SBF

Conclusion

A source who made it decently high in the ranks of FTX before self‐extricating ahead of the immolation—but who, nevertheless, does not want to be identified because, well, because of everything—told me the following at the end of a conversation we had on the same day that I finished writing the first draft of this book:

A lot of people are finger‐pointing and asking how did these people not know. Politicians. VCs. Employees. Etc. I think when you put it all together and you realize that Sequoia, BlackRock, President Biden … Katy Perry, all these different people, had absolutely no idea about what was going on. [It] is not about a failure of any one of these people.

It's about, that… Sam was a genius at covering up his fraud.

He was just the best.

He was able to tell the story to everyone, including from the very earliest days that we all started working here, there were things going on. He clearly was just a masterful liar and a masterful storyteller. And I think that's what people need to understand to move on.

***

An adjective that gets used a lot in the reporting on FTX is that it was “unregulated.”

But keep in mind that the mechanisms of the 2008 financial crisis were built by a slew of well‐regulated entities. And governments propped up those same entities in the crisis' aftermath, rather than simply unwinding them in an orderly fashion. Those institutions remain. One has to wonder if any lessons were really learned.

One can use FTX as an example of the dangers ...