The founder of bust cryptocurrency exchange FTX has admitted he talked up his ethical credentials as part of a “dumb game we woke Westerners play” to burnish his reputation “so everyone likes us”. The Telegraph has more.
Sam Bankman-Fried, the 30-year-old founder of collapsed cryptocurrency company FTX, admitted in an interview that his public stance on ethical issues was in part a “front”.
The admission comes amid accusations that Mr. Bankman-Fried scammed investors out of their money. Regulators around the world, including the U.S. Department of Justice, are investigating the collapse of FTX, which has left over one million creditors out of pocket.
Mr. Bankman-Fried, who at one stage was worth around $16bn, was a self-proclaimed “effective altruist”, meaning he aimed to make as much money as possible in order to give it away to charities.
He appeared in multiple videos explaining his views on climate change and world poverty and posted his thoughts on how to maximise his positive impact on the world on Twitter.
However, he told the website Vox: “Man all the dumb s*** I said… it’s not true really.”
He said: “I feel bad for those who get f***** by it, by this dumb game we woke westerners play where we say all the right shibboleths and so everyone likes us.”
On Thursday morning he then attempted to row back his comments, saying: “Some of what I said was thoughtless or overly strong, I was venting and not intending that to be public. What matters is what you do – is actually doing good or bad, not just talking about doing good or using ESG language.”
But Sam, all the dumb s*** you say, it’s not true really, so why should we believe you now? Can I also suggest that anything you don’t intend to be public you omit from media interviews?
Douglas Murray in the Spectator suggests people shouldn’t feel bad if they experience pangs of satisfaction at seeing the woke charlatan fall.
Today when you want to show that you really care – as opposed to actually caring – then you talk of how concerned your company is about ESG [Environment, Social, Governance]. Firms are even rated by their ESG scores. It is a great medieval Vatican-style scam. And it is everywhere.
In any case, FTX was big on ESG. On a video from January this year the company’s founder Sam Bankman-Fried and the vlogger Nas Daily – the first a shyster, the second possibly a naif – claimed that FTX existed only to make money that could then be given away. The two young men are weirdos in different ways – but the main one, Bankman-Fried, looks about 14 and has a face like a stress ball being scrunched by somebody who’s very stressed indeed.
This pair talk about all of the things that our age values most, claiming as they do that making money to pass on to special causes is much better than merely getting rich and buying a Lamborghini. If you make money and give it away to these causes, they say, that makes you way more happy than spending it on yourself.
With some infelicitous turns of phrase, Daily says various things about Bankman-Fried, which the latter then responds to. “He is funding everything you can think of: global warming” (“It’s one of the biggest problems that we have to tackle together as a world”). “COVID-19 preparedness” (“We have to be ready for the next pandemic”). “Neglected tropical diseases” (“More than a billion people suffer from them – we have to eliminate these diseases”). “And of course animal welfare” (“Animals deserve to live just like we do; it’s also why I’m vegan”).
People should really have learned about ESG by now, says Murray:
ESG – like its fellow traveller ‘Diversity Inclusion and Equity’ (or DIE, as I prefer to call it) – ought by now to be a great big warning flag to investors and speculators everywhere. When a firm or investment fund goes on about ESG or DIE it should cause hard-wired suspicion of the kind provoked by, say, a sinister stranger with a comb-over volunteering to look after the kids at bathtime.
Bankman-Fried is a rare thing – someone formerly on the inside who’s come out and uttered the truth about wokery: that’s it’s the sanctimonious creed of a prestige faith, a set of luxury beliefs there primarily for show that demonstrate how with it you are while personally costing you nothing.
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Not heard the word “shibboleth” before. I’m going to use it as my preferred pronoun.
Check your pronunciation.
Try as I might I can’t see it. At first I thought you were making a pun on the word “pronoun”, but likely not. I’m not sure what you mean.
This might help:
And the Gileadites took the passages of Jordan before the Ephraimites: and it was so, that when those Ephraimites which were escaped said, Let me go over; that the men of Gilead said unto him, Art thou an Ephraimite? If he said, Nay; Then said they unto him, Say now Shibboleth: and he said Sibboleth: for he could not frame to pronounce it right. Then they took him, and slew him at the passages of Jordan: and there fell at that time of the Ephraimites forty and two thousand.
