This arrogant, entitled, little snot's far left arrogant parents teach at Stanford , one of the premier universities in the nation. Will Stanford fire them for being assholes? I doubt it. To teach at an elitists university, the first requirement is to be a far left, elitist, asshole. A little know fact is at the top of all employment forms in bold letters is "Assholes Welcomed".
If you don't believe me, just look at what is happening on the campuses of these "elite" universities.
Hell no. Coddled...Mollycoddled to an extraordinary degree.
His parents are legal ethicists. Their expertise is <barf barf> at the intersection of legal and illegal.
Their instruction of him was how to be corrupt (not illegal, especially if your friends are in the right places.) But he missed the part as to where the line gets drawn, and now he bemoans the fact that he no longer has the ability to make the books look as if nothing ever happened.
Ponzi schemes are great as long as you can keep them rolling.
I don’t think he is clueless. I think he is using the tricks which worked for a long time. Fortunately for us, the prosecutor appears to be doing a great job of proving Sam Bankman-Fried is a crook and untrustworthy.
I also suspect he thinks he could either talk his way out of a conviction or make back the money he stole if given enough time. I don’t think he could make back the money and I am glad he cannot talk his way out of jail.
I hope he gets at least 25 years for what he did. Unfortunately, he will probably get closer to 10-15 years like Elizabeth Holmes did.
It's hard to say (cluelessness), unless one is really probing deep questions that demonstrate the other person's thought processes and how they came to the conclusions they have. Quite honestly, it's probable that the idea of this catching up to him and there being real consequences to himself, and being accountable, was something he didn't consider possible. And yet, here he is, being tried. Reality, as they say, is a bitch.
Maybe classes in ethics should constitute a core requirement each year in school beginning, say, with the fourth grade.
The bifurcation of the kids coming out of high school, being motivated and interested in learning or being socially and educationally deficient, is not going to be changed unless there is a massive commitment on the part of teachers and parents to honesty and integrity in every part of a child's education.
Ding, Ding, Ding; Change of Subject: Education of our youngsters today represents a crucial investment in tomorrow. If our educational system(s) can correct for the obvious shortcomings, it is incumbent on us, the voting public, to remove the movers and shakers therein and replace them with people who have their heads screwed on properly.
Time for the educational emperor to put on some overalls and get to work.
One more thing. I don’t think his parents are responsible for his crimes. Reading comments on Sam Bankman-Fried’s crimes, I am amazed at how many people either accuse his parents of crimes without evidence or blame them for his failings. I am genuinely curious as to why people want to punish his parents (or any parents) for their children’s crimes.
His father was on the Board of the company. They paid themselves millions of dollars, bought $30 million of real estate in the Bahamas and funneled millions to their pet causes. They’re law professors at Stanford who knew exactly what they were doing.
Glad you focused on this aspect of the story. It highlights a theme which speaks to larger problems in our social calculus. Undoubtedly, our upbringing, including the emotional and cognitive influences surrounding us during formative years, plays an important role in the kinds of people we become and the choices we make. But my father in law likes to remind me that when the kids leave the house at 18, many are still only half baked and the world of elite colleges and high white collar expectations is a cesspool of bad character and bad characters. A good sense of right and wrong comes from first hand experience early in life, not books read and speeches heard in boarding school and university. But As tempting as it is to blame his parents for not imparting that sense, he, not them, made his choices. Blame them for serving as figureheads in his failed enterprise (they seem deserving of that). Blame them for letting themselves be deceived or entranced by their high falutin’ virtue signaling (a trait common among liberal college professors). Blame them for not pulling him aside once in a while and asking him to affirm it was all above board. These are exactly the kind of people we conservatives have chafed against for decades--elites who can’t imagine a world they can’t fix if only they had more power. At the end of the day, he chose to play fast and loose--and illegally--with other people’s money. HE chose not to risk manage better. HE was unable to see that being in over your head in a game of poker with your own money is very different than when it’s a lot of other people’s money. These were HIS mistakes. Our lives are our own and so are our choices. When we diffuse responsibility away from the people who make their choices, that is just another manifestation of moral hazard, which is one of the fundamental problems in America today. It has played major roles in everything from the 2008 financial crisis to the disastrous wars we’ve fought to the handling of the pandemic. If his parents did illegal things, they should be prosecuted and punished. Otherwise, we can pity them and serve them up as examples of the pitfalls of modern parenting (believe me, I’d like to do more), but the material consequences of his actions are his to bear.
