Thanks, that makes sense. I didn’t remember Going Infinite as having made such a strong claim, but maybe I was projecting my own knowledge into the book.
I looked back at the agenda for our resignation/buyout meeting and I don’t see anything like “didn’t disclose misplaced transfer money to investors”. Which doesn’t mean that no one had this concern, only that they didn’t add it to the agenda, but I do think it would be misleading to describe this as the central concern of the management team, given that we listed other things in the agenda instead of that.[1]
To preempt a question about what concerns I did have, if not the transfer thing: see my post from last year:
I thought Sam was a bad CEO. I think he literally never prepared for a single one-on-one we had, his habit of playing video games instead of talking to you was “quirky” when he was a billionaire but aggravating when he was my manager, and my recollection is that Alameda made less money in the time I was there than if it had just simply bought and held bitcoin.
I’m not sure if I would describe the above as a “benign management dispute” (it certainly didn’t feel benign to me at the time), but I think it’s even less accurate to describe it as being about the misplaced transfers
that makes sense, sounds like it wasn’t the concern for at least your group. He does describe it as “The rest of the management team was horrified and quit in a huff, loudly telling the investors that Bankman-Fried was dishonest and reckless”, so unless there were multiple waves of management quitting it sounds like the book conflated multiple stories.
Just to clarify, it seems that “The rest of the management team was horrified and quit in a huff, loudly telling the investors that Bankman-Fried was dishonest and reckless” is from Matt Levine, not from Michael Lewis.
I’m quickly skimming the relevant parts of Going Infinite, and it seems to me that Lewis highlights other issues as even more relevant than the missing $4M
Thanks, that makes sense. I didn’t remember Going Infinite as having made such a strong claim, but maybe I was projecting my own knowledge into the book.
I looked back at the agenda for our resignation/buyout meeting and I don’t see anything like “didn’t disclose misplaced transfer money to investors”. Which doesn’t mean that no one had this concern, only that they didn’t add it to the agenda, but I do think it would be misleading to describe this as the central concern of the management team, given that we listed other things in the agenda instead of that.[1]
To preempt a question about what concerns I did have, if not the transfer thing: see my post from last year:
I’m not sure if I would describe the above as a “benign management dispute” (it certainly didn’t feel benign to me at the time), but I think it’s even less accurate to describe it as being about the misplaced transfers
that makes sense, sounds like it wasn’t the concern for at least your group. He does describe it as “The rest of the management team was horrified and quit in a huff, loudly telling the investors that Bankman-Fried was dishonest and reckless”, so unless there were multiple waves of management quitting it sounds like the book conflated multiple stories.
Just to clarify, it seems that “The rest of the management team was horrified and quit in a huff, loudly telling the investors that Bankman-Fried was dishonest and reckless” is from Matt Levine, not from Michael Lewis.
I’m quickly skimming the relevant parts of Going Infinite, and it seems to me that Lewis highlights other issues as even more relevant than the missing $4M