His quirkiness was emphasized in various profiles (including one commissioned by Sequoia for its website)-a vegan crypto mogul with unusual sleeping habits (on a beanbag chair in the office, when not in the Bahamas penthouse he shared with about 10 roommates) and a penchant for wearing shorts and playing video games. Journalists might not have invented Bankman-Fried, but he appeared irresistible to profile writers and TV bookers (and apparently authors, as Michael Lewis spent the past six months or so embedded with him). “Once everyone else is on board,” he said, “then it starts to take off.” There were all these investors throwing big money behind him and lavishing praise, and celebrities doing high-profile ads with FTX,” by the time Forbes put him on the cover. “Along the way there were a lot of people who believed in him, and the media portrayal of him is a reflection of that,” said Forbes’s Peterson-Withorn, adding that “the media didn’t invent Sam Bankman-Fried. (Bankman-Fried has maintained that FTX did not directly invest customer deposits, and in the Vox interview, he blamed FTX’s losses on “messy accounting.”) Ray, who has overseen large-scale bankruptcies, including Enron’s, said he had never seen “such a complete failure of corporate controls.” Hundreds of thousands of people may be impacted. The first detailed look at FTX’s business came in a bankruptcy filing on Thursday, in which newly appointed CEO John J. The extent of the damage is just starting to come into focus. (At another: “fuck regulators.” Hours later, he tried to walk some of these comments back.) And a few days after that, he DM’d Vox’s Kelsey Piper, a fellow effective-altruism proponent, to try to explain himself, leaving Piper “appalled by much of what he said.” “Each individual decision seemed fine and I didn’t realize how big their sum was until the end,” Bankman-Fried wrote at one point. A few days later, he was on the phone past midnight with New York Times reporter David Yaffe-Bellany. Indeed, even as he’s now under federal investigation, Bankman-Fried can’t stop talking. “He’s talking when other people wouldn’t,” noted Peterson-Withorn. This was two days before FTX, once valued at $32 billion, would file for bankruptcy. Bankman-Fried said he couldn’t “confidently dispute” that he was no longer a billionaire, as he was “not totally clear” on his net worth at the moment. “Presumably, he was hard at work trying to save FTX and FTX US and Alameda and all this money from his investors and his customer user funds.” Which is why the journalist was surprised to get an email back on this comparatively trivial matter. “He hadn’t really been talking to anyone,” Peterson-Withorn told me. Now, Chase Peterson-Withorn, who coauthored the story, was writing Bankman-Fried to notify him that the publication planned to drop him from the ranking, given that he had lost nearly all of his money in a matter of days, amid a liquidity crisis after FTX allegedly used billions of dollars’ worth of customer assets to fund bets by Alameda Research, a sister trading firm. A year earlier, the magazine had put Bankman-Fried-or SBF, as he’s known-on the cover of its annual Forbes 400 issue, hailing him in a profile as “the world’s richest 29-year-old.” He was worth $22.5 billion. Last week, as Sam Bankman-Fried’s crypto exchange, FTX, was imploding, a journalist from Forbes sent him an email.
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