, Columnist
The SBF Case Was Easy
Also gentle pod shops, private credit liquidity, PIK, Sculptor, telltale fonts and Grok.
I am probably the person in the world who was most susceptible to Sam Bankman-Fried’s “actually it’s complicated” defense of the collapse of his crypto exchange, FTX Trading:
So when SBF was like “see, I was running a leveraged financial institution that took customer deposits for margin trades and leveraged futures bets; I was doing what I thought was reasonable risk management, but then a once-in-a-lifetime storm crashed the crypto markets and a run on the bank evaporated my customers’ money,” I was pretty much the ideal audience for that pitch.