I recall reading a news article (maybe in TFP?) that included a message from his father asking Sam for an increase in pay from FTX for his role on his son’s board. Anybody else remember that, or am I misinformed?
BTW, if you are a fellow finance geek, @AutismCapital on Twitter has done yeoman's work covering the more ludicrous aspects of this story. Jeff Carter on Substack also has published some deeper insights into the various abject management and regulatory failures here.
The parents, according to reports, were active in constructing FTX in a way that would minimize (evade) regulatory restraints. That was legal advice.
There is nothing illegal about finding ways to AVOID regulatory entanglement. It is when the AVOIDANCE turns to EVASION that the problems arise.
It is not clear that his father, as a member of the Board of Directors, knew of the illegal conversion of clients' money, but certainly with the gift of the vacation home and other lavish personal spending, some sort of question mark should have been floating around in his father's mind. And if he suspected skullduggery and didn't step forward, he is as guilty as it appears his son to be.
Yes. Still, one would think that someone raised by two Stanford law professors would have heard enough around the dinner table to understand basic concepts like not taking money from your customers and putting it into investments or political campaigns they had not specified.
Heck, children of blue-collar families understand this stuff when they open businesses after high school.
Another point: His parents don't need to be punished in a court of law. Their punishment will be to live out their lives watching their precious son, an MIT graduate, face the consequences of his own misbehavior.
Sorry, but I have to disagree. His parents may not have been as deeply involved as SBF, but they knew exactly what he was doing and were personally enriched by his misdealings.
The best (and most telling) part of the NPR story was the comment that SBF grew up in his parents' modest home on the Stanford campus. I'd fathom a wild guess that the value of this "modest home" eclipses the value of 99% of the homes in the US.
It’s NPR, take anything they say with a grain of salt. They’ll defend leftists and hold them in a good light no matter what. Just don’t be a Republican or in any way conservative and expect impartial journalism from them. Not going to happen.
If they are convicted and sent to prison, fine. Personally, I would rather go to prison than live with the knowledge that a child of mine had grown up to be a billion-dollar fraudster.
Yes, even modest houses in Palo Alto are expensive. So what? The Bankman-Fried family never had to worry about having enough money. What was lacking seems to have been basic ethics.
We have three living offspring. All raised nearly identically. They could not be any more different. One has inherited/assumed the headship of the family business, one started her own thing and one went to work in the service industry and has a side gig representing a European products line.
I'm not deeply involved in their affairs and would feel uncomfortable in meddling. I'm trusting their convictions and moral compasses.
You can't simply paint the parents with that broad of a brush.
Normally, I’d agree with you, but his parents are both law professors at Stanford, teaching tax law and business ethics. And the dad was on his payroll. These weren’t well-meaning, doting Mom and Pop back on the farm. They were co-conspirators.
Stanford houses are usually modest but most importantly they belong to Stanford. Can’t be sold or inherited. Not to defend him in any shape or form, just this curious fact about Stanford housing.
My instinct, and that's all it is, is that he is their frontman. When the police were at the door to arrest him.he was in a text argument with mommy over whether he should wear a suit or shorts. There is an email from daddy complaining about only getting a check for $200,000 when he was expecting one for $2,000,000. There is more. Lots more.
I think you need to read up on who his parents are and what they tech before you make that statement. They are what is wrong with him, symptomatic of the entire woke diseased mess.
Erm, because they benefited financially from his crimes and both are Stanford Law Professors who knew, or should have known otherwise that makes them educated idiots, he was acting fraudulently. They’re culpable, but not criminally. Not sure why anyone can’t see that.
Why defend the indefensible? These two people are teaching law at Stanford and they were the beneficiaries of their son’s grift.
Let’s make this simpler. If a police officer pulls you over for speeding your ignorance of the speed limit will do nothing for you. Ignorance is not a defense.
But these two were willfully ignorant. So doubly not a defense. They looked the other way because it suited them to do so. They didn’t believe they or their son should be held to the same standards of accountability as the rest of the proletariat out there, obviously.
They are not responsible for his crimes because they are merely his parents. However, given that they benefitted from his crimes while teaching ethics, they are subject to derision and scorn.
