It's almost over (the FTX trial of Sam Bankman-Fried)
It has been cathartic and engaging to watch this train wreck.
Going to admit that I have been entranced with the fall of FTX and the insanity of its former head, Sam Bankman-Fried(SBF)1. I first heard about Crypto and Bitcoin not long after it was started in the late aughts, and I shook (and still shake) my head over it.
But I largely ignored it until I started getting former colleagues pumping it to me circa 2017, and upon taking a longer look at it, I still said nah.
The fact that it was a bubble was obvious. And I didn’t buy enough popcorn.
The last 4 weeks has been the trial of SBF, and we have heard a bevvy of testimony from the former lieutenants of SBF about how it was all a scam, and that the manchild at the top was in the thick of it.
It wasn’t going well for SBF, and I feel for his defense team, as they were tasked with the impossible, how to get their client who was central to a massive, obvious fraud off of the charge.
At the end of the day, the defense (n.b.: it was the arrogance of SBF that felt he could talk his way out of this shit. Kinda reminds me of this:
Not a good plan. First, the Judge required the defense and the prosecution to do a proffer session without the jury in the room last Thursday, and all reports were that SBF was stunned when his normally gifted tongue was ineffective in the face of Great Wall of evidence that was presented. Several of the journalists in the audience reported his blanching at many of the exhibits.
Clearly, the defense team retooled, and when the jury was back in the room, they had altered their tack.
The direct from his own attorneys didn’t hurt him, but hoo-boy, when the prosecution hit him on direct, man oh man, did SBF come off as shifty, untrustworthy, and surprisingly having a very poor memory (in direct contrast for his ability to recall minutia in his direct from many more arcane topics in the distant past versus when the prosecution was hammering him).
Alas, the trial didn’t go well for him, and today (Thursday, November 2, 2023) the jury goes out to deliberate.
Regardless of how long it takes, I will miss a large part of my Youtube viewing, and newsletter reading that has been focused on the decline and fall of FTX and Alameda research, and the fallout of the end of the Crypto golden era.
I suspect that the long run of essentially 0% interest coupled with the boredom of the Covid lockdowns drove the speculation and stellar rise and then the fall of many of the crypto projects.
I am almost out of popcorn.
I have been slow in posting lately, but I have a banger in the editing stage. I hope I can get a few of these in my backlog published this coming weekend.
Early on in the unwinding of FTX and Alameda, someone quipped that he was “Sam Bankrun-Fraud” and to this day, I connect those dots in my head.
Thank you for the update, and the "Pulp Fiction" piece. I've been wondering how his trial was going, but have been focused on TFG's New York case.
It’s nice to see well-deserved comeuppances. SBF is a nice table setter for Trump’s. And the NY fraud trial of his is a nice one for the criminal trials to follow. It’s like watching a slow moving snowball rolling down the mountain picking up speed.
I got immunized to the crypto during the 90’s by tech stocks. I learned my lesson then about “investing” in things I didn’t understand and didn’t have any real value anyway.