Get your hankies out for the FTX Parents
Just kidding, you fucking failed at raising your kids, and you should feel like epic failures...
I was reading the outstanding daily missive from Matt Levine, finance reporter at Bloomberg, as is the custom, and one of his “also” items was a blurb about how the parents of the failed Crypto exchange FTX’s ‘young’ executives are shattered that their crotch fruit did big frauds.
First, the article, from the NY Times, titled “How FTX’s Young Executives Shattered Their Parents” (gifted link) is worth a read purely for indulging your inner schadenfreude. I mean the word “fraud” is practically in there.
It leads off with the 27 year old Nishad Singh at the time of the implosion who …
The week that FTX collapsed in 2022, the father of Nishad Singh, one of the crypto exchange’s top executives, arrived at the airport to pick him up.
His son, who had just turned 27, appeared suicidal. “Nishad was a shell of himself, completely destroyed by his guilt,” Gururaj Singh, a veteran tech executive, recalled in a recent court filing.
Gee kiddo, you got caught with your hand in the $8B cookie jar, and now you feel guilty, and your father thinks you might be suicidal…
You know what? If I had committed the LARGEST fraud on record, I might want to take a swan dive off a cliff somewhere to end the pain.
But then his father had this epiphany:
He also had to come to terms with an alarming fact: His son, a talented software engineer who had graduated with the highest honors from the University of California, Berkeley, was a criminal. Nishad Singh had helped oversee a sweeping conspiracy that erased $8 billion from FTX’s books, plunging the company into bankruptcy, draining customers’ savings and prompting a slew of criminal investigations centered on Sam Bankman-Fried, the founder of FTX.
You think?
Of course, he pled guilty and got just 3 years of “supervised release”. Big whoop dude, you got caught with your hand in the $8B cookie jar and you just get essentially parole.
Good luck in the future finding a job to use your “computer science” chops.
Of course, there’s Sam Bankrun-Fraud’s1 love interest, Caroline Ellison, the sweet, innocent waif. Her mother is …
The mother of Caroline Ellison, another executive at the crypto business, said she had a hard time reconciling what her daughter had done.
“I will spend the rest of my life trying to understand how someone as good and selfless in so much of her life could end up in the situation she did,” Sara Fisher Ellison wrote in a filing last month.
Gee, both her parents are Economics professors at MIT. SBF’s parents are motherfucking LAW professors at Stanford for fuck’s sake, one of them teaches business ethics. You can’t make this shit up!
Their parents’ lives have been shattered. Some of them faced enormous legal bills or suffered reputational damage. Mr. Bankman-Fried’s parents, the Stanford University law professors Joe Bankman and Barbara Fried, were sued by FTX’s bankruptcy estate over their financial entanglements with the company. Ms. Ellison’s parents, who both teach economics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, were harassed online and hounded by the news media.
You know, if you don’t want to have this “stress” in your life, the hounding by the press, the reputational shame of having your offspring in the legal system (that you no doubt believed that it was for “others” - make your own interpretation of who these “others” are) then perhaps you should have been better parents, instilling — oh, I dunno — ETHICS in them?
Why am I so harsh on this? It is because of this:
Across those cases, the FTX conspirators benefited from privileges that most criminal defendants lack, said Seth Goertz, a former federal prosecutor in Arizona. They hired top-tier law firms to mount sophisticated defenses featuring sympathetic portraits of their lives, anchored by polished parental testimonies.
“You’re certainly seeing class dynamics in play here,” Mr. Goertz said. “This is not something a defendant who just has access to a public defender could do.”
Yeah, they should have been forced to use public defenders.
In fact, some of the parents were up to their nipples in the scam:
Mr. Bankman-Fried’s parents were intimately involved in the business. Mr. Bankman helped FTX find its first lawyers and worked on the company’s advocacy efforts in Washington. Ms. Fried, who ran a political donor network in Silicon Valley, advised Mr. Bankman-Fried and Mr. Singh on campaign contributions before the 2022 midterm elections, court filings show.
Other FTX parents played smaller roles, offering informal guidance and occasionally visiting the Bahamas, where the company relocated in 2021.
At times, they were completely in the dark about their children’s company. In his letter to the court, Mr. Ellison said he had no idea his daughter had been dating Mr. Bankman-Fried, with whom she had a turbulent, multiyear relationship, until a few months before they broke up.
If they were in the dark, it was because they chose to ignore the warning signs, or they were happy to be the recipients of their beneficence.
Regardless, parents, you made them, and you should look really hard at where you fucked up, and figure out how you can atone for this shitty childrearing.
Back to the initial crisis, I will close with this pull-quote about Nishad Singh:
The elder Mr. Singh had been bracing for bad news. A few days before the bankruptcy, he had gotten a panicked call from his son. “Can you come here?” Nishad Singh had asked. “I’m scared. I need you.”
But FTX unraveled too quickly for him to intervene, so he arranged for his son to fly home to the San Francisco Bay Area with his fiancée, who was also an FTX employee, and their dog, Gopher.
At home, the elder Mr. Singh tried to hold himself together, to stay strong for his family. When Ms. Singh saw their son, she pulled him into an embrace. “I held him as tightly as I could, rocking him back and forth as he wept,” she wrote.
Over the next year, Gururaj Singh traveled to New York with his son for meetings with prosecutors. All the onetime billionaire wants now is to live a simple and happy life, he told the judge. “To him, this means a renewed focus on family,” the elder Mr. Singh wrote. “On getting married, becoming a father one day.”
Well, with a non-custodial sentence, he might be able to do those things. But he will forever be a convicted felon, with that stigma following him the rest of his life.
Is this justice? No, but it is better than nothing.
Real name is Sam Bankman-Fried
I am a big fan of nature versus nurture. But you aren't born with ethics and values. Those need to be taught and these parents you describe are abject failures.
I’m not going to nominate myself as parent of the year, because I made plenty of mistakes, but I’ll just say that my youngest has a PhD in a neuroscience field with mad computer skills. They’re helping children with cognitive disabilities. Eldest has dual degrees in biological and environmental sciences. They’re helping provide education, data for species recovery after an event and surveys for state/federal agencies. I couldn’t be prouder.