The accusation comes, and derives merit from, with the parents' active participation in the creation and operation of FTX. They were sort-of a quiet board of directors aiding him in constructing a trading exchange that evaded regulatory restraints. They got paid handsomely with a multi-million dollar vacation home in the Bahamas and a cool $200K per year (a sum they are recorded as complaining that it was too low for the work the were performing.)
Not much to say here except that the whole foundation of crypto has been nonsense from the start. I wrote a paper on it way back proving that everything claimed about it was wrong. So of course grifters congregated around it.
Economics and finance were never my strong suit in school, but I know enough to spot bullshit when I see it. Crypto and Bitcoin (for that matter) didn't sound stable, and thankfully the instinct to avoid it paid off. Unfortunately, there were a lot of folks that took the bait.
Naturally the worst crimes he committed aren’t on trial.
He was held in an island prison until democrats forced the government off that island to denounce election fraud charges against him and refuse extradition until those charges were dropped.
Because of course.
democrats taking money from his criminal enterprise.
I would call on all parents of high schoolers who are choosing a university right now, don’t do it! Or anyone considering entering university, especially an Ivy League, save your hard earned money, or the massive debt you’ll acquire.
Do anything else. But do not go to these bastions of poisonous, Marxist, unethical, anti-Semitic, violent, Lord of the Flies, hate factories. You will lose yourself to the demons lying await there, and you will lose your humanity.
You may think it’s an exaggeration. But just look at what university students deem acceptable today. They all need safe spaces and comfort animals, But they will scream to lock you up for misgendering them, or not recognizing white privilege, or for saying a man cannot be a woman. Yet they think nothing of cheering for babies and grandmas being burned or beheaded, or acting like a lynch mob with Jews, or terrorizing a young woman (Riley Gaines) by trapping her in a locked room while they are baying for blood at the door.
Universities have become vile, evil institutions and they are producing monsters inside of them.
Sam Bankman Fried is a product of the university culture. Both he and his parents in their superiority and arrogance lacked the morality to see that what their son was doing was ruining lives. They didn’t care because they were only defrauding the peons of society who should know better than to trust them.
Even now I’d take an easy bet SBF and his parents see nothing wrong with what he did. After all SBF is MIT and they are Stanford and they are Democrats. The rest of us are just the “Little people”.
The parents should be on trial with him. They raised him, advised him, and took money from him. Typical liberal grifters who think they deserve only the best and let the people eat cake!
He really is the antithesis of all the other corrupt billionaires that got taken down.
I was a tween during the Enron scandal, and I remember part of me fantasizing about how awesome their lives were. Remember Lau Pai (who basically got away with it all and now breeds purebred horses), who was notorious for inviting prostitutes to his private office since they never believed him? He was un-ironically my idol for a year. Even sickos like Jeffrey Epstien and Harvey Weinstein have their kind of sordid appeal to young boys.
But let's look at SBF's lifestyle, ignoring the fact he's a thief. Here's a man who has more wealth than essentially ANYONE can dream of. He's the 0.0001%. And he's basically failed in so many other areas of life. He's physically unfit and unattractive, his maybe-sometimes girlfriend ain't any easier on the eyes, he seems entirely too stressed out with his entire life revolving around work, he'll likely never have love, children, or a legacy, and didn't manage to amass much power or influence outside his sphere. He won in one domain, and lost every single other one. Here is a man anyone can point to and say "Wow, what a loser!"
I was living and working in Houston at the time of Enron. I remember the pictures of blindsided employees wandering out of the building with a box of the stuff from their desk, like what now? Whom to blame? Crappy accountants. The same can be said of FTX. Where are the accountants? We are the keepers of the economy. Without honest and ethical accountants it all falls apart.
Yes, I listened to the interview that Bari did with Mr. Ray. He said they basically weren’t keeping any books. I just don’t know how anyone thought this was OK.
bobbybob and PH, I just thought of this when you mentioned Enron - Sarbannes-Oxley was specifically enacted in the aftermath of Enron and WorldCom to put liability on CEOs, CFOs, and even board members for corporate fraud.
I am not a lawyer (thank you, Jesus), but I don't believe SOX applies to FTX. But the intent of the law is clear, and I do know that the management and board of the American public company I worked for knew all about SOX and their responsibilities/liabilities under it.
And for FFS, the parents are law professors! They should know not only the letter of the law, but the spirit behind it. And maybe give their kid some parental advice on keeping out of trouble.
