” Levin said. Epstein, Levin continued, even ordered him to surrender equity in Wexner’s town project, likely costing Levin millions. “Epstein basically said, ‘If you want, you can fight it out, but I have a lot of lawyers and I’ll make sure it’ll cost you a fortune.’ ”
https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2021/06/inside-jeffrey-epste...
This is NYTimes mentioning Epstein and Wexner (with a heads-up on surveillance to visitors /g):
"Mr. Wexner bought the house in 1989 for $13.2 million and lavished tens of millions on renovations, art and furnishings. Those curious to see the princely accommodations Mr. Wexner abandoned need look no further than the cover of last month's Architectural Digest. When asked how long Mr. Wexner had occupied the property, Jeffrey Epstein, his protege and one of his financial advisers, replied, "Les never spent more than two months there." Thus the prorated cost of Mr. Wexner's sejours would appear to have been in excess of a million dollars a day.
"Visitors described a bathroom reminiscent of James Bond movies: hidden beneath a stairway, lined with lead to provide shelter from attack and supplied with closed-circuit television screens and a telephone, both concealed in a cabinet beneath the sink."
https://www.nytimes.com/1996/01/11/garden/home-sweet-elsewhe...
Btw, this is the one and only (in NYTimes, WSJ, NewYorker) article mentioning J.E. in 1990-2000 range per google (for me at least).
In the mainstream news, I’m not sure, but there were clear reasons to be skeptics, and that no one with any money involved did real DD beggars belief.