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Comment by londons_explore | Hacker News Reader

> could have cashed out as a billionaire

I doubt there was any time in his career where all the accounts were fully legit and he could have cashed out. There would always have been some investors who hadn't got the returns they expected and would have gone digging.

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Hindsight is always 20/20 but as FTX was growing and Alameda was losing money, he could have shut down Alameda before it went negative. Then, he could've focused solely on FTX, which was apparently worth 10 of billions.

Was it not as much 'worth tens of billions' as 'held tens of billions of customer funds' though?

FTX supposedly had funding rounds that valued it at like $30B. This is equity, not deposits. Possibly massively overpriced due to crypto bubble, but likely that he could've extracted generational wealth from it.

I'd be shocked if they had any solid claim at even $1B using honest numbers. The crypto world loves to make valuations like “I just sold one to my buddy at $500, the other tokens are worth $45 trillion” but at the end of the day there just wasn't that much liquidity since most people aren't interested in the product. For a company like FTX which is getting fees from their customer's holdings that doesn't leave a lot of room for billions unless they could have cashed out at the peak of the bubble.

Or just settled for the generational wealth he'd get from his parents. You really had to try hard in this guy's position to not live a life of complete material ease, and he pulled it off!

Or stay at the hedge fund he was working at (Jane Street?) and make a fortune in bonuses! Dudebro really achieved something very few of us ever will.

What sort of funding rounds was Elizabeth Holmes getting again? What was the supposed value of twitter when Elon bought it?

Valuations don’t mean much until the money changes hands, typically with the asset holder losing.

In crypto, those two seem to mean the same thing. Three yards of ironclad terms of service inform customers that the deposited funds are fully and permanently the exchange's funny money

You say “in crypto” yet Bitcoin was invented to solve the problem you describe.

Then it failed spectacularly. How was FTX possible, if Bitcoin was invented to solve that problem?

How much are unicorns that never turn a profit worth?

Ask Amazon and YouTube for the first decade of their lives.

Short answer is they're (their stock is) worth as much as people are willing to pay.

Alameda stole customer deposits from FTX. You can not just "shut it down".

I think he means shut Alameda down at the point where it was starting to lose money and he had to decide whether or not to steal funds from FTX.

In part due to Alameda making it an attractive venue to trade on (at a loss) and other shenanigans though.

Like most of the financial world, the whole thing was a confidence game. Shutting down Alameda would have destroyed the illusion and the chips would have begun to fall shortly after, IMHO.

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