I don’t think he is that different. He got status, power, and a lot of expensive things as a result of the fraud. He spent his stolen money on very expensive properties in the Bahamas (over $10 million), flying on private planes, etc. He also got a lot of status by playing as a venture capitalist, giving tens of millions to politicians, and pretending to be a successful tech/financial entrepreneur.
One of the best parts of this story, for me, was when a text message/email revealed that a consultant told him he’d have to pretend to be interested in “woke shit” in order to ingratiate himself with the right people.
Whatever this guy gets, it won’t be enough. It’s too bad his grifter parents aren’t facing any charges for what they extracted from their son’s pretend company.
and the 10's of millions directed to tilt an already tilted election? He will get a long sentence which he won't have to finish and emerge with money on hand and sympathetic new stories.
I am disturbed...really disturbed...that little is included in recent stories about SBF about the millions contributed to politicians...about actual amounts, actual names, and whether ANY of them are returning those contributions so that the actual victims of actual fraud might receive pennies on the dollar of their losses.
That will depend on whether he has any dirt on them. He is no longer useful for generating money, so they don't have many other reasons to give a crap about him
I know you think he's 'a dead man walking', but I've become so jaded in our system of justice that I feel he'll somehow get off.
Frankly, the greatest crime of this century isn't what he did. It's what the DOJ, and corrupt judges have done to bring their partisanship and hackery to our court system. THEY have destroyed my faith (and 50% of my countrymen's faith) in the court system, because they've been blatantly dishonest in administering it.
Stealing other people’s money is no laughing matter, but I appreciated the touches of humor in this piece.
I think the point is how a person can be so smart in some ways and so clueless in others.
I only wish the judge was able to toss his parents in jail with him for creating such a pathetic human.
I don't think he was clueless.
My believe is that he's a narcissist who thinks is,smarter than everybody else.
A really pathetic character who lacks a moral compass, and ...yes,both parents are guilty of having enabled him probably his entire life.
.
This arrogant, entitled, little snot's far left arrogant parents teach at Stanford , one of the premier universities in the nation. Will Stanford fire them for being assholes? I doubt it. To teach at an elitists university, the first requirement is to be a far left, elitist, asshole. A little know fact is at the top of all employment forms in bold letters is "Assholes Welcomed".
If you don't believe me, just look at what is happening on the campuses of these "elite" universities.
Couldn't agree more.
Instead of "professors" the title should be changed to " Leftist indoctrinators"
You could add: Second-Grade transexual teachers
Enabled? Enbled?
Hell no. Coddled...Mollycoddled to an extraordinary degree.
His parents are legal ethicists. Their expertise is <barf barf> at the intersection of legal and illegal.
Their instruction of him was how to be corrupt (not illegal, especially if your friends are in the right places.) But he missed the part as to where the line gets drawn, and now he bemoans the fact that he no longer has the ability to make the books look as if nothing ever happened.
Ponzi schemes are great as long as you can keep them rolling.
The misbegotten child of these educators is what the entire educational establishment is trying to do to your children.
Wake the F up, America.
I am ruefully amused that Barbara Fried was the author of 2013’s “The Limits of Personal Responsibility.”
Wherever could have Sam learned that ethics are… complex?
My 7 year-old asked why he had to have rules and I told him the story of this man.
I don’t think he is clueless. I think he is using the tricks which worked for a long time. Fortunately for us, the prosecutor appears to be doing a great job of proving Sam Bankman-Fried is a crook and untrustworthy.
I also suspect he thinks he could either talk his way out of a conviction or make back the money he stole if given enough time. I don’t think he could make back the money and I am glad he cannot talk his way out of jail.
I hope he gets at least 25 years for what he did. Unfortunately, he will probably get closer to 10-15 years like Elizabeth Holmes did.
It's hard to say (cluelessness), unless one is really probing deep questions that demonstrate the other person's thought processes and how they came to the conclusions they have. Quite honestly, it's probable that the idea of this catching up to him and there being real consequences to himself, and being accountable, was something he didn't consider possible. And yet, here he is, being tried. Reality, as they say, is a bitch.
I think this is an indictment of prestigious universities and we need to reassess how we define smart.
And maybe a class in ethics should be a required course, especially in the Ivy League schools.
SBFs mama taught ethics at Sta-a-a-hnford.
No way. Seriously? That's hysterical. I wonder if she'll profile herself and her little boy the next time she teaches the class.
