In The Shadow Of Mt Hollywood

At this point, there's a lot that isn't adding up in the current FTX-Bankman-Fried narrative, even among the more skeptical commentators. Let's just start with John Ray III, the new CEO of FTX who is to supervise its liquidation, whom I quoted yesterday as saying, “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.” More succintly, he's saying the Bankman-Fried-Ellison clique who putatively ran the company couldn't organize a two-car funeral. So let's ask a very basic question. The evidence we have is that they suffered from serious cases of ADHD, which simple research shows renders its victims incapable of planning complex tasks, conducting sustained research, or even sitting still for fairly minimal periods. Sixty years ago, I went through five years of the Ivy ...

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...

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 fami...

Yesterday we took a closer look at Caroline Ellison's parents, both faculty members at elite-university MIT. This link provides an introduction to Sam Bankman-Fried's parents ; in an odd mirror-image reflection, both are husband-and-wife faculty members at elite Stanford Law School, ranked Number 2 on the US News list , although Stanford recently withdrew from the US News rankings. Both of Sam's parents, Barbara Fried and Joseph Bankman , hold endowed chairs at Stanford Law, which places them somewhat higher in David Brooks's new meritocratic American upper class than even the Ellisons, of whom only one holds an endowed chair. This places the family income, I would imagine, at something well north of $250,000 per year. This would be consistent with the private school to which they sent Sam befoere he went to MIT, the main building of which is shown in the photo at the top of this post. According to the first link, [H]e attended local elite private school Cr...

Above is a screen shot from the evaluation of Sara Fisher-Ellison at ratemyprofessors.com . She is the wife of Glenn Ellison, the Gregory K. Palm Professor of Economics at MIT. Although she's listed as a Senior Lecturer in the Economics Department at MIT, as far as I can tell, this is not a tenured or tenure-track position, and in the sort of arrangement I discussed yesterday, she's on the faculty primarily to pad the compensation for her powerful husband. I quote from a student evaluation that dates from June 19, 2021, before the FTX scandal broke: Very nice but can't teach. She makes a lot of mistakes and seems nervous. When she's solving a problem she often has to back peddle because she made a mistake, which leads to a lot of confusion. Biggest critique is that she doesn't show her work for a lot of the problems she works through. She does a lot of solving in her head... sorry not sorry My experience from my brief academic career is that non-tenure track fa...

I left off yesterday wondering if the whole elite-school racket, which earlier fraudsters like Madoff, Lay, and Kozlowski avoided, has anything to do with some of the less familiar features of the FTX scandal. I referred to David Brooks's 2000 Bobos in Paradise: The New Upper Class and How They Got There , which bases his argument on what might be called the bourgeois-optimistic interpretation of elite-school admissions: after World War II, James B Conant reformed the Ivy admissions process by introducing the Scholastic Aptitude Test, which devalued the role of money and social standing in determining who got into Harvard, Yale, Chicago, Stanford, MIT, and the like, and instead stressed merit and ability. At the same time, the Ivies are thought to have dropped Jewish quotas, which allowed Jews to increase their presence on campus and qualified them in greater numbers for careers at upper levels in business and government. One needed to look no farther for confirmation than Brook...

In the aftermath of the midterms and Trump's presidential announcement, the FTX scandal hasn't been a top story, even though some commentators are calling it worse than Enron. So far, in fact, nobody has noticed an odd coincidence that the scandal emerged within days of Elizabeth Holmes's sentencing for the Theranos hoax -- but both Caroline Ellison, the reputed queen of Sam Bankman-Fried's harem and CEO of Alameda Research, and Elizabeth Holmes were products of Stanford University. I did a quick check; Stanford produced 11 Nobel laureates since Elizabeth Holmes was on campus in 2002, but it's worth noting that Ellison and Holmes must hold ranks equivalent to the Nobel Prize among famous financial hoaxers, up there with Bernie Madoff, Ken Lay and Dennis Kozlowski. Two of them in just a decade! Remember as well that Madoff, Lay, and Kozlowski didn't achieve prominence until they were well into middle age; Holmes and Ellison emerged meteorically when they we...