Yuri Bezmonov points out that elite cronyism revolving around Environmental, social, and governance (ESG) virtue-signaling investing resides at the root of the FTX/Alameda Investing debacle.

Most articles I’ve read about FTX are analyzing the mechanics of how it imploded, but they are not going deep on the characters involved because that would be politically incorrect. Have no fear, Yuri is here! It is the perfect story to dissect that includes pattern recognition, crony elitism, and physiognomy. The diligence below will grow more savage as you keep reading.

FTX CEO Sam Bankman-Fried (SBF) is the quintessential soy bugman. Rule of thumb – never trust a vegan who wears cargo shorts with white socks. His parents were Stanford professors and his mother is a Democrat NGO bundler. SBF funneled $50 million to Democrats in this midterm cycle, second only to the perennial heavyweight George Soros. “Effective altruism” + “democracy” = stealing from people to give to Democrats. He also fraudulently transferred FTX customer money into his own hedge fund Alameda, run by soy bugwoman ex-girlfriend Caroline Ellison.

The most underreported part of this tale is on the other side of the table – the investors. Sequoia is regarded as the one of the greatest venture capital firms of all time with a storied history of grand slams including household names like Apple, Cisco, Google, Instagram, LinkedIn, PayPal, Reddit, Tumblr, WhatsApp, and Zoom. It has $85 billion in assets under management. Roloef Boetha is its well-respected leader, who was part of the legendary Paypal Mafia that included Elon Musk, Peter Thiel, David Sacks, and Keith Rabois.

At the peak of the bubble in Summer 2021, Sequoia plowed $214 million into FTX. As is custom with smug VCs, they announced their investment with a 13,000 word epic of self-congratulatory masturbatory propaganda fellating the brilliance of SBF. They have deleted the piece from their website to hide their embarrassment, but the internet never forgets and archived it in full here. The worst moment came when the partners were simping over SBF’s pitch, while he was simultaneously playing a video game.

RTWT

0xfbifemboy does a thorough job of explaining “how Sam Bankman-Fried, Sam Trabucco, and Caroline Ellison incinerated over $20 billion dollars of fund profits and FTX user deposits.”

[W]e still don’t have a perfect understanding of what exactly happened at Alameda Research and FTX. However, at this point, I feel that we have enough information to get a grasp on the broad strokes. Through a combination of Twitter users’ investigations, forum anecdotes, and official news releases, the history of these two intertwined companies becomes progressively less hazy, slowly coalescing into something resembling a consistent narrative.

Of course, without witness testimonies and a full financial investigation, our claims only remain tentative at best. Any given piece of information may be flawed or even fabricated. However, if they are assembled together and put in context, they together lend credence to the following timeline:

SBF, Trabucco, and Caroline were (probably) initially well-intentioned but not especially competent at running a trading firm

Alameda Research made large amounts of book profits via leveraged longs and illiquid equity deals in the 2020-2021 bull market

Although Alameda was likely initially profitable as a market maker, their edge eventually degraded and their systems became unprofitable

Despite success with some discretionary positions, on net, Alameda & FTX jointly continued to lose large amounts of money and liquid cash throughout 2021-2022 as a result of excessive discretionary spending, illiquid venture investments, uncompetitive market-making strategies, risky lending practices, lackluster internal accounting, and general deficiencies in overall organizational ability
When loans were recalled in early 2022, an emergency decision was made to use FTX users’ deposits to repay creditors

This repayment spurred on increasingly erratic behavior and unprofitable gambling, eventually resulting in total insolvency.

RTWT

In retrospect, perhaps $20 billion would've been better invested in lottery tickets than magic beans from two autistic band nerds pic.twitter.com/Mzh8pmEWWv

— David Burge (@iowahawkblog) November 14, 2022

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The NY Post profiles the FTX founder/genius.

Biden’s second-biggest donor, cryptocurrency billionaire wunderkind Sam Bankman-Fried, a k a SBF, saw his business file for bankruptcy days after the election, but not before pumping $40 million into the Democratic Party to spend on “get-out-the-vote” and other shadowy ballot-harvesting mechanics for the midterms.

The shambolic 30-year-old whiz kid, once said to have been worth $16 billion, had spent $10 million helping get Biden elected in 2020.

SBF’s mother, Stanford law professor Barbara Fried, also is co-founder of left-wing political action committee Mind The Gap, which has raised a reported $140 million to help Democrats win elections through the same “get-out-the-vote” grift.

A more unlikely billionaire you could not find — and of course his money was built on thin air. A math genius with poor social skills, SBF reportedly lived in a “polycule” — a polyamorous relationship with multiple people — in a luxury penthouse with about 10 co-workers in the tax haven of the Bahamas, where his collapsed crypto exchange FTX was headquartered.

Otherwise, he was sleeping on beanbags in his office, eating vegan fries and, according to his own Twitter feed, popping amphetamines and sleeping pills to regulate his chaotic sleeping habits.

Now Reuters is reporting that between $1 billion and $2 billion of customer funds have vanished from FTX, conveniently after the Democrats safely spent his money.

At last report, SBF and his mysterious co-founder, Gary Wang, were being held “under supervision” by Bahamian authorities after reportedly planning to flee to Dubai, according to fintech publication Cointelegraph.

It is a stunning fall to earth. The financial media and big investors have feted the young billionaire as a saint who shunned earthly pleasures like Lamborghinis and Rolexes, but lived only to give away all his money and make the world a better place.

He was the most famous millennial adherent of a cult known as “Effective Altruism,” which originated at Oxford University, found fertile ground in Silicon Valley — and now has gone down in flames along with him.

EA is a disguised form of socialism, because all the “good” that is done just happens to match up perfectly with the left’s obsessions, whether climate change, social justice, equity, banning meat or his favorite, “pandemic preparedness.”

In a Nas Daily online video, an awkward Bankman-Fried was featured this year as a role model of altruism for young people: “Sam is not a traditional billionaire because he believes in the concept of ‘earn to give’ … Next decade he will probably give away more than $10 million … He wants to get rich in order to impact the world and change it.”

RTWT

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Caroline Ellison, Ellison, the close business associate and confirmed ex-girlfriend of FTX founder Sam Bankman-Fried, tweeted last year:

nothing like regular amphetamine use to make you appreciate how dumb a lot of normal, non-medicated human experience is

— Caroline (@carolinecapital) April 5, 2021