Maybe classes in ethics should constitute a core requirement each year in school beginning, say, with the fourth grade.
The bifurcation of the kids coming out of high school, being motivated and interested in learning or being socially and educationally deficient, is not going to be changed unless there is a massive commitment on the part of teachers and parents to honesty and integrity in every part of a child's education.
Ding, Ding, Ding; Change of Subject: Education of our youngsters today represents a crucial investment in tomorrow. If our educational system(s) can correct for the obvious shortcomings, it is incumbent on us, the voting public, to remove the movers and shakers therein and replace them with people who have their heads screwed on properly.
Time for the educational emperor to put on some overalls and get to work.
Your comment is more charitable than my husband’s thoughts about SFB.
One more thing. I don’t think his parents are responsible for his crimes. Reading comments on Sam Bankman-Fried’s crimes, I am amazed at how many people either accuse his parents of crimes without evidence or blame them for his failings. I am genuinely curious as to why people want to punish his parents (or any parents) for their children’s crimes.
His father was on the Board of the company. They paid themselves millions of dollars, bought $30 million of real estate in the Bahamas and funneled millions to their pet causes. They’re law professors at Stanford who knew exactly what they were doing.
Glad you focused on this aspect of the story. It highlights a theme which speaks to larger problems in our social calculus. Undoubtedly, our upbringing, including the emotional and cognitive influences surrounding us during formative years, plays an important role in the kinds of people we become and the choices we make. But my father in law likes to remind me that when the kids leave the house at 18, many are still only half baked and the world of elite colleges and high white collar expectations is a cesspool of bad character and bad characters. A good sense of right and wrong comes from first hand experience early in life, not books read and speeches heard in boarding school and university. But As tempting as it is to blame his parents for not imparting that sense, he, not them, made his choices. Blame them for serving as figureheads in his failed enterprise (they seem deserving of that). Blame them for letting themselves be deceived or entranced by their high falutin’ virtue signaling (a trait common among liberal college professors). Blame them for not pulling him aside once in a while and asking him to affirm it was all above board. These are exactly the kind of people we conservatives have chafed against for decades--elites who can’t imagine a world they can’t fix if only they had more power. At the end of the day, he chose to play fast and loose--and illegally--with other people’s money. HE chose not to risk manage better. HE was unable to see that being in over your head in a game of poker with your own money is very different than when it’s a lot of other people’s money. These were HIS mistakes. Our lives are our own and so are our choices. When we diffuse responsibility away from the people who make their choices, that is just another manifestation of moral hazard, which is one of the fundamental problems in America today. It has played major roles in everything from the 2008 financial crisis to the disastrous wars we’ve fought to the handling of the pandemic. If his parents did illegal things, they should be prosecuted and punished. Otherwise, we can pity them and serve them up as examples of the pitfalls of modern parenting (believe me, I’d like to do more), but the material consequences of his actions are his to bear.
I recall reading a news article (maybe in TFP?) that included a message from his father asking Sam for an increase in pay from FTX for his role on his son’s board. Anybody else remember that, or am I misinformed?
Yes. Seems like he was promised 1M and only received $200k. Sound familiar?
Yes, here on TFP
Sounds familiar
https://finance.yahoo.com/news/sam-bankman-fried-dad-thought-170822604.html
BTW, if you are a fellow finance geek, @AutismCapital on Twitter has done yeoman's work covering the more ludicrous aspects of this story. Jeff Carter on Substack also has published some deeper insights into the various abject management and regulatory failures here.
The parents, according to reports, were active in constructing FTX in a way that would minimize (evade) regulatory restraints. That was legal advice.
There is nothing illegal about finding ways to AVOID regulatory entanglement. It is when the AVOIDANCE turns to EVASION that the problems arise.
It is not clear that his father, as a member of the Board of Directors, knew of the illegal conversion of clients' money, but certainly with the gift of the vacation home and other lavish personal spending, some sort of question mark should have been floating around in his father's mind. And if he suspected skullduggery and didn't step forward, he is as guilty as it appears his son to be.
Damn....Well said. Regards.
They’re in legal jeopardy for multiple criminal acts and the trial begins soon.
