Caroline claims she was able to track their finances well enough to (a) establish that they couldn’t afford to buy out Binance and (b) calculate a -$2.7bn NAV-excluding SamCoins for Alameda and recommend against $3bn of venture investments, both in 2021. I gave some links for that in OP. Then they calculated out how to repay lenders in June 2022, creating the spreadsheet that was central to the eventual guilty findings. So I don’t think they were completely clueless when it came to 10 figure numbers or the big picture more generally.
I suppose I consider it almost a given that they did not have good financial controls on ‘mere’ 7-8 figure sums, because at this scale and complexity that would be a full time job for a professional, probably multiple professionals. Per Going Infinite, VCs knew this and tried to push Sam to hire a CFO; he mocked them as quoted in OP and refused. So in the end all four people permitted to know the true state of things had substantial other responsibilities and no accounting background.
Caroline claims she was able to track their finances well enough to (a) establish that they couldn’t afford to buy out Binance and (b) calculate a -$2.7bn NAV-excluding SamCoins for Alameda and recommend against $3bn of venture investments, both in 2021. I gave some links for that in OP. Then they calculated out how to repay lenders in June 2022, creating the spreadsheet that was central to the eventual guilty findings. So I don’t think they were completely clueless when it came to 10 figure numbers or the big picture more generally.
I suppose I consider it almost a given that they did not have good financial controls on ‘mere’ 7-8 figure sums, because at this scale and complexity that would be a full time job for a professional, probably multiple professionals. Per Going Infinite, VCs knew this and tried to push Sam to hire a CFO; he mocked them as quoted in OP and refused. So in the end all four people permitted to know the true state of things had substantial other responsibilities and no accounting background.