I was wondering why SBF seemingly behaved like an innocent man. Giving interviews, talking to podcasters, remaining at his residence.
Why didn’t he make a run for it?
If he did take all those billions as was claimed, why didn’t he move to a country that doesn’t extradite or just move off the grid for a couple years?
Was he burnt out? complacent? drugs?
Or did he never have that money in the first place?
I think I get it, it was a surprise to him and everybody else that he ended up in prison.
You say he wasn’t particularly gifted but he was definetly smart no? I mean him graduating from MIT is at least evidence that he is not suffering from brain-damage.
I have to admit that all i know is from the media. I did not know about his powerful family, I always assumed he was just a regular kid who just got lucky.
I definitely fell for the story developed over years.
I just cant believe the complacency and utter lack of paranoia, given the means he had, both monetarily and intellectually.
You are falling for a common pitfall, assuming that intelligence is the dominant factor in success. There is enough evidence to suggest intelligence is a thing and that it does help general ability broadly, but it is basically always dominated by other factors, be it affluence or experience. It’s entirely possible for an expert in 1 field to end up being completely clueless and seeming like a dumbass when talking about anything else. There is even research to suggest people that are experts in one domain can be easier to fool into thinking they are more competent in all domains, actually making them less likely to seek external opinions and ending up worse off.
No, you’re still missing it. It was a surprise to him, because his world view stated that what he had done should make the people in power overlook the laws he’d broken.
It wasn’t a surprise to most people. He made the wrong kinds of mistakes.
He thought his wealth would buy his freedom… interesting point of view. He should of known better.
Yeah he really should’ve known better. I have to think that if he came from money / influence the folks pulled strings to get him into MIT. I guess if his GPA was high then ok he is good at mathy type stuff. Otherwise, a guy can graduate from MIT with a D average lol. Anyway, it seems he didn’t really understand the intricacies of other relevant areas needed to get away with his scam, didn’t develop the connections and power, and didn’t think he needed to, I guess?
I don’t think he was witless, I just think he presented himself as a boy genius when in reality he was just a narcissist with ADHD. He spent a lot of time developing a persona that mixed imagery of Steve Jobs and Aaron Swartz.
But if you actually look into his actual work… None of it’s groundbreaking, especially considering all the innovative aspects of ftx were all lies built upon fraud.
If Bitcoin didn’t make a dip when it did then he never would have been caught, he would have been able to bounce back and no one would have ever known, but his customers all made a run at a time when Bitcoin was dipping and effecting the value of his crypto so he couldn’t pay out the time. What he did isn’t an uncommon scam, he basically gambled with other people’s money and lost.