The Legend Of "SBF"
Media accounts continue to be generous to Sam Bankman-Fried on the FTX scandal. This piece, I think, gives the overall current dimensions of the Overton window: In the weeks since Sam Bankman-Fried’s cryptocurrency empire was revealed to be a house of lies, mainstream news organizations and commentators have often failed to give their readers a straightforward assessment of exactly what happened. August institutions including the New York Times and Wall Street Journal have uncovered many key facts about the scandal, but they have also repeatedly seemed to downplay the facts in ways that soft-pedaled Bankman-Fried’s intent and culpability. The writer in the piece comes down on Sam Bankman-Fried as the architect of a fraud: At the heart of Bankman-Fried’s fraud are the deep and (literally) intimate ties between FTX, the exchange that enticed retail speculators, and Alameda Research, a hedge fund that Bankman-Fried co-founded. While an exchange ultimately makes money from transactio...