The framing sounds too generous, since I do not think there was any plan to transfer it at any point. But I can see a grain of truth here. As covered in OP, SBF seemed to think Alameda’s balance sheet by October 2022 was very roughly:
$18bn of illiquid assets
$6bn of liquid assets
-$15bn of customer liabilities
Then the customers started to withdraw, $5bn in liquid assets was returned, then they more or less ran out and declared bankruptcy.
So what might this have looked like before returning money to crypto lenders in June 2022? I did not find any concrete figure for what the size of those transfers was, but I’ve generally assumed around $10bn. If so then the pre-return state was:
$18bn of illiquid assets
$16bn of liquid assets
-$15bn of customer liabilities
-$10bn of crypto lender liabilities
So on this hypothetical, at this point Alameda/FTX have liquid assets exceeding customer liabilities; in a crisis of confidence they can meet a full bank run from customers, though of course at cost of still going bankrupt and blowing up the lenders.
To be clear, this is all very rough and speculative. But I can readily imagine that Alameda had sufficient liquid assets to cover customer liabilities before they repaid their other major funding source. Of course the problems of the commingled assets, investing of customer assets, lying to everyone, and various other crimes would remain.
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.