Another Bankman-Fried

The photo above is Gabe Bankman-Fried, Sam's younger brother, who appears to have been involved in Sam's various enterprises in one way or another since their start. According to his Linkedin profile, he graduated from Brown University in 2017. Brown, an Ivy, has a reputation for accepting more than the usual number of offspring of celebrities, royalty, and wealthy donors, including John-John Kennedy and assorted other Kennedys, the son and daughter of Sunny von Bülow, Amy Carter, and John Kerry's daughter Alexandra.

Immediately after Brown, he worked as a trader at Jane Street Capital alongside his brother Sam and Sam's sometime girlfriend Caroline Ellison. However, Sam left Jane Street only months after Gabe's arrival, and Gabe didn't last there much longer. After a period of unemployment, he worked six months as a data consultant for Civis Analytics, a political data analysis firm tied to Democrats. Civis Analytics also has ties to the Bankman-Fried family:

Civis Analytics has positioned itself as a Democratic powerhouse in recent years. The firm was "born" from President Obama's campaign after Eric Schmidt, the former Google CEO and executive chairman of Alphabet, helped as a recruiter and trainer for the campaign and later teamed up with Dan Wagner, the chief analytics officer for Obama's 2012 campaign, to help launch the company.

As Gabe Bankman-Fried worked for the firm during the 2018 election cycle, Civis received nearly $4.4 million from the likes of the Senate Majority PAC, House Majority PAC, Priorities USA Action, Democratic National Committee and Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee. The cash was primarily for research and data analytics consulting, FEC filings shows.

Barbara Fried leads Mind the Gap, a secretive organization that funnels massive amounts of money to Democratic campaigns, according to Influence Watch. The group has received major funding from well-known Silicon Valley donor. . . . In 2018, Mind the Gap paid Civis about $90,000 for data analytics services.

Isn't that peculiar? During precisely the same six-month period that Gabe worked for Civis, his mom funneled $90,000 to the company, which would have funded Gabe's salary plus a lagniappe. I'm having a hard time staying away from an imputation that Gabe is a pretty useless guy, and mom was fully aware of it.

In January 2019, as Sam was moving to start Alameda Research and FTX, he went to work for Rep. Sean Casten, D-Ill.

Casten, then a freshman congressman, was named that same month to the House Financial Services Committee, which oversees regulation of cryptocurrency and hedge funds, among other matters.

Gabe Bankman-Fried remained employed for two years on the House staff, according to his LinkedIn profile. The website Legistorm, which tracks members of Congress and their staffers, says he worked for Casten.

. . . The Daily Signal and The Heritage Foundation’s Oversight Project asked Casten’s spokesperson, Jacob Vurpillat, whether the congressman met with or received donations from FTX or any other cryptocurrency company. (The Daily Signal is Heritage’s multimedia news organization.)

Casten’s spokesman didn’t respond to email or phone inquiries Monday by publication time. We also reached out Tuesday to Casten through a Twitter direct message, but did not get a response.

We made inquiries by email asking whether ethical limitations regarding interactions with cryptocurrency companies were placed on Casten or Gabe Bankman-Fried, who was employed by Casten as a legislative correspondent from January 2019 through February 2021.

Typically in government, when an apparent conflict of interest arises involving a relative with whom a government employee has a close relationship, that employee or government office would seek counsel from a lawyer regarding ethical issues.

We also asked Casten’s spokesperson whether the congressman met with Treasury Department officials and discussed FTX or any other cryptocurrency companies.

In July 2020, according to Linkedin, he becme Director of Guarding Against Pandemics, which is

a left-leaning advocacy created in 2020 to support legislation that increases government investment in pandemic prevention plans. The organization was created to support a specific proposal by the Biden administration to allocate $30 billion in federal funding for the containment of future pandemic outbreaks. The organization was founded and is funded by cryptocurrency billionaire Sam Bankman-Fried and directed by his brother, Gabe Bankman-Fried.

According to NBC News,

Gabe Bankman-Fried resigned Monday from Guarding Against Pandemics, the nonprofit that purchased the Capitol Hill townhouse and served as the hub for its philanthropic work, telling his roughly three-dozen employees he didn’t want to get in the way of the group’s mission as it scrambles to find new funders.

Neither Gabe Bankman-Fried nor Guarding Against Pandemics responded to a request for comment.

The story suggests that Gabe was little more than a useful idiot for Sam:

Bankman-Fried’s collapse was so abrupt that his political point man in Washington only found out about it via Twitter, according to two sources.

That’s especially notable since his point man is his younger brother, Gabe, who quickly flew to the Bahamas to console Bankman-Fried, and who, like their parents, is now caught up in the ignominious collapse.

“A lot of people in D.C. thought this was the next big thing. Everybody was trying to get in,” said one source close to the Bankman-Frieds’ political operation who requested anonymity to speak candidly. “This went from the hottest thing to the most toxic thing. But that’s how D.C. works.”

The high-priced consultants and lobbyists the Bankman-Frieds employed will be fine, said the source. “The person who got most f----- from all this is probably his brother,” the source continued, “Somebody who probably had no idea what was going on on the business side, who unfortunately shares the same hyphenated name, who has worked in politics and is now probably not going to be able to.”

One pattern that's emerging here is that Sam Bankman-Fried knew what was going on, and directed the whole enterprise. He was surrounded by at least two ciphers, his sometime girlfriend Caroline Ellison and his brother Gabe. The parents of both Caroline and Gabe were, I would guess, delighted to have something that not only kept their no-count kids busy, but paid themselves a substantial income as well.

These are vignettes of life in the new meritocratic American upper class.