I think this is likely wrong. I agree that there is a plausible story here, but given the case that Sam seems to have lied multiple times in confirmed contexts (for example when saying that FTX has never touched customer deposits), and people’s experiences at early Alameda, I think it is pretty likely that Sam was lying quite frequently, and had done various smaller instances of fraud.
I don’t think the whole FTX thing was a ponzi scheme, and as far as I can tell FTX the platform itself (if it hadn’t burned all of its trust in the last 3 weeks), would have been worth $1-3B in an honest evaluation of what was going on.
But I also expect that when Sam used customer deposits he was well-aware that he was committing fraud, and others in the company were too. And he was also aware that there was a chance that things could blow up in the way it did. I do believe that they had fucked up their accounting in a way that caused Sam to fail to orient to the situation effectively, but all of this was many months after they had already committed major crimes and trust violations after touching customer funds as a custodian.
I think this is likely wrong. I agree that there is a plausible story here, but given the case that Sam seems to have lied multiple times in confirmed contexts (for example when saying that FTX has never touched customer deposits), and people’s experiences at early Alameda, I think it is pretty likely that Sam was lying quite frequently, and had done various smaller instances of fraud.
I don’t think the whole FTX thing was a ponzi scheme, and as far as I can tell FTX the platform itself (if it hadn’t burned all of its trust in the last 3 weeks), would have been worth $1-3B in an honest evaluation of what was going on.
But I also expect that when Sam used customer deposits he was well-aware that he was committing fraud, and others in the company were too. And he was also aware that there was a chance that things could blow up in the way it did. I do believe that they had fucked up their accounting in a way that caused Sam to fail to orient to the situation effectively, but all of this was many months after they had already committed major crimes and trust violations after touching customer funds as a custodian.