[jdoliner]

Every round Anthropic raises twists the knife deeper in SBF. If only he could have survived the downturn his Antropic investment alone probably could have papered over the other loses.

[stravant]

That assumes he would have stopped with the shenanigans, which is a pretty big if.

[Symmetry]

Proudly proclaiming on the Conversations With Tyler podcast that given a double or nothing bet with a 51% chance of success he'd keep playing forever.

[ramesh31]

>"Every round Anthropic raises twists the knife deeper in SBF. If only he could have survived the downturn his Antropic investment alone probably could have papered over the other loses."

Things working out in the end doesn't make what he did not a crime at the time. He was a common paper hanger, albeit with billions instead.

[yunwal]

> Things working out in the end doesn't make what he did not a crime at the time

Morally speaking, no. Practically speaking, it does. He would not have seen jail time.

[sidewndr46]

I'm pretty sure giving yourself a 1 billion dollar loan had something to do with his downfall. Not a failure to 'survive the downturn'.

[bambax]

Probably would have made his crimes less visible, but not less criminal.

[toomuchtodo]

Like Martin Shkreli, who made his investors whole with his gambling, but still went to jail.

[bpodgursky]

Yes but investors being whole and profitable would almost certainly have not resulted in jail time. He probably would have even had enough unquestionably personal returns to pay back any misappropriated funds in a negotiated settlement, if they even come to light at all.

[brandall10]

Let's not pretend there aren't multitudes out there doing similar things who never get caught. SBF was just more egregious and untimely w/ his actions.

[m101]

A joke for finance types I was told a while back:

"what do you call a rouge trader that makes money?"

"Managing director"

If someone makes money on time, everything is forgiven. Money blinds us.

[willhslade]

Rogue

[FinnLobsien]

Always makes you wonder how many companies that are successes today could’ve had their SBF moment, but market conditions kept them afloat

[adamgordonbell]

> In the early days of FedEx, Smith had to go to great lengths to keep the company afloat. In one instance, after a crucial business loan was denied, he took the company's last $5,000 to Las Vegas and won $27,000 gambling on blackjack to cover the company's $24,000 fuel bill.

Some who take on unreasonable risk will be among the most successful people alive. Most will lose eventually, long before you hear about them if they keep too many taking crazy risks.

Who is a great genius, and is who is just winning at "The Martingale entrepreneurial strategy"?

[hn_throwaway_99]

I think it's really objectionable to refer to this as an "SBF moment".

It's not just about surviving a downtown and unforseen circumstances with some luck (like the sibling talking about FedEx barely making it). Tesla, for example, was famously extremely close to bankruptcy.

But SBF got into the situation he was in due to his egregious fraud. The accounting at FTX was a criminal joke, with multiple sets of books, bypassable controls, outright fake numbers. My guess is that if SBF had survived that particular BTC downturn that his extreme hubris and willingness to commit fraud would have eventually done him in - downturns always happen at some point, and his brazenness in his criminal enterprise showed no signs of learning from mistakes.

Sure, all hugely successful companies have a ton of luck involved. But I think it's a mistake to pretend that SBF was just done in by bad timing, or that all companies do what he did. His empire collapse was pretty inevitable IMO if you look at what a clown show FTX was under the covers.

[zmmmmm]

It's a slightly different context, but Apple probably would have gone out of business if Microsoft hadn't needed them so badly to exist due to antitrust. Hard to imagine how different the world would have been now if that had happened.

[xpe]

Does someone care about this alternative speculative history? Why? If there was something called the sunk death fallacy, I would invoke it.

[paulpauper]

yeah, had CZ not made those tweets... He only had to weather another 2 months of the BTC bear market. BTC began to rebound in Jan 2023. Of course hindsight is 20-202

[arduanika]

CZ was a minor factor. Someone internal leaked the balance sheet.

Hindsight says, don't do fraud.

[cellis]

He'll get a pardon next election cycle.

[stefan_]

What if we put criminals into prison because they committed crimes, regardless of them making their victims "whole" (it would not happen anyway).

[LarsDu88]

So the difference between criminal fraud, and precient genius investor is a difference of a year or so.

We should all try to remember this the next time we vote to cut taxes on billionaires.

[arduanika]

That's a pretty distorted view, and it's probably what people tell themselves right when they're about to do fraud.