Hi Oli — I was very saddened to hear that you thought the most likely explanation for the discussion of frugality in my interview with Sam was that I was deliberately seeking to mislead the audience.
I had no intention to mislead people into thinking Sam was more frugal than he was. I simply believed the reporting I had read about him and he didn’t contradict me.
It’s only in recent weeks that I learned that some folks such as you thought the impression about his lifestyle was misleading, notwithstanding Sam’s reference to ‘nice apartments’ in the interview:
“I don’t know, I kind of like nice apartments. … I’m not really that much of a consumer exactly. It’s never been what’s important to me. And so I think overall a nice place is just about as far as it gets.”
Unfortunately as far as I can remember nobody else reached out to me after the podcast to correct the record either.
In recent years, in pursuit of better work-life balance, I’ve been spending less time socialising with people involved in the EA community, and when I do, I discuss work with them much less than in the past. I also last visited the SF Bay Area way back in 2019 and am certainly not part of the ‘crypto’ social scene. That may help to explain why this issue never came up in casual conversation.
Inasmuch as the interview gave listeners a false impression about Sam I am sorry about that, because we of course aim for the podcast to be as informative and accurate as possible.
Two years later, after having read way too many posts, comments, podcasts and a book about SBF, my understanding is that the most likely interpretation is that SBF was actually frugal for a billionaire.
By far the main thing is the Bahamas luxury penthouse and properties, where he lived with at least 6 other coworkers. The person who bought the property recently did an interview claiming that the high cost was due to a lack of supply of real estate in the Bahamas, the need to incentivize employees to move there, and the fact that FTX believed it was very rich: https://x.com/TuckerCarlson/status/1844100642979099054?t=3585 . I think this not an absurd explanation even in hindsight. That person does not talk positively about SBF or the “effective altruism cult” at all in the interview, but describes SBF as obsessed with work and not caring about much else.
On cars: Caroline Ellison during her testimony against SBF testified that they were originally assigned luxury cars, but Bankman-Fried suggested they switch to a Toyota Corolla and a Honda Civic. I can’t find any reliable source that Bankman owned a $110k “BMW X7”. The source that Thorsdad uses is this website which doesn’t look reliable. It seems that the Judge who sentenced Bankman drives a BMW X7, so maybe it was generated from that? In any case, $110k seems a cheap car for a billionaire, and the fact that it made the list of most luxurious expenditures seems telling.
On restaurants, the fact that they spent up to ~$40 per day per employee (if I’m doing the math right) doesn’t seem crazy to me.
On the extravagant lifestyle article, most of the expenses seem to be buying favour with the local authorities, the most extravagant thing for employees seems to be this:
employees could request any groceries they wanted twice a week and frequently received comped meals. And there were parties at Albany, which “at some point I got tired of.” The level of spoilage was such that once, she recalled an FTX employee requesting a pair of toenail clippers over Slack, which was quickly delivered.
In general, I would encourage a lot of scepticism when reading Thorstad. I think that if he was writing similar articles on any topic besides “EA criticism”, people would point out that they are extremely misleading and often straight-up false.
But note that two independent sources told me in private that the post-FTX-collapse comments from Habryka are inconsistent with what he used to say about SBF/FTX as late as April 2022, so I don’t know how reliable they are, and afaik there are no public claims from anyone before November 2022 that SBF himself was lavish.
I agree with some of the thrust of this question, but want to flag that I think these sources and this post kind of conflate FTX being extravagant and SBF personally being so. E.g. if you click through the restaurant tabs were about doordash orders for FTX, not SBF personally. I think it’s totally consistent to believe it’s worth spending a lot on employee food (especially given they were trying to retain top talent in a difficult location in a high-paying field) while being personally more abstemious
As an EA at the time (let’s say mid-2022), I knew there were aspects of the of the FTX situation what were very plush. I still believed it was part of SBF’s efforts to make as much money as possible for good causes, and had heard SBF say things communicating that he thought it was worth spending a lot in the course of optimizing intensely for having the best shot of making a ton of money in the long run, and was generally skeptical of the impact of aiming at frugality. My impression at the time was indeed that the Corolla was a bit of a gimmick (and that the beanbag was about working longer, not saving money), but that SBF was genuinely very altruistic and giving his wealth away extremely quickly by the standards of new billionaires.
