SBF

Chapter 31Celebrity

Between July and October 2021, FTX raised over $1 billion across two separate rounds (the first led by longstanding venture firm Sequoia Capital, the second including Ontario Teachers' Pension Plan Board among others). It was also able to buy Binance out of its stake in the company from its early days (which is how the rival exchange would get its hands on its fateful bag of ftt).

And so SBF had a giant pile of money.

In other words, in 2021 FTX moved to a new level on the global stage, and anyone following the crypto market could feel it.

So this next part will be constructed a little bit differently. The story has been basically chronological. But by mid‐2021, there is simply too much going on to go straight through. So for Part II, I'm going to break the story into three separate threads: SBF's celebrity, his bailouts, and his political efforts.

Up first: FTX's aggressive acquisition of attention in the United States.

Michael Arrington, an investor and the founder of the news site Techcrunch, has a famous selfie he took in January 2019 at a crypto party in Singapore. It shows him with Tron's Justin Sun, Binance's CZ, and SBF, among others. It was a portrait of some of the industry’s most notorious. Arrington tells me that SBF had been lurking nearby and then basically photobombed the shot.

According to Frankel, the crypto OGs that she was friends with found Sam off‐putting at first. He was viewed with suspicion for a long time. But even if everyone didn't ...