A jury deduces in hours what deluded our elites for years about Sam Bankman-Fried
Tiana Lowe Doescher
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After nearly a full month of the most closely watched criminal trial in the world came to an end, it took the jury fewer than five hours to decide that Sam Bankman-Fried was guilty as sin, convicting the disgraced crypto bro on two counts of wire fraud and five counts of conspiracy. The jury began its deliberations at 3:15 p.m. and reported that it reached its verdict at 7:40 p.m. The jury would have finished more quickly had it not paused to dine on some taxpayer-funded pizza at 6 p.m.
The verdict was hardly surprising to anyone with a pulse. Journalists in the courtroom reported that during Bankman-Fried’s disastrous testimony, they saw “jurors shake their heads, frown so hard their lips disappeared, and make prolonged eye contact with each other.” Bankman-Fried’s decision to testify indicated that the pampered, patrician scion of two Stanford professors failed to let go of the very hubris that led him to incinerate $32 billion of investor cash overnight.
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Bankman-Fried’s failure began long before he testified against the advice of legal counsel. His legal team antagonized the judge with its relentless demands for vegan meals and increased access to Adderall, and the only reason he was remanded to prison prior to the trial was that Bankman-Fried decided to leak the diary of his ex-girlfriend and the eventual star witness, Caroline Ellison, to the press.
But none of these antics should have shocked anyone who followed the ridiculous rise and deserving fall of FTX. It’s just ironic that a jury of normal people deduced in an afternoon what deluded our financial elites, Hollywood celebrities, and the entire corporate press for years.
To the plebian sensibility, a 20-something trust fund baby who dressed like a homeless slob would come across as unprofessional, not a genius. A wannabee entrepreneur who played video games during his ostensibly serious television debut would be seen as in over his head, not ready for prime time. This same pseudo-billionaire cosplaying as a man of the people while writing off private jets as a business expense would be seen as a fraud, not a visionary of philanthropy.
And yet our entire patrician class bought his boondoggle. Legendary athletes like Tom Brady and Shaquille O’Neal to underwear models like Gisele Bundchen took tens of millions to advertise the bogus crypto exchange. Financial lodestars like SoftBank and Sequoia Capital invested hundreds of millions, the latter of which did so after Bankman-Fried played yet another video game during a meeting. Sequoia actually bragged about this Zoom meeting in a since-retracted puff piece on its website.
The Zoom went well for all concerned. SBF looked relaxed as he answered questions, talking, as he usually does, in complete paragraphs about topics of extreme complexity. Ramnik Arora, FTX’s head of product and another ex-Facebook engineer, remembers the meeting clearly: “We’re getting all these questions from Sequoia toward the end. He’s absolutely fantastic.” Arora locks eyes with me, and I am mesmerized. Arora is intense—calling to mind a Bollywood version of Adrian Brody. “Unbelievably fantastic,” he says, shaking his head. [Sequoia Capital partner Michelle] Bailhe remembers it the same way: “We had a great meeting with Sam, but the last question, which I remember Alfred asking, was, ‘So, everything you’re building is great, but what is your long-term vision for FTX?’” That’s when SBF told Sequoia about the so-called super-app: “I want FTX to be a place where you can do anything you want with your next dollar. You can buy bitcoin. You can send money in whatever currency to any friend anywhere in the world. You can buy a banana. You can do anything you want with your money from inside FTX.” Suddenly, the chat window on Sequoia’s side of the Zoom lights up with partners freaking out. “I LOVE THIS FOUNDER,” typed one partner. “I am a 10 out of 10,” pinged another. “YES!!!” exclaimed a third. What Sequoia was reacting to was the scale of SBF’s vision. It wasn’t a story about how we might use fintech in the future, or crypto, or a new kind of bank. It was a vision about the future of money itself—with a total addressable market of every person on the entire planet. “I sit ten feet from him, and I walked over, thinking, Oh, s***, that was really good,” remembers Arora. “And it turns out that that f***er was playing League of Legends through the entire meeting.” “We were incredibly impressed,” Bailhe says. “It was one of those your-hair-is-blown-back type of meetings.”
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From a financial perspective, the structure undergirding FTX’s growth-at-all-costs model was never sound. But the jury saw something much simpler. Whereas effete elites considered Bankman-Fried’s slovenly disregard for standards, norms, and basic displays of respect a marker of his supremacy, the 12 normal people on the jury saw a scion of privilege who proved why almost nobody, much less a pretentious and precocious prick, is truly above the rules.