ADHD At FTX

There have been persistent stories that Sam Bankman-Fried, Caroline Ellison, and other key people at FTX were being treated for Attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD), and they were apparently being prescribed amphetamines to treat it. The tweet above from Caroline Ellison at least suggests this. On the other hand, this is difficult to confirm for several reasons. Diagnosis of ADHD must be done by a medical or mental health professional, and nobody can diagnose it from a distance in any case. Medical records are highly confidential (unless they relate to COVID vaccination, in which case they are completely public). In addition, statements from John Ray III, FTX's new CEO, indicate that company records are so poor that nobody is quite sure who even worked there.

My own interest in the question stems from my research into public information on the minimal job histories of those key people, Caroline Ellison and the Bankman-Fried brothers, and their vapid public personas. If they were such prodigies from such privileged backgrounds, why did they need to be such crooks? And why have they turned out to be incompetent even as crooks? Their peers, Kenneth Lay and Bernard Madoff, kept their scams running for a decade and more, while the elite graduates of Stanford, Brown, and MIT could manage it for only a few years.

I'm inclined to accept the ADHD hypothesis, at least until a better one comes along. According to the National Institute of Mental Health,

Attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) is marked by an ongoing pattern of inattention and/or hyperactivity-impulsivity that interferes with functioning or development. . . . Many people experience some inattention, unfocused motor activity, and impulsivity, but for people with ADHD, these behaviors. . . [i]nterfere with or reduce the quality of how they function socially, at school, or in a job.

More specifically, the site goes on to say that adults with ADHD have difficulty sustaining attention during tasks such as conversations, lectures, or lengthy reading; have difficulty organizing tasks and activities, doing tasks in sequence, keeping materials and belongings in order, managing time, and meeting deadlines; and avoid tasks that require sustained mental effort, such as preparing reports, completing forms, or reviewing lengthy papers.

All of these qualities are apparent in accounts of Sam's behavior even in important meetings with investors, where he is reported to have fidgeted, fiddled with toys, and played video games. He is reported to have said few books are worth reading. Caroline Ellison's video accounts of her duties disparage tools like stop-losses or tasks like technical analysis or use of math above the elementary school level. But it's worth pointing out that new CEO John Ray III's published analysis of Alameda Research, where Ellison was previously CEO, indicate that it was owned 90% by Sam and 10% by another of Sam's cronies; she had no ownership stake and probably had few actual duties as "CEO".

This story in the New York Post is suggestive as much for what it doesn't say as for what it reports:

Dr. George K. Lerner, a psychiatrist, reportedly served as a therapist to disgraced FTX CEO Sam Bankman-Fried and an adviser to many of the firm’s employees. Bankman-Fried and his ex-lover Caroline Ellison were reportedly part of a 10-person group that ran FTX and its sister cryptocurrency trading firm Alameda Research from a “luxury penthouse” in the Bahamas.

“It’s a pretty tame place,” Lerner told the New York Times. “The higher-ups, they mostly played chess and board games. There was no partying. They were undersexed, if anything.”

Lerner told the outlet he moved in June to the Bahamas, where he served as an adviser at FTX for 32 hours per week and also maintained a “small private practice.” The performance coach asserted the FTX executives were workaholics with little in the way of social lives.

. . . Lerner also addressed viral rumors about the alleged use of stimulants by FTX executives. Ellison, the CEO of Alameda Research, admitted to “regular amphetamine use” in an April 2021 tweet, while Bankman-Fried has openly discussed his experimentation with Adderall and other stimulants.

Amphetamine can be prescribed under the brand name Adderall as medication to treat attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD).

Lerner told the Times that while some FTX employees may have had prescriptions for ADHD medications, the “rate of ADHD in the company was in line with most tech companies.”

To which I have two reactions. One is that if the rate of ADHD at FTX "was in line with most tech companies,” then maybe Elon Musk had a point in firing half of Twitter (he might have if he'd taken more than just a week to fire them, of course). But also, based on John Ray III's remarks, nobody knew who worked there or how many employees they actually had, so how can Dr Lerner even know what the ADHD rate actually was? As Ray put it,

“Never in my career have I seen such a complete failure of corporate controls and such a complete absence of trustworthy financial information as occurred here,” Ray said. “From compromised systems integrity and faulty regulatory oversight abroad, to the concentration of control in the hands of a very small group of inexperienced, unsophisticated and potentially compromised individuals, this situation is unprecedented.”

In other words, it's as if the place was run by a little clique of people with ADHD.

Yet the key players came from remarkably privileged backgrounds. What does this say, for instance, about the schools and universities to which the powerful parents were able to send their children? If we can reason backward from the circumstance that those offspring seem to have suffered from serious symptoms of ADHD as adults, how could they possibly have qualified for admission to exclusive schools and universities as adolescents?

Remember that people with ADHD have problems with completing tasks, meeting deadlines, listening to lectures, or doing lengthy reading, all of which are normally required for elite-school admission. How did they manage even to sit through the SATs, much less pass them with distinction? How did they manage to graduate at all, much less to have had professors say glowing things about them?

And we're back to the question I raised above, why the Bankman-Fried brothers and Ellison, with degrees in math and physics from top universities, couldn't get careers going after graduation that were consistent with such outstanding credentials. Something's seriously missing in this whole picture.

Oh, right, this is David Brooks's new meritocratic American upper class.