One has to appreciate Sam Bankman-Fried’s honesty of late. After running FTX, a presumed $32 billion company, to zero in a matter of days, he took to Twitter to reveal what many of us already knew. He said that “woke” is a racket.
“In the future, I’m going to care less about the dumb, contentless, ‘good actor’ framework,” he said. “What matters is what you do—is ‘actually’ doing good or bad, not just ‘talking’ about doing good or ‘using ESG language.’”
True enough but perhaps a bit late, since woke ideology was the main product that his short-lived company was selling. He says it was never his intention to rob anyone. And he does feel “bad for those who get” harmed by “this dumb game we woke westerners play where we say all the right shiboleths [sic] and so everyone likes us.”
What the company’s ideological strutting did provide was access to power. Bankman-Fried made frequent trips to Washington to court regulators he now criticizes as mostly useless, while holding events in his fancy Bahamas home that attracted the likes of Bill Clinton and Tony Blair.
When the Ukrainian government was looking for a crypto exchange to store and convert its own crypto holdings (where did they get those?), it chose FTX. What’s more, FTX was the only crypto exchange in the world that came recommended by the World Economic Forum, which has since taken the company down from its website.
The unraveling of the company reads like the most implausible fiction story you have ever encountered. The Wall Street Journal has discovered billions in payments to undisclosed parties, the names of which weren’t disclosed in the books. It could take years to sort out the whole sordid tale.
In a too-bizarre-to-be-true twist, the company was heavily involved in the COVID lockdown response, including the funding of studies conducted by scientists connected with vaccine companies to debunk repurposed drugs, studies that received loving media attention even though their flaws were obvious to anyone in the industry.
