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Comment by robinson7d | Hacker News Reader

Welp, guess I picked a bad one. Paper Bird Inc seems to be owned by Sam Bankman-Fried… but anyway maybe they aren’t all owned by him, and regardless it might partially explain why the revenue numbers GP was looking up are much lower than the claims.

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Amazing find, a list of each entity and owner would be great to see considering you chose a random company and yet it was within the SBF sphere of influence. What was the end game for FTX? Funneling money to its own shell companies to achieve…

The end game was to secure a regulatory monopoly for FTX. SBF was beloved in Washington circles, even the SEC Chair had exclusive meetings with him. It's also well known he spent enormous amounts of money on the elections:

From Oct 19, 2022, just before their collapse: https://www.ftxpolicy.com/posts/possible-digital-asset-indus...

Thanks for the link. A monopoly for FTX would mean what given how they managed themselves? Excessive money into opaque entities owned by FTX, I guess.

It was not a coherent strategy. They basically put the whole industry on a trajectory that was unsustainable, and hoped that there's at least one more price increase/jump, that'll 10x their value, because in that case that means everyone is using crypto, there's no "backing off", etc.

Indeed, it seemed on the verge of collapse once the curtain was pulled back. I can’t see how a regulation monopoly would have done anything more than make its implosion that much bigger and influence more of economic and political structure as more entities would have become intertwined, pulled by the gravity of greed.

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