I basically heard the same thing in late 2021, and I am upset that I stayed silent about it even though it really alarmed me at the time.
Everywhere on the public internet, Alameda Research and FTX had painted themselves as clearly different companies. Since October 2021, they’ve ostensibly had disjoint sets of CEOs. By late 2021 I had watched several interviews with SBF and followed his output closely on Twitter, and saw people talking about Alameda and FTX in several crypto Discord servers. Nowhere did anyone say that Alameda had changed its name to FTX or otherwise act as if they were the same company (though everyone knew they were close).
And yet, one day in late 2021, I saw an EA who had worked at Alameda after FTX was founded casually conflating the two companies. They said something like, “Alameda, the company that is now called FTX, [rest of sentence].” They seemed to think that there was nothing noteworthy about what they’d just said, but it really shocked me. How could they know less about FTX and Alameda than me, who had never worked at either company and was just watching everything by the sidelines? If it was possible for this person to think that FTX was merely the new name for Alameda, that almost certainly implied that the FTX/Alameda leadership was putting a lot of effort into consistently lying to the public.
That brief sentence kept coming back to my mind, and it really made me uncomfortable. But yeah, I stayed completely silent, other than bringing that up a few times to my partner. I’m low-status, so I would likely not have achieved anything by speaking up, but perhaps I should have done so anyway.
I basically heard the same thing in late 2021, and I am upset that I stayed silent about it even though it really alarmed me at the time.
Everywhere on the public internet, Alameda Research and FTX had painted themselves as clearly different companies. Since October 2021, they’ve ostensibly had disjoint sets of CEOs. By late 2021 I had watched several interviews with SBF and followed his output closely on Twitter, and saw people talking about Alameda and FTX in several crypto Discord servers. Nowhere did anyone say that Alameda had changed its name to FTX or otherwise act as if they were the same company (though everyone knew they were close).
And yet, one day in late 2021, I saw an EA who had worked at Alameda after FTX was founded casually conflating the two companies. They said something like, “Alameda, the company that is now called FTX, [rest of sentence].” They seemed to think that there was nothing noteworthy about what they’d just said, but it really shocked me. How could they know less about FTX and Alameda than me, who had never worked at either company and was just watching everything by the sidelines? If it was possible for this person to think that FTX was merely the new name for Alameda, that almost certainly implied that the FTX/Alameda leadership was putting a lot of effort into consistently lying to the public.
That brief sentence kept coming back to my mind, and it really made me uncomfortable. But yeah, I stayed completely silent, other than bringing that up a few times to my partner. I’m low-status, so I would likely not have achieved anything by speaking up, but perhaps I should have done so anyway.
I’m extremely opposed to the culture of silence in EA/rat spaces. It is very extreme.