I was wondering why SBF seemingly behaved like an innocent man. Giving interviews, talking to podcasters, remaining at his residence.
Why didn’t he make a run for it?
If he did take all those billions as was claimed, why didn’t he move to a country that doesn’t extradite or just move off the grid for a couple years?
Was he burnt out? complacent? drugs?
Or did he never have that money in the first place?
Everyone had been telling him he was the smartest guy in the room, and he thought he was. Plus BTC and crypto are still kinda in shaky legal status, and he’d made a lot of donations to politicians.
Crypto ain’t cash, they can unravel the block chain and figure out the transactions. He can’t just disappear with a few mil and not be followed.
If he can’t just disappear with a few mil and not be followed, then how smart can he be?
SBF was arrogant as fuck, and a bunch of rich people mistook it as eccentric genius so they started praising him as a genius. He did some very stupid things and he definitely isn’t a genius, but isn’t an idiot either. He’s smart enough to know when he’s got.
So he may have been just narcissistic and deluded himself his shit does’t stink.
No, everyone had been telling him he was the smartest guy in the room. He clearly wasn’t.
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He was an MIT grad in physics and minor in math, his girlfriend was a mathmatician too. Clearly he must be intelligent. Maybe he wasn’t the genius everybody hailed him as. However if you are smart enough to understand topology and other math-related topics, I would assume that he would be smart enough to funnel money out to secret untraceable accounts, buy diamonds and stash them at strategic locations in numerous countries, have an exit strategy.
Why couldn’t he just have bought a submarine and flee to russia? Or just make a run for it on a regular boat?
I have a lot of trouble believing that if you have all that money, and you have at least as much smarts as the average math student, that you cannot extracate yourself from the situation he was in.
You are making a mistake that a lot of people do. Just because you are intelligent in one particular field doesn’t mean that knowledge applies elsewhere. Time and time again we’ve seen some insane theories from truly talented people. My go to example is Ben Carson is a world renowned doctor who pioneered and succeeded in a surgery no one ever could have thought possible. He also believes the pyramids were used to store grain.
Intelligence and stupidity are not mutually exclusive.
People with Ph.Ds will sit down at a keyboard and drool out of the corner of their mouth while contacting tech support.
And then there’s also a difference between being intelligent and being smart. If you are intelligent, you might know how to cheat in a videogame. But if you are smart, you know that this a bad idea because of a plethora of reasons.
Excellent point.
It’s just very very weird. If I sat on that much money, and had his IQ I would of figured something out.
IQ isn’t reliable and hasn’t been for a very long time, if ever. People get smart in areas, not overall. The brain is like a video game in that sense. You get skill points and get to spec them into certain areas. Some people spread them around and get middling knowledge in all areas but you won’t ever find someone who’s a genius universally. It’s just not a thing.
Then you’ve got something else that is extremely important to this discussion. Arrogance. The smarter you are the more arrogant you tend to be. Usually not on purpose. Mostly it’s a byproduct of being told you’re smart constantly or by everyone else being slower than you and you get frustrated. When you have that arrogance you don’t seem to be aware of what you don’t know.
Which leads me to a third thing. Actual smart people don’t assume they have knowledge. They know they don’t know a lot and are really hesitant. Conversely, people who aren’t that intelligent are usually convinced they know more than they do. Why? Because they’re not smart enough to see gaps in their knowledge. They’re looking at what’s in front of them but not the overall picture.
All of that leads to this dude just genuinely not being smart. He was a combination of lucky and knowledgeable in a particular field.
I sure as hell wouldn’t have committed major financial crimes to float a failing company run by some gal I only occasionally wanted to bang. Dude is a top notch dumbass.
He was an MIT grad in physics and minor in math, his girlfriend was a mathmatician too. Clearly he must be intelligent.
Yes, depending on how hard he worked, properly a bit above average. But really it doesn’t say that much.
I would assume that he would be smart enough to funnel money out to secret untraceable accounts
Why? Those seems more like something a lawyer or economist would know about. As you said he graduated in physics and maths.
But I agree. He should have been smart enough to at least hire someone to help him with that.
And he could have just copied what other rich folks do. He didn’t have to reinvent the wheel.
