Bout tree fiddy stacks of high society worth
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âIâm in quite a big hole right now,â Thacker said. âIâm probably going to have to file for bankruptcy.â
Thacker told CNBC he âwould encourage people to still invest in crypto.â
âI probably would give them some different advice at this point,â he said. That advice would come with the warning, âHereâs what I learned, donât make the same mistakes I did.â
Bhagamshi Kannegundla said he first heard about FTX in an advertisement featuring comedian Larry David that aired during the Super Bowl.
âI was like, oh my goodness, thereâs all these big name people utilizing FTX,â Kannegundla said. âSo I was like, OK, hey, I think Iâll be safe using this.â
Less than a year later, Kannegundla was out $174,000, representing around 60% of his crypto portfolio, from FTXâs collapsed.
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Michael Lewisâs Going Infinite is released today. I reserved it at my library, but Iâm afraid itâs going to be a flimsy look at FTXâs fall rather than a deep, critical dive. I suspect that when he was embedded at FTX, he was actually planning on a very positive puff piece like The New, New Thing (which was very not good), and the timing of the FTX collapse saved him from looking like a complete moron.
Lewis has been getting roasted on Twitter for defending SBF on 60 Minutes.
not sure thatâs a fair description of Lewis during the interview. he definitely has sympathy for Sam and itâs probably fair to say he liked him personally, but the (poor) description how ftx came to be, Samâs âmanagement styleââ and of the fraud heâs accused of isnât the same as defending him imo.
thought Lewis was goofing on him actually
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Oooofff, this review kind of confirms my fears that this book is not going to be great.
https://x.com/jenszalai/status/1709003422001754492?s=46&t=5Y4DrgHazxMWQ9paU0HR7w
Itâs very funny that the only subject Michael Lewis was ever able to muster an appropriate level of skepticism towards was himself.
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There were certainly people in this forum that felt that NFTs represented something more tangible than anything having to do with âfiatâ (stocks, bonds, etc), or that at worst it wasnât any more or less of a scam than trad finance based on fiat.
Lewis was the guy who wrote a bunch of good books. moneyball/wallstreet stuff/etc
and then he started talking and you realized he sucks he just has connections (blind side/this)
He also panders to his subjects/connections. Like in hindsight the Blind Side was a puff piece on how great the Tuohys were. Even Moneyball was basically a Billy Beane PR piece (and I think Beane is great and have enjoyed all his books).
well that stuff is being an ahole but this was probably most telling to me from that article
âOther parents who had lost children told him that heâd be overcome by anger and guilt, but he wasnâtâ
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I caught the â60 Minutesâ interview with Lewis and, as an admitted fan of his, I found it somewhere between confounding and infuriating. Him actually taking the absolute trash concept of âeffective altruismâ seriously was even more infuriating than his complete blinders with regard to SBF.
This excerpt from that review pretty much sums it up, part of which was in that tweet you quoted:
Lewis, who traveled back and forth from the Bahamas, where Bankman-Fried was based, had, in the months leading up to the disaster, a front-row seat â from which he could apparently see nothing. âAs late as the final days of October 2022,â he writes, âyou could have ransacked the jungle huts until you were blue in the face and have had not the faintest sense that anything was amiss.â
"Not the faintest senseâ? That April, Bankman-Fried had given an infamous interview to Bloombergâs Matt Levine in which he all but admitted that the cryptocurrency industry â the linchpin of the Bankman-Fried edifice â was like a Ponzi scheme.
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The way he was talking about Bankman-Fried, he sounded as if he were presenting a prize to his star pupil. âYouâre breaking land-speed records,â Lewis said. âAnd I donât think people are really noticing whatâs happened, just how dramatic the revolution has become.â
. . . the authorâs questions were so fawning they seemed inappropriate for a journalist. Listening from the packed auditorium, I started to question whether Lewis was really writing a work of nonfiction or if FTX had paid him to appear. (Lewis later told me that he was there as a reporter and that he was not compensated.)
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This is not good news for SBF:
Months before the collapse of FTX, some of its U.S.-based employees discovered the so-called backdoor that Alameda Research allegedly used to withdraw billions of dollars of customer funds from the cryptocurrency exchange, people familiar with the matter said.
The employees who made the discovery reported it to the boss of their division, who discussed it with one of FTX founder Sam Bankman-Friedâs lieutenants, some of the people said.
But the problem never got fixed. In the summer of 2022, the leader of the team that raised concerns about Alamedaâs special privileges was fired.
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