Your Weekend Reading: The Sudden Implosion of a Crypto Empire

At his peak, crypto mogul Sam Bankman-Fried was worth $26 billion. At the start of this week, he still had $16 billion. Now: a whole lot less. The collapse of FTX.com—the biggest bankruptcy of the year—provides another lesson in what happens when the hype of personality meets the cold wind of reality. Digital assets were supposed to revolutionize finance, but the same old mistakes have been committed, Bloomberg’s editors write. SBF made all sorts of lofty promises, including big plans to donate his crypto wealth as part of a movement called “effective altruism.” For many retail traders who poured their life savings into digital assets, the collapse of his empire marks the end of the line. The venture capital firms who gave the digital wunderkind a pile of money without demanding he establish oversight over FTX could arguably bear some of the responsibility. And all of this is just the beginning. With the US Securities and Exchange Commission and the Justice Department now investigating, and people like ex-Treasury Secretary Larry Summers making Enron comparisons, the road ahead for SBF and what remains of FTX may be bumpy indeed.

Big Tech is getting smaller everywhere. Mark Zuckerberg issued a rare mea culpa in announcing plans to fire 11,000 people at Meta. And Twitter began its second week under Elon Musk trying to rehire some of the 3,700 people he terminated. Parmy Olson writes in Bloomberg Opinion that the industry is entering an age of austerity, and companies can no longer afford their billionaire bosses’ obsessions.