He did do what other rich folk do. Based himself in a tax haven and, initially, tried to challenge extradition.
Not many rich folk end up on trial. But even fewer end up absconding with their cash, never to be seen again. He is the normal kind of rich folk: he assumed he would get away with it because he is a born-rich kid who has never faced a consequence in his life.
There is a difference between rich and powerful,perfectly illustrated by comparing this guy to any number of rich assholes who should be in jail but aren’t.
Intelligence doesn’t preclude stupidity.
He hadn’t gotten caught until he did, and even then, he believed he’d had a track record of getting away with anything.
I think there’s one major flaw here:
You’re thinking about this as an average human.
When you have insane amounts of money, you get what you want.
He likely shopped around high price lawyers, but since he’s used to being told he’s right and a genius. He would have hired a law firm that agreed with him and said he’d be fine.
They likely knew better, but told him what he wanted to hear and took his money with a smile.
So he fell into the whole “yes-man-trap”… It takes somebody who is intelligent/self::aware to avoid that pitfall
What you are saying is that he had a head for numbers.
That says absolutely nothing about his ability to function in society. He had a personal world view that was extremely self-centred and ignored most US social values. The way he operated his businesses shows that he also had no clue how to responsibly manage a business; he left the wrong tasks to the wrong people and left tasks to others that were his responsibility as CEO. He felt that telling others that something was legal was just as good as actually making sure that the things he wanted to do actually WERE legal.
So… not delusional, just ignorant of pretty much everything outside his own narrow area of expertise, and assuming that his smarts at math automatically made him an expert at everything without actually learning the details of how everything else worked.
Just FYI diamonds are not a good place to store money
Just FYI it’s not about that. It’s about them being lightweight and small compared to gold or cash for example
Crypto ain’t cash, they can unravel the block chain and figure out the transactions. He can’t just disappear with a few mil and not be followed.
That’s not true of all crypto though, he could have disappeared with monero.
That’s some peak crypto shilling “My Crypto is amazing for CRIME!”
How is me pointing out that their statement was incorrect shilling? Is it a crime now to want things to be factually accurate?
It’s true though. Monero is great for buying drugs. There’s also many ways to tumble your crypto.
By US laws, fraud is fraud, it’s just a matter of which agency has jurisdiction over it based on if it’s classified as security or commodity.
He believed he was untouchable due to his political contributions to both sides, but he underestimated the reach some of his investors that he stole from had themselves.
You steal from the ultra-rich, this is what happens. If you want into the club, you help them steal from joe-average.
I see, basically he was delusional…maybe it was the drugs after all…
Nope. Narcissism and Self delusion. The most powerful drug of all.
He probably didn’t make a run in the beginning because he had convinced even himself that he hadn’t done anything wrong, that he’d just been aggressive and sloppy. Then he probably thought that he might be accused of something, but that his money and connections would help him stay out of jail. By the time he was arrested in the Bahamas, it was probably too late. He was too high profile to just slip away.
If he’d been a bit more paranoid, he probably could be on the run today.
He had access to billions. Even if getting it all liquid would have resulted in a 90% loss, that’s still hundreds of millions. With that kind of money, you can find a country where you can get a new passport under a new name, and probably get away with faking your own death.
The problem is that to do any of that, you’d have to work with other people, and there would have to be some trust involved. If he wanted to keep the money in a bank, there would have to be some mutual trust with a bank / banker. If he tried to walk around with millions in jewelry, he’d have to avoid getting mugged. If he hired private security, he’d have to avoid getting mugged by his private security. If he tried to use his money to get a passport in say Myanmar, he’d have to have some trust that they wouldn’t just imprison him and beat him until he gave him the rest of his money. If he had tried to work with a lawyer who was only slightly bent, he’d have to trust that the lawyer wouldn’t turn him in. If he had tried to work with a very bent lawyer, he’d have to trust that the lawyer wouldn’t have him tortured until he gave up his money.
While he was definitely a criminal, he was a white-collar criminal from a very white-collar family. He probably had zero connections to underworld figures. So, risking his life going on the run might have seemed like less of a risk than risking that his money and his connections could help him avoid prison time if he didn’t run.
