can you please explain to us to what extent you guys grilled FTX leadership about the integrity of the sources of money they were giving you? Surely you had an inside view model of how risky this was if it blew up?
This sounds a bit hindsight-bias-y to me; we know to poke at this specific topic now because we know what happened. SBF claims to not have known himself that this was happening, which I take to mean that either this info was super siloed or buried somehow, or that Sam is lying. (And is relying on few-to-no people knowing the truth, or someone would immediately call him out on the lie.)
The idea that SBF didn’t know what was happening is farcical. You don’t unknowingly loan out $10bn of customer funds, which you then lose on bad bets, and then try and cover up your insolvency. I think it’s healthy to wait for a clearer picture of what happened before making any summary judgement, but we know enough to say that SBF was not an honest actor.
To be honest, I’m at a point now where I’m putting significant weight on lying. Some evidence here that FTX bailed out Alameda for ~$4B in FTT on Sep 28th. There are the blockchain transactions (disclaimed by SBF at the time), and the resignation of a high-profile figure (President of FTX.US) the day before. (Note that whilst this doesn’t look good, it’s still inconclusive. I’m sure the truth will come out eventually.)
I agree that there’s a lot of hindsight bias here, but I don’t think that tweet tells us much.
My question for Dony is: what questions could we have asked FTX that would have helped? I’m pretty sure I wouldn’t have detected any problems by grilling FTX. Maybe I’d have gotten some suspicions by grilling people who’d previously worked with SBF, but I can’t think of what would have prompted me to do that.
There were IMO some orange flags (such as the connection to the questionable lawyer who also works with tether), but admittedly think it’s difficult to notice such things when there’s an aura of success around someone. I think it isn’t just hindsight, though. I think people need to get a lot better at being cynical, because it’s important. For instance, it was odd how FTX positioned itself as the savior of crypto by proposing to buy out entities like Voyager and Blockfi and then it comes out that Alameda owes them money. They said they could “pay anytime,” but it still looked weird.
This sounds a bit hindsight-bias-y to me; we know to poke at this specific topic now because we know what happened. SBF claims to not have known himself that this was happening, which I take to mean that either this info was super siloed or buried somehow, or that Sam is lying. (And is relying on few-to-no people knowing the truth, or someone would immediately call him out on the lie.)
The idea that SBF didn’t know what was happening is farcical. You don’t unknowingly loan out $10bn of customer funds, which you then lose on bad bets, and then try and cover up your insolvency. I think it’s healthy to wait for a clearer picture of what happened before making any summary judgement, but we know enough to say that SBF was not an honest actor.
To be honest, I’m at a point now where I’m putting significant weight on lying. Some evidence here that FTX bailed out Alameda for ~$4B in FTT on Sep 28th. There are the blockchain transactions (disclaimed by SBF at the time), and the resignation of a high-profile figure (President of FTX.US) the day before. (Note that whilst this doesn’t look good, it’s still inconclusive. I’m sure the truth will come out eventually.)
I agree that there’s a lot of hindsight bias here, but I don’t think that tweet tells us much.
My question for Dony is: what questions could we have asked FTX that would have helped? I’m pretty sure I wouldn’t have detected any problems by grilling FTX. Maybe I’d have gotten some suspicions by grilling people who’d previously worked with SBF, but I can’t think of what would have prompted me to do that.
There were IMO some orange flags (such as the connection to the questionable lawyer who also works with tether), but admittedly think it’s difficult to notice such things when there’s an aura of success around someone. I think it isn’t just hindsight, though. I think people need to get a lot better at being cynical, because it’s important. For instance, it was odd how FTX positioned itself as the savior of crypto by proposing to buy out entities like Voyager and Blockfi and then it comes out that Alameda owes them money. They said they could “pay anytime,” but it still looked weird.