https://milkyeggs.com/?p=175
Similarly, FTX acquired naming rights to the e-sports organization TSM for a stunning $210 millionーfar out of line with comparable deals in the e-sports industry.
:miyazaki-laugh:
It's harder than it seems! I tried post-Snowden and only got close once or twice, once with Mark Cuban weirdly.
Instead FTX gets to piss away 15$B, probably much more. When for just a couple measly million (+legal support) we could have centralized file storage and sharing which, for various reasons that make this an unfortunately difficult pitch, is unable to remove data they're (probably) hosting while being immune to prosecution in most every Western nation, with some even needing constitutional amendments to ban or harass it (and yes all the insider attack/court-ordered/feds with access to the actual hardware running things stuff is accounted for, again unfortunately nothing about this is succinct).
The plan was to supplant both the need and hopefully market for VPNs and gain legitimacy to become a less fraught... Internet Archive, of sorts... But 2000 different variations of the same one-way ledger distributed database each having unique environmental catastrophes are definitely needed and most importantly safe, definitely pump billions into more of those.
Whats funny is that the e-sports org TSM is also famous for squandering their money on signing extremely washed up players and paying a premium for it. In particular last year, they signed one of the best players in the world for a 2 year contract worth $ 6 million, which was apparently frontloaded enough that when said player left after 1 year, he had already gotten paid 4,5 million. The player who was supposed to be one of the best, was a Taiwanese support player, who was mostly famous for his ability to control the game via calls to his teammates. These calls were mostly made in Mandarin, as his last team had been Chinese. Turns out that making extrmely high pressure decicions is extremely hard when you aren't 1000% confident in the language you're using, and the team ended up falling flat.
If a firm is incapable of scaling back a $3m/year AWS bill or even tracking whether or not millions of dollars’ worth of payments have arrived or not, what are the chances they have accurate tracking of their PnL, let alone a clear view of the state of their assets and liabilities at any given moment?
so that's why their "balance sheet" was sooo badly done.
What did they submit to Bahamas regulators though? :thonk:
Autism Capital recently shared an account from an ex-FTX employee recounting how SBF encouraged extreme use of stimulants
Overall, it seems very likely that SBF’s propensity to take extreme levels of risk was elevated to preternaturally high levels via heavy, habitual usage of amphetamines and selegiline, causing him to rationalize nonsensical strategies as optimal via convoluted “linear wealth utility” reasoning.
:data-laughing:
The article mentions the "balance sheet" later:
One cannot help but wonder if this general deficit in intellectual ability is why the FTX balance sheet (provided by SBF earlier last week) is so farcically simplistic
Frankly, this can barely be considered a serious attempt at accounting. It is so absurd that one’s initial assumption is that it is some sort of insane attempt at the financial equivalent of “making up an answer when the teacher calls on you.” But what if this is actually reflective of the quality of his thought.
I love how fucking weird the CEO of FTX and his girlfriend are. Peak cryptopersons.
