Sheelah Kolhatkar’s comprehensive and thoughtful examination of Sam Bankman-Fried and his parents in this week’s New Yorker deserves consideration even by those who, like myself, have read every single word about this case. Kolhatkar was one of the journalists who had enjoyed consistent, welcoming access to Bankman-Fried while he was on bail at his parents’ house in Palo Alto. That access ended with Bankman-Fried’s decision to share private writings by his former girlfriend and now cooperating witness Caroline Ellison with the New York Times. I have already shared that I cannot stand the way even a punk-ass bitch like Bankman-Fried has been pre-judged by an angry society. But his decision…
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FTX CEO Comes After SBF Parents
Bankman and Fried sued by John Ray for alleged lavish treatment
There’s a Rodney Dangerfield joke, “My high school was tough. After they sacked the quarterback, they went after his family.” We’re now seeing a little bit of that toughness directed at Bankman, Fried and Bankman-Fried family members. Over the weekend, a BusinessWeek cover story ran with the headline “How Sam Bankman-Fried’s Elite Parents Enabled His Crypto Empire.” The story itself was not so bad and there’s no smoking gun — it’s 5,000 words of high-powered parents advising their privileged son. Hardly surprising to anyone who’s followed this case or knew of his parents, whom BusinessWeek says, “both renowned Stanford scholars, [they] opened doors for their son and provided a halo effect…
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SEC Chairman Gary Gensler in an official government photo from his service as Chairman of the Commodity Futures Trading Commission. (Photo: CFTC)What Gensler role in Long Term Capital Debacle Tells us about his war on crypto
25th anniversary occasions a look at SEC chair’s small part
This is the 25th anniversary of the September 1998 collapse of Long-Term Capital Management. That was one of the most stunning events in Wall Street history, as the firm allowed its leverage to grow to more than 100 to 1. But it was shocking beyond the sudden evaporation of $4 billion in value—that was a lot of money 25 years ago— but also because the firm had been put together specifically on the basis of its supposed genius for understanding and managing risk. The firm was dominated not by great traders but by intellectual supermen, including Robert Merton and Myron Scholes. Merton and Scholes had won the Nobel prize just…
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Ivan Soto-Wright, CEO of MoonPay, speaks with Michael Gronager, CEO of Chainalysis, November 17, 2022. (Photo: Village Global/Flickr)MoonPay Founder Revealed as Mystery Suarez Funder
Ivan Soto-Wright gave half mil to Miami Mayor’s presidential PAC
Ivan Soto-Wright is capable of excellent timing. The cherubic, celebrity-adjacent founder and CEO of crypto payment app MoonPay moved to Miami just before Covid shut down most of the country. And also before Florida’s hands-off approach to the pandemic attracted a wave of liberty-loving crypto enthusiasts. And then, in a further burst of excellent timing, he and other top MoonPay executives sold $150 million in shares of the company at the end of 2021, near Crypto’s mid-pandemic sugar high. But he’s also displayed some less fortunate timing. In April 2022, just as NFTs were ending their brief and idiotic reign as the flavor of the month, Soto-Wright told the audience…
