https://ez.substack.com/p/moving-fast-and-breaking-things
When someone is suppressed, restrained or otherwise pushed into a corner, the aggressor tends to assume unlimited power. The feeling of isolation and power imbalance gives the oppressor a form of momentum - as long as they can control the rules of the system, they are unstoppable, able to bend and crack someone to their will, even as onlookers attempt to intervene.
This kind of loathsome creature — call them an aggressor, a bully, a narcissist, it’s up to you — thrives on belief, and seems so poisonous because they appear to be able to get away with anything. The pain they cause and the obviousness of their malice is obvious to anyone operating outside of the system, but it’s very difficult to break in and even harder to break out.
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These people, however, always make two mistakes: they believe their system is transferrable, and never attribute anything they’re doing to luck. Nothing is by accident. Their successes are a result of fairly-won victories or fairly-won swindles against lesser creatures. People that weren’t smart enough to see them coming, or just collateral damage for their empire.
Sam Bankman-Fried, Elon Musk, Changpeng Zhao, Do Kwon, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg and every ruinous cretin that I’ve written about in the last year has the same pattern - a laundry list of excuses that never involves true regard for another human being, a higher purpose that justifies their contempt for others as a necessary evil, and an ever-growing sense of outrage that they would be criticized. They have survived for a long time on work-adjacent success and superficial charm, because they’ve all found the right ways to get what they want.
And in every case, their failures are stemming from their unwillingness to cash out, to stop and take stock and say “I have it pretty good.” They are ever-greedy, ever-hungry, ever-empty souls that get worse as you learn more. They will never be happy, a burden they outsource to anybody unfortunate enough to stay too close.
That’s why it feels so incredibly satisfying to see them lose.
Sam Bankman-Fried has decided that extradition would be the preferable option to living in a rat-infested prison with a bucket for a toilet, capitulating the world’s shortest four-dimensional chess game with the US government. Bankman-Fried assumed he was the smartest guy in the world, manipulating the media for weeks on end and thinking, if I had to guess, that they would somehow shield him after he publicly embarrassed both political parties with illegal political contributions. Bankman-Fried may have been smart enough to pull off one of the largest frauds of all time, but he wasn’t smart enough to build corporate infrastructure or redundancy for his massive fraud, assuming he was always going to be the smartest little shit in all of moneymaking history.
Sadly for him, he wasn’t smart enough to realize he got lucky. He wasn’t grateful for his success - he saw it as a natural byproduct of his genius, and thus there was no need to, say, prepare for the eventuality that someone would find out