Matt Levine, Columnist

SBF’s Defense Will Be Tough

Also Su Zhu, Ackman/Musk X SPARC, Lordstown and Dumb Money.

October 2, 2023 at 6:25 PM UTC

Matt Levine is a Bloomberg Opinion columnist. A former investment banker at Goldman Sachs, he was a mergers and acquisitions lawyer at Wachtell, Lipton, Rosen & Katz; a clerk for the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 3rd Circuit; and an editor of Dealbreaker.

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The essential charges against Sam Bankman-Fried are:

This is bad! The basic combination of “the customers’ money is gone” and “you lived in a $30 million penthouse” is really killer. That’s the most basic outline of a financial fraud: The customers don’t have the money anymore, and you do.