This source is unreliable and deprecated for their scandalous bias and failure to provide objective journalism but it’s a typical article:
https://www.npr.org/2023/10/02/1200764160/sam-bankman-fried-sbf-parents-ftx-crypto-collapse-trial-stanford-law-school
Yes. Still, one would think that someone raised by two Stanford law professors would have heard enough around the dinner table to understand basic concepts like not taking money from your customers and putting it into investments or political campaigns they had not specified.
Heck, children of blue-collar families understand this stuff when they open businesses after high school.
Another point: His parents don't need to be punished in a court of law. Their punishment will be to live out their lives watching their precious son, an MIT graduate, face the consequences of his own misbehavior.
Sorry, but I have to disagree. His parents may not have been as deeply involved as SBF, but they knew exactly what he was doing and were personally enriched by his misdealings.
The best (and most telling) part of the NPR story was the comment that SBF grew up in his parents' modest home on the Stanford campus. I'd fathom a wild guess that the value of this "modest home" eclipses the value of 99% of the homes in the US.
It’s NPR, take anything they say with a grain of salt. They’ll defend leftists and hold them in a good light no matter what. Just don’t be a Republican or in any way conservative and expect impartial journalism from them. Not going to happen.
That's true enough. I'm sad to have to agree.
If they are convicted and sent to prison, fine. Personally, I would rather go to prison than live with the knowledge that a child of mine had grown up to be a billion-dollar fraudster.
Yes, even modest houses in Palo Alto are expensive. So what? The Bankman-Fried family never had to worry about having enough money. What was lacking seems to have been basic ethics.
And both parents have been teaching young minds. We are doomed by universities. They have brought about our demise.
If they’re convicted they should receive life in prison without parole the same as sam. Solitary confinement is too good.
It's modest compared to a $16M villa in the Bahamas.
We have three living offspring. All raised nearly identically. They could not be any more different. One has inherited/assumed the headship of the family business, one started her own thing and one went to work in the service industry and has a side gig representing a European products line.
I'm not deeply involved in their affairs and would feel uncomfortable in meddling. I'm trusting their convictions and moral compasses.
You can't simply paint the parents with that broad of a brush.
Normally, I’d agree with you, but his parents are both law professors at Stanford, teaching tax law and business ethics. And the dad was on his payroll. These weren’t well-meaning, doting Mom and Pop back on the farm. They were co-conspirators.
Stanford houses are usually modest but most importantly they belong to Stanford. Can’t be sold or inherited. Not to defend him in any shape or form, just this curious fact about Stanford housing.
It appears that at least some Stanford faculty housing is for sale:
https://fsh.stanford.edu/buy/homes-for-sale
They benefitted financially, and didn’t bother to ask any questions. They should never be allowed within a mile of a student.
My instinct, and that's all it is, is that he is their frontman. When the police were at the door to arrest him.he was in a text argument with mommy over whether he should wear a suit or shorts. There is an email from daddy complaining about only getting a check for $200,000 when he was expecting one for $2,000,000. There is more. Lots more.
That is exactly what I suspect, as well. He doesn't seem bright enough to have done this without standing on the shoulders of giants.
Are you aware of his mother's PAC? If not check it out.
I am. I think a main purpose of creating FTX was to funnel funds to politicians.
Wow, he even stiffed his parents? I bet even Hunter wouldn't do that.
I think you need to read up on who his parents are and what they tech before you make that statement. They are what is wrong with him, symptomatic of the entire woke diseased mess.
Erm, because they benefited financially from his crimes and both are Stanford Law Professors who knew, or should have known otherwise that makes them educated idiots, he was acting fraudulently. They’re culpable, but not criminally. Not sure why anyone can’t see that.
In their defense, they may not have been aware of crimes SBF was committing, but if they're in a paid position, they will most likely be held liable.
Few people who worked for Bernie Madoff were allowed in his upstairs trading room, and were most definitely unawars of his crimes.
Why defend the indefensible? These two people are teaching law at Stanford and they were the beneficiaries of their son’s grift.
Let’s make this simpler. If a police officer pulls you over for speeding your ignorance of the speed limit will do nothing for you. Ignorance is not a defense.
But these two were willfully ignorant. So doubly not a defense. They looked the other way because it suited them to do so. They didn’t believe they or their son should be held to the same standards of accountability as the rest of the proletariat out there, obviously.
I'm not defending anyone....I AM defending due process.
Ever serve on jury duty? Until you sit through a trial and hear all the evidence brought forth, it's best to hold off judging.