Part of this long but highly interesting blog series stood out to me
What the heck happened here? Why such a big difference? Was it:
His spending was not high at the time the podcast happened.
It was high, but 80k/EA didn’t know about it.
It was high, and 80k/EA did know, but it was introduced like this anyway.
Does anyone have a sense or a link to if this was talked about elsewhere?
Here’s a comment from the 80k interviewer 2 years ago: https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/RPTPo8eHTnruoFyRH/some-important-questions-for-the-ea-leadership?commentId=Xr27yCbC72ZPh5Fzn
Two years later, after having read way too many posts, comments, podcasts and a book about SBF, my understanding is that the most likely interpretation is that SBF was actually frugal for a billionaire.
By far the main thing is the Bahamas luxury penthouse and properties, where he lived with at least 6 other coworkers. The person who bought the property recently did an interview claiming that the high cost was due to a lack of supply of real estate in the Bahamas, the need to incentivize employees to move there, and the fact that FTX believed it was very rich: https://x.com/TuckerCarlson/status/1844100642979099054?t=3585 . I think this not an absurd explanation even in hindsight. That person does not talk positively about SBF or the “effective altruism cult” at all in the interview, but describes SBF as obsessed with work and not caring about much else.
On cars: Caroline Ellison during her testimony against SBF testified that they were originally assigned luxury cars, but Bankman-Fried suggested they switch to a Toyota Corolla and a Honda Civic. I can’t find any reliable source that Bankman owned a $110k “BMW X7”. The source that Thorsdad uses is this website which doesn’t look reliable. It seems that the Judge who sentenced Bankman drives a BMW X7, so maybe it was generated from that? In any case, $110k seems a cheap car for a billionaire, and the fact that it made the list of most luxurious expenditures seems telling.
On restaurants, the fact that they spent up to ~$40 per day per employee (if I’m doing the math right) doesn’t seem crazy to me.
On the extravagant lifestyle article, most of the expenses seem to be buying favour with the local authorities, the most extravagant thing for employees seems to be this:
Even Habryka, who (after the FTX collapse) claimed that SBF “was actually living a quite lavish lifestyle”[1] also claimed that SBF was in many ways frugal. Two years later, as far as I know, zero of the people who were close to SBF at the time described him as lavish.
In general, I would encourage a lot of scepticism when reading Thorstad. I think that if he was writing similar articles on any topic besides “EA criticism”, people would point out that they are extremely misleading and often straight-up false.
But note that two independent sources told me in private that the post-FTX-collapse comments from Habryka are inconsistent with what he used to say about SBF/FTX as late as April 2022, so I don’t know how reliable they are, and afaik there are no public claims from anyone before November 2022 that SBF himself was lavish.
I agree with some of the thrust of this question, but want to flag that I think these sources and this post kind of conflate FTX being extravagant and SBF personally being so. E.g. if you click through the restaurant tabs were about doordash orders for FTX, not SBF personally. I think it’s totally consistent to believe it’s worth spending a lot on employee food (especially given they were trying to retain top talent in a difficult location in a high-paying field) while being personally more abstemious
As an EA at the time (let’s say mid-2022), I knew there were aspects of the of the FTX situation what were very plush. I still believed it was part of SBF’s efforts to make as much money as possible for good causes, and had heard SBF say things communicating that he thought it was worth spending a lot in the course of optimizing intensely for having the best shot of making a ton of money in the long run, and was generally skeptical of the impact of aiming at frugality. My impression at the time was indeed that the Corolla was a bit of a gimmick (and that the beanbag was about working longer, not saving money), but that SBF was genuinely very altruistic and giving his wealth away extremely quickly by the standards of new billionaires.
I don’t think I saw the 80k thing in particular at the time