You’re buying into the story he spent years developing. SBF is a conman from a highly influential family, who used his familial connections to run what essentially was a ponzi scheme. He wasn’t a particularly gifted individual, he was just manipulative and had a lot of connections in high places.
He didn’t flee because he didn’t think he was ever going to prison, and tbh I’m kinda surprised that was the eventual outcome. If it had been any other exchange besides crypto, he probably would have gotten away with it.
I think I get it, it was a surprise to him and everybody else that he ended up in prison.
You say he wasn’t particularly gifted but he was definetly smart no? I mean him graduating from MIT is at least evidence that he is not suffering from brain-damage.
I have to admit that all i know is from the media. I did not know about his powerful family, I always assumed he was just a regular kid who just got lucky.
I definitely fell for the story developed over years.
I just cant believe the complacency and utter lack of paranoia, given the means he had, both monetarily and intellectually.
You are falling for a common pitfall, assuming that intelligence is the dominant factor in success. There is enough evidence to suggest intelligence is a thing and that it does help general ability broadly, but it is basically always dominated by other factors, be it affluence or experience. It’s entirely possible for an expert in 1 field to end up being completely clueless and seeming like a dumbass when talking about anything else. There is even research to suggest people that are experts in one domain can be easier to fool into thinking they are more competent in all domains, actually making them less likely to seek external opinions and ending up worse off.
You say he wasn’t particularly gifted but he was definetly smart no? I mean him graduating from MIT is at least evidence that he is not suffering from brain-damage.
I don’t think he was witless, I just think he presented himself as a boy genius when in reality he was just a narcissist with ADHD. He spent a lot of time developing a persona that mixed imagery of Steve Jobs and Aaron Swartz.
But if you actually look into his actual work… None of it’s groundbreaking, especially considering all the innovative aspects of ftx were all lies built upon fraud.
No, you’re still missing it. It was a surprise to him, because his world view stated that what he had done should make the people in power overlook the laws he’d broken.
It wasn’t a surprise to most people. He made the wrong kinds of mistakes.
He thought his wealth would buy his freedom… interesting point of view. He should of known better.
Yeah he really should’ve known better. I have to think that if he came from money / influence the folks pulled strings to get him into MIT. I guess if his GPA was high then ok he is good at mathy type stuff. Otherwise, a guy can graduate from MIT with a D average lol. Anyway, it seems he didn’t really understand the intricacies of other relevant areas needed to get away with his scam, didn’t develop the connections and power, and didn’t think he needed to, I guess?
If Bitcoin didn’t make a dip when it did then he never would have been caught, he would have been able to bounce back and no one would have ever known, but his customers all made a run at a time when Bitcoin was dipping and effecting the value of his crypto so he couldn’t pay out the time. What he did isn’t an uncommon scam, he basically gambled with other people’s money and lost.
Jane Street doesn’t hire non-smart people, and to have passed their hiring process he has to at least have been a talented programmer.
That’s not true at all… Connections go a lot further in wall street than intellect. Even if you’re an extremely talented trader, unless you’re taking a lot of risk, you’re still going to be doing just slightly better than average. The most important aspect of trading is convincing people to join your portfolio, so people with affluent families have a huge advantage.
Being a programmer for JS who does trading is very different than being a regular trader.
I’m sure that’s the imagery that Jane Street’s marketing firm has spent a lot of money developing.
We don’t really know what he did at Jane Street, it’s not like the company is going to go into detail about hiring the biggest fraudster in modern history. What we do know comes from what SBF or his lackeys told michael lewis, who is also a known liar…
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I’m not sure you know who Jane Street is.
I understand they do quantitative trading, which is mostly just a new marketing term for something people have been doing for ages.
they do not have clients. Jane Street invests on their own behalf,
No… They are a liquidity provider, they still have clients.
As far as what you said about connections and convincing people to join your portfolio, that’s not relevant as JS traders do not have investment clients
Liquidity providers rely on clientele and reputation just as much as any other trading company.
Was he an employee of Jane Street?
The only thing I know about them is that they sponsor one or two of my fav math youtubers.