This is hardly similar to being pulled over for a traffic violation. Besides, they were not driving the car.
You are in NO position to say they were 'willfully ignorant.'
No, the parents seem to have commiting their own crimes. With using their son either as an instrument, if not a frontman, for them:
https://abcnews.go.com/Business/wireStory/ftx-attorneys-accuse-sam-bankman-frieds-parents-unjustly-103320991
Doing great, higher education, doing just great!
They are not responsible for his crimes because they are merely his parents. However, given that they benefitted from his crimes while teaching ethics, they are subject to derision and scorn.
The accusation comes, and derives merit from, with the parents' active participation in the creation and operation of FTX. They were sort-of a quiet board of directors aiding him in constructing a trading exchange that evaded regulatory restraints. They got paid handsomely with a multi-million dollar vacation home in the Bahamas and a cool $200K per year (a sum they are recorded as complaining that it was too low for the work the were performing.)
To paraphrase the author: imagine if your broker bought her parents a new house with money you’d given her to invest.
In your example most parents, if not all of them, would assume the money to purchase the house came through legal means.
If they asked their broker where the money came from and he told them it was investor's money, then send them all away.
Stealing peoples $ and then using some of that $ to be #2 donate (only behind Soros) to Democratic PACs & candidates is also no laughing matter
Not much to say here except that the whole foundation of crypto has been nonsense from the start. I wrote a paper on it way back proving that everything claimed about it was wrong. So of course grifters congregated around it.
The False Premises and Promises of Bitcoin. https://arxiv.org/pdf/1312.2048.pdf
For some reason I keep typing Bitcon... there's no con so good as a con that gets people to con themselves.
Economics and finance were never my strong suit in school, but I know enough to spot bullshit when I see it. Crypto and Bitcoin (for that matter) didn't sound stable, and thankfully the instinct to avoid it paid off. Unfortunately, there were a lot of folks that took the bait.
It seems we need an LoL like.
I'm chuckling
That we do.
Naturally the worst crimes he committed aren’t on trial.
He was held in an island prison until democrats forced the government off that island to denounce election fraud charges against him and refuse extradition until those charges were dropped.
Because of course.
democrats taking money from his criminal enterprise.
Democrats are evil, they're responsible everything bad, now the world makes sense to me, blah blah blah
Good for you, Eric, for sarcastically recognizing that, for a substantial amount of reality, that is indeed a fact.
Turns out, he STOLE MONEY FROM HIS OWN CLIENTS TO GIVE MONEY TO DEMOCRATS.
$100+ million in the 2022 midterms.
I would call on all parents of high schoolers who are choosing a university right now, don’t do it! Or anyone considering entering university, especially an Ivy League, save your hard earned money, or the massive debt you’ll acquire.
Do anything else. But do not go to these bastions of poisonous, Marxist, unethical, anti-Semitic, violent, Lord of the Flies, hate factories. You will lose yourself to the demons lying await there, and you will lose your humanity.
You may think it’s an exaggeration. But just look at what university students deem acceptable today. They all need safe spaces and comfort animals, But they will scream to lock you up for misgendering them, or not recognizing white privilege, or for saying a man cannot be a woman. Yet they think nothing of cheering for babies and grandmas being burned or beheaded, or acting like a lynch mob with Jews, or terrorizing a young woman (Riley Gaines) by trapping her in a locked room while they are baying for blood at the door.
Universities have become vile, evil institutions and they are producing monsters inside of them.
Sam Bankman Fried is a product of the university culture. Both he and his parents in their superiority and arrogance lacked the morality to see that what their son was doing was ruining lives. They didn’t care because they were only defrauding the peons of society who should know better than to trust them.
Even now I’d take an easy bet SBF and his parents see nothing wrong with what he did. After all SBF is MIT and they are Stanford and they are Democrats. The rest of us are just the “Little people”.
The parents should be on trial with him. They raised him, advised him, and took money from him. Typical liberal grifters who think they deserve only the best and let the people eat cake!
He really is the antithesis of all the other corrupt billionaires that got taken down.
I was a tween during the Enron scandal, and I remember part of me fantasizing about how awesome their lives were. Remember Lau Pai (who basically got away with it all and now breeds purebred horses), who was notorious for inviting prostitutes to his private office since they never believed him? He was un-ironically my idol for a year. Even sickos like Jeffrey Epstien and Harvey Weinstein have their kind of sordid appeal to young boys.