— Judges 12:5–6[11]
Thank you. No so good on my Old Testament.
Unfortunately it is now mostly used to mean “holy cow”. The use in the quote is an example of how the two meanings overlap. To me the word “shibboleth” is a shibboleth: if you use it incorrectly you are marked out as of the legion of the damned.
I meant “sacred cow”.
Yes a “holy cow” is something Robin exclaims to Batman. Sorry I meant Batperson.
What an appropriate surname! He’s “disgraced” but not jailed.
(I’m assuming Fried has the Yiddish pronunciation)
I totally believe that FTX only existed to make obscene amounts of money and then to give it away. What the fools who fall for the nonsense that is ESG, wokeness, aggrievance culture, the oppression Olympics, identity politics or however one wishes to call it, did not realise, is that the people behind it intended all along to give the money to themselves.
Murray is right, people need to wake up now and fight back against this utter nonsense, which is pushed by a small group of people so that useless wasters like Fried, who in the world as it existed 10 years ago would still be living in his parents’ basement, can become very rich while the rest of us become infinitely poorer. It’s not just that FTX was a ponzi scheme, that is what the climate scam is as well, heaping huge amounts of money into ‘green’ projects that will make a handful of people very very wealthy but will fail and cause the rest of us great hardship. The same with the importing of ‘refugees’ and ‘migrants’. I’ve got no problem with the individuals, they are being used just as much as we are, but they are being brought in as future voters, to increase the lower-level working base in order to cut wages, to get the people who spent 100 years to create a system that provides basic education and health to all, to themselves call for these things to be abolished because they are unsustainable with such an increase in population without a concomitant increase in tax take.
How embarrassing to have been taken for a ride by someone who looks like he should be walking around with a piece of paper taped to his back saying ‘kick me’. What a trick, look and act so nerdy and dumb that people have to believe that you really must be a genius – rather than believe what you see with your own eyes.
Of course he’s going to say these things, FTX was a WEF partner company. https://web.archive.org/web/20221013135233/https://www.weforum.org/organizations/ftx
Fried is a total corrupt skank. I’ll take it back if this tweet isn’t true.
https://twitter.com/robbystarbuck/status/1592597971727962113
BS. This was a Ponzi con from the start and he rode the woke train only to make Dem regulators look away.
Worked well. Always does and will.
For a while.
This was a money laundering scam pure & simple. US gives money to Ukraine, Ukraine ‘invest’ in FTX, FTX make a ‘donation’ to the Democratic party….
The rest of the woke guff is just smoke & mirrors to obfuscate the money laundering going on in plain sight.
I have to agree with you BB….I suspect billions have been ‘washed’….
This article shows the link between US, FX and Ukraine…
https://thegrayzone.com/2022/11/15/ftx-ukraine-western-aid/
But to add to that there are two good stories I read yesterday, which I think relate to this….(in anti-Spiegel.ru)….I used ‘translate this page)…
First was this…
“Another farce has been added to the epic tale of corruption in Ukraine. The head of Ukraine’s audit office wanted to do his job and control the use of the billions that are being transferred to Kyiv from the West. The head of Ukraine’s Audit Office, Valeriy Patskan, has resigned over allegations leveled against him after his initiative to review the National Anti-Corruption Bureau of Ukraine (NABU) and conduct an audit of the defense and law enforcement sectors.”
Then this….
After 1,600 auditors combed through the Department of Defense’s $3.5 trillion in assets and $3.7 trillion in liabilities, officials found the department was unable to account for 61 percent of its assets, Pentagon Comptroller Mike said McCord told reporters on Tuesday.
Corruption on an epic scale…..
I knew that the corruption was bad… Similar things have been occurring in the UK with PPE contracts etc but the US corruption is a whole other level!
It appears that SBF (and his brother) were not only backers of Democrat politicians but also of Covid fanatics:
https://brownstone.org/articles/covid-crypto-connection-ftx-and-sbf