Yes, he interned there and then worked for them for a few years after graduating from MIT. If you’re not familiar, they’re a financial trading firm known for heavy use of esoteric functional languages such as OCaml and being difficult with job interviews.
He did flee, albeit not to country that doesnt extradite to the US. He tried to hide in his techbro trooical get away in the Bahamas.
He didn’t flee. That’s where he was living. That’s where the company was based.
I would argue he did flee as he /was/ in the US, if I am not mistaken, then a legal development happened and then he left.
But eh, not a super big deal at this point, I am too hungry to go look up the exact chain of events.
No, the company was based out of the Bahamas. He’d been living in the Bahamas for years.
Why didn’t he flee? To make gullible folks think he may be innocent because he is acting innocent. He stole billions of dollars from rubes, now he’s on to stealing empathy from humans.
To make gullible folks think he may be innocent
lol worked on me 😂 😭 😅
Yo free mah boi SBF, he’s innocent af
He checks notes only stole from rich people. I see no crimes here. Just some good old payback.
I haven’t really followed this too closely so good chance I am misremembering or just wrong here.
Didn’t he essential steal from everyone using FTX since customers are likely not going to get much back after the portion for taxes and whatever else is taken out first?
That would include a lot of rich people but probably a lot of average people and irresponsible/poor people as well.
He didn’t though. He stole from people who were into Crypto. Sure a lot of them were rich, many weren’t rich but did have disposable income, and plenty were just stupid and thought crypto would be the way they would GET rich. But he didn’t only steal from rich people.
My guess. Dud was just totally disconnected from reality. He isn’t that smart and didn’t understand how badly he’d fucked up.
Read “Going Infinite” which describes the rise and tall of FTX and SBF. “isn’t smart” is not true, but he is definitely not “human smart”, but rather “math smart”.
The book tha Michael Lewis wrote and is now being heavily criticized for because he is so far off the mark and totally takes this twerp’s dick all the way down his throat and lets him finish?
I will give you an upvote for maintaining critical thinking, but I will say that the book is not that bad. And it is really well written and interesting, but might be favoring SBF more than other books. The truth is probably somewhere in the middle.
[Freakonomics Radio] 568. Why Are People So Mad at Michael Lewis? #freakonomicsRadio https://podcastaddict.com/freakonomics-radio/episode/168343814 via @PodcastAddict
He also did a podcast on Freakonomics explaining his position. He wrote the book to give a sense of why everybody fell for SBF. To act like he was an idiot does a disservice to all those affected, and so Michael Lewis captures him in a way that shows why people didn’t question what he was doing. Many people took it as Michael Lewis being a kiss ass, but really, he was trying to show SBF as the complex character that he is.
We all would do well to recognize different types of intelligence.
I really have no interest in Michael Lewis. He only writes about people he likes and usually fails to analyse their actions critically.
What caused that?
Money
His extradition options are, to my immediate knowledge:
- Russia
- United Arab Emirates
I am certain if he went to either, he’d get killed probably by someone holding the bag on his debt. At a rate quicker than a federal prison.
Because he’s a narcissist that thought he could talk his way out anything. He obviously thought wrong, but I’m willing to bet he still thinks it’s everyone else that’s wrong.
A lot of people in his position of power truly believe their own hype. I no doubt believe he thought that they would never convict him, that he’d be too intelligent for them to catch, and that he’d be able to buy his way out with his powerful connections.
“why didn’t he make a run for it” if you realise you will be tried, it is too late. If you try to flee somewhere without a good reason, they will hold you and arrest you.
He’s not a genius, but he’s also not a total idiot. He knows.
Because he’s a lazy fuck with severe adhd and he’s a fucking idiot.
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Where would he go? Even countries without extradition treaties can still extradite. There’s no hiding. His options were grim either way.
it’s the hair. just look at it.
I don’t get it, he’s got beautiful hair…
On top of the many other reasons here, there’s also a pretty distinct difference between countries without a US extradition treaty and countries that won’t extradite to the US. Many countries without formal treaties will still happily hand over a US citizen trying to hide in their country. It might be a different story if he had dual citizenship somewhere but anywhere he tried to flee he’d be immigrating illegally.
