FTX fraudster came out as Republican, then tried to claim Biden's DOJ targeted him.
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New Sam Bankman-Fried trial would be huge waste of court’s time, judge says
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scortiusthecharioteer
Ars Centurion
Yeah well he sucks. None of these guys are any different than your average grifter, they just wear a quarter zip well, and are good at giving out vague platitudes to interviewers
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Unless the political about-face also comes with several tens of millions pumped into a $TRUMP coin of some kind I don’t think they care about your shitty X posts.
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He should have bought Prison Escape Simulator on Steam. Could have gotten some practice in trading toilet paper for digging tools.
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Oh, they're different alright, in the fact that they can parley their existing connections (see: Bankman's parents, for example) into utterly gushing wunderkind articles in every paper of note for fucking years.
What's that old joke about things that are super classy as long as you're rich and famous enough? Day drinking and playing league of legends at work, of course!
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SBF is a complete fraud, and left plenty of evidence to prove this, as well as mens rea regarding FTX. Hasn't he heard that Trump doesn't like losers—especially if they can't do anything for him?
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When I was reminded in the first couple of paragraphs who was overseeing the case, I had a good laugh that I very much needed this week. Judge Kaplan is one of the worst judges to try to put one over on. He's sharp and has little patience for legal shenanigans. He also is rarely overturned on appeal. There was zero chance this was ever going to go anywhere.
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The people get what they vote for, whether it's the polls or their wallets. Imagine how many honest naysayers were brushed under the rug because people didn't like what they were saying, and chose to believe him instead.
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The wildest thing is if this guy actually had more MAGA connections and got busted during the current regime there's a decent chance this line of conspiracy nonsense would actually get him pardoned.
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Political pandering, stealing, lying under oath, this guy needs a good long jail stay.
On top of that, I'm also grumpy that SBF bought my favorite autobattler at the time (Storybook Brawl) and it was shut down with the failure of SBX. That said, the team is back with a new company and new game (Once Upon a Galaxy).
On top of that, I'm also grumpy that SBF bought my favorite autobattler at the time (Storybook Brawl) and it was shut down with the failure of SBX. That said, the team is back with a new company and new game (Once Upon a Galaxy).
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Still finding out. Nice. Incredible how stupid some smart people can be. As an Altman acolyte, I can’t say I’m surprised things didn’t work out for him with what’s coming out about Altman.
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Decent? Try 100%.
Trump pardoned the CEO of Binance...the guy who precipitated the run on FTX and caused its collapse--and the entire investigation.
https://finance.yahoo.com/news/binance-ceo-changpeng-zhao-says-040412647.html
https://www.forbes.com/sites/digita...hao-for-176-billion-conspiracy-vs-governance/
https://www.politico.com/news/2025/10/23/trump-pardons-crypto-billionaire-changpeng-zhao-00620175
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He is a truly dedicated conman, caught conning and sentenced, but still active in the only field where he actually has any skill. It is doubtful that he is even capable of learning to stop his con.
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The difference may lie in that Zhao has money—he's one of the wealthiest people in the world at this time, and Fried isn't. Most of the time, people need money to play Trump's game.
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He was donating heavily to both major sides of the political spectrum, but did so quite covertly to the republicans, because he thought that "it would look bad". His openly donating to the democrats sealed his fate with the MAGAts, he had perfectly picked the only dead horse to ride, in his race to the
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Certainly not for themselves. They are far too busy scheming bad consequences for their marks.
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Or he just never grew up. SBF was famous for just ignoring interviewers, during interviews, and playing video games. As cons go--people who fell for it, wanted to be deceived. The writing was there on the wall for all who wanted to read that he wasn't some wunderkind smarter and seeing farther than the rest of us. He was a child in a man's body who needed a baby sitter to even show up to company meetings and interview requests.
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David Rubenstein had an interesting interview with him. Anyone paying attention and somewhat savvy could deduce SBF was just riffing the whole interaction. And Rubenstein isn't just an interviewer—he knows how to invest and succeed.
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There is a class for whom there are no consequences, and a class, us the little people, for whom there are consequences. However, just occasionally a loosely bound member of the former class does something outrageous enough to fall into the regular people class, and in this case rather foolishly did not have enough tucked away to rebuy his birthright protection. But yes, he does seem to have some trouble processing that.
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His sentence was 300 months. Presuming that he doesn't get resentenced (which looks very unlikely so far), he has to serve at least 85% of that, which is 255 months or 21.25 years. Most of that will likely be at a low-security facility (he's currently at FCI Lompoc I) because of this being his first conviction and there being no violence. He may eventually get to go to a federal prison camp, and may get some time (up to 12 months) at the end in a halfway house. It depends mostly on what the Bureau of Prisons decides along the way. He also gets three years of supervised release (probation) once his custodial sentence is over.
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Psychopathy is separate from intelligence.
Dunning-Kruger wouldn't be a thing without some level of psychopathy involved.
This guys is stupid, but thinks he's the smartest person in the room and is utterly without empathy on top of that.
It'd be nice if people in general stopped looking up to psychopaths, and committed them instead. The world would be a much nicer place today if that was the norm.
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I missed the March version of this story and as a result just discovered https://cdn.arstechnica.net/wp-cont...ankman-Fried-Docket-410-3-Google-Document.pdf. It's hilarious; if you haven't read it, you should. It's one of the best examples of "stupid person pretends to think like smart person" that I've ever seen.
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He was just too late to pivot to the AI grift. He coulda just parachuted out of the crypto grift by “exiting” with a big payout, blamed the remaining execs for all the criming, and slid that wad into a big AI ponzi fraud by teaming up with Nazi Space Karen or someone.
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His mom literally wrote academic papers claiming that the entire notion of personal responsibility was invalid. You can't make this stuff up.
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some rampaging psychopaths occur naturally, others are meticulously trained from birth
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