Background
Edward Snowden
The White House sanctions and arrests kids for the “crime” of building privacy tools to protect you, while “regulators” were quietly palling around with the thieves who just robbed 5 million people.
The difference? The thieves were big political donors.
Sam Bankman-Fried https://twitter.com/SBF_FTX/ and the conscience of a crypto billionaire
SBF’s father was an expert in tax shelters and a professor at @StanfordLaw. On an entirely unrelated note, this is the FTX corporate structure:
The general counsel of FTX US had served as lead counsel to Chairman Gensler at the CFTC.
Gensler was Hilary Clintons campaign finance manager and Gensler’s daughter works for Elizabeth Warren.
SEC Chair Gary Gensler’s old boss Glenn Ellison at MIT is the father of Caroline Ellison who is the Co CEO of Alameda research.
Before joining Alameda in 2018, Caroline worked at Jane Street as a trader on the equities desk. Caroline Ellison graduated from North School in 2012. She won numerous math awards, like placing top 10 at the Harvard MIT math competition and receiving an honorable mention from Math Prize, in addition to representing the North math team.
She graduated from Stanford University with a bachelor’s degree in mathematics in 2016.
Caroline @carolinecapital April 5 2021 actually posted this to her twitter acct.“nothing like regular amphetamine use to make you appreciate how dumb a lot of normal, non-medicated human experience is
the dumbest thing is: this morning, I was lying on the couch reading a book. then I decided to go for a hike. but it took me like … a half an hour from that point to muster the energy and motivation to actually get up from the couch
and then after that the hike was good! my body had no problem making the countless exertions of effort involved in ascending to a much higher elevation using only my own muscles! but the effort to get off the couch and move to a standing position is somehow Herculean
the second dumbest thing is: apparently there’s about 20% of my brain that’s dedicated to food.
whatever else is happening, throughout the day, it’s just a significant percentage of my thoughts dedicated to “what should I do for dinner? how about dessert? should I have an afternoon snack before that? … you know what’s good? Ethiopian food. do they even have that in HK?”
Michael Lewis will do an amazing job with the FTX story
Michael Lewis Already Selling Movie Rights for Book on FTX’s $32 Billion Meltdown. The author of Moneyball and The Big Short has been following around FTX founder Sam Bankman-Fried for the past six months.
Moneyball Quotes
“No matter how successful you are, change is always good. There can never be a status quo. When you have no money you can’t afford long-term solutions, only short-term ones. You have to always be upgrading. Otherwise you’re fucked.”
― Michael Lewis, Moneyball: The Art of Winning an Unfair Game
“The inability to envision a certain kind of person doing a certain kind of thing because you’ve never seen someone who looks like him do it before is not just a vice. It’s a luxury. What begins as a failure of the imagination ends as a market inefficiency: when you rule out an entire class of people from doing a job simply by their appearance, you are less likely to find the best person for the job.”
― Michael Lewis, Moneyball: The Art of Winning an Unfair Game
“Years later he would say that when he’d decided to become a professional baseball player, it was the only time he’d done something just for the money, and that he’d never do something just for the money ever again. He would never again let the market dictate the direction of his life.”
― Michael Lewis, Moneyball: The Art of Winning an Unfair Game
It’s an admission few billionaires will make publicly: Sam Bankman-Fried is in it for the money.
“The pleasure of rooting for Goliath is that you can expect to win. The pleasure of rooting for David is that, while you don’t know what to expect, you stand at least a chance of being inspired.”
― Michael Lewis, Moneyball: The Art of Winning an Unfair Game