Believe me. EVERYONE sticks around for the free lunch.
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FTX was there to fleece the regular investor, as is the case to one degree or another with all cryptocurrency exchanges (since they all enable pyramid schemes). Alameda, like most hedge funds, was for accredited investors: high-net-worth individuals and institutions that can handle more risk. Both firms worked together to enrich Sammy and his confederates, but the bigger sin was the Alameda Ponzi scheme stealing from wealthy people.
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The parents would be well-advised not to fund the appeal. They’ve already blown hundreds of thousands if not millions on the defense of their golden boy, so it’s not like they can be accused of abandoning their son. But anything more than that is throwing good money after bad (at best) or the father setting himself up for criminal charges of his own.
It’s a tough pill for anyone to swallow, knowing that any physical contact with their kid for the rest of their lives will be on prison visiting day. Also, after investing so much in their little genius, it’s going to be hard for them to admit that he’s ruined the family’s finances and name. But that’s exactly what he did, and the sooner they come to that realisation the better chance they have of moving on with their lives.
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FTX crypto-villain Sam Bankman-Fried convicted on all charges
[…]
FTX has arguably replaced Enron as the ultimate example of corporate incompetence.
The former CEO will therefore get to play his new role as the face of everything that’s wrong with crypto for years come. That’s cold comfort to investors whose faith in the growth of digital assets with no intrinsic value saw them trust FTX to make them money.
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“Incompetence” isn’t the word I’d use for FTX or Enron. “Malfeasance” is more accurate.
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I mean, there was incompetence as well… in that their deliberately malfeasant plans collapsed in ignominy.
A competent malfeasance would just make sure that whatever it was doing was legal, by having the laws rewritten if necessary.
ref.eg. The life and career of Rupert Murdoch.
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(gift link)
Among the many paradoxes surrounding the case was the idea that someone so antagonistic to the perceived value of image and story would have paid such careful and perversely winning attention to his own.
FTX, the cryptocurrency exchange that for a short time made Mr. Bankman-Fried the richest person in the world under 30 before it completely collapsed, had no chief financial officer, no human resources or compliance departments, no board of directors. But it employed a public-relations manager who spent her time arranging the interviews that Mr. Bankman-Fried gave so freely. In these conversations, he forged the public’s perception of him as an ungroomed radical utilitarian, a Corolla-driving savant who cared about money only to the extent that he wanted to give it all away.
Implicit in the government’s case was the insincerity of that conceit and the foundation it laid for the practice of other, more meaningful forms of deception. “You didn’t cut your hair because you were busy and lazy?” the prosecutor, Danielle Sassoon, asked the defendant in her cross-examination. Her question was rhetorical.
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… FTX just stole people’s money, it didn’t cause blackouts or topple a state governor
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