But let's look at SBF's lifestyle, ignoring the fact he's a thief. Here's a man who has more wealth than essentially ANYONE can dream of. He's the 0.0001%. And he's basically failed in so many other areas of life. He's physically unfit and unattractive, his maybe-sometimes girlfriend ain't any easier on the eyes, he seems entirely too stressed out with his entire life revolving around work, he'll likely never have love, children, or a legacy, and didn't manage to amass much power or influence outside his sphere. He won in one domain, and lost every single other one. Here is a man anyone can point to and say "Wow, what a loser!"
I was living and working in Houston at the time of Enron. I remember the pictures of blindsided employees wandering out of the building with a box of the stuff from their desk, like what now? Whom to blame? Crappy accountants. The same can be said of FTX. Where are the accountants? We are the keepers of the economy. Without honest and ethical accountants it all falls apart.
I believe their accountants were a software package bought for $99.99 from the good people at Intuit:
https://www.wsj.com/livecoverage/sam-bankman-fried-arrested-ftx-congress/card/ftx-used-slack-quickbooks-for-accounting-recording-keeping-Rxv42XUT5RKqtYQsM5j8
(As the acting CEO says above, Quick Books is fine for a small business. But not for a damn trading platform and exchange.)
Yes, I listened to the interview that Bari did with Mr. Ray. He said they basically weren’t keeping any books. I just don’t know how anyone thought this was OK.
bobbybob and PH, I just thought of this when you mentioned Enron - Sarbannes-Oxley was specifically enacted in the aftermath of Enron and WorldCom to put liability on CEOs, CFOs, and even board members for corporate fraud.
I am not a lawyer (thank you, Jesus), but I don't believe SOX applies to FTX. But the intent of the law is clear, and I do know that the management and board of the American public company I worked for knew all about SOX and their responsibilities/liabilities under it.
And for FFS, the parents are law professors! They should know not only the letter of the law, but the spirit behind it. And maybe give their kid some parental advice on keeping out of trouble.
I don’t think he is that different. He got status, power, and a lot of expensive things as a result of the fraud. He spent his stolen money on very expensive properties in the Bahamas (over $10 million), flying on private planes, etc. He also got a lot of status by playing as a venture capitalist, giving tens of millions to politicians, and pretending to be a successful tech/financial entrepreneur.
Your tone implies all billionaires are corrupt.
And their wealth automatically makes them guilty of something.
Sounds like envy to me
I don't think billionaires are all corrupt -- I was talking specifically about "corrupt billionaires that got taken down".
One of the best parts of this story, for me, was when a text message/email revealed that a consultant told him he’d have to pretend to be interested in “woke shit” in order to ingratiate himself with the right people.
Whatever this guy gets, it won’t be enough. It’s too bad his grifter parents aren’t facing any charges for what they extracted from their son’s pretend company.
and the 10's of millions directed to tilt an already tilted election? He will get a long sentence which he won't have to finish and emerge with money on hand and sympathetic new stories.
I am disturbed...really disturbed...that little is included in recent stories about SBF about the millions contributed to politicians...about actual amounts, actual names, and whether ANY of them are returning those contributions so that the actual victims of actual fraud might receive pennies on the dollar of their losses.
Put him in Madoffs old cell. It’s empty and he can leave prison the same way Madoff did, feet first.
SBF will at least be able to quickly calculate the probability of unwanted attention if he drops the soap in the prison shower.
Joking aside though, I seriously do wonder if the Democratic Party might figure a way to come to his rescue....
That will depend on whether he has any dirt on them. He is no longer useful for generating money, so they don't have many other reasons to give a crap about him
I know you think he's 'a dead man walking', but I've become so jaded in our system of justice that I feel he'll somehow get off.
Frankly, the greatest crime of this century isn't what he did. It's what the DOJ, and corrupt judges have done to bring their partisanship and hackery to our court system. THEY have destroyed my faith (and 50% of my countrymen's faith) in the court system, because they've been blatantly dishonest in administering it.
Thanks Bari & Co. You have no idea how much I wish this asshat is dominating the headlines right now instead of the conflict in Israel
Just another typical con man.
Absolute power corrupts absolutely. When you think you are king then rules don’t apply to you.
Is anyone surprised that the Democrats were bankrolled by this fraud?
Lying and defrauding America defines the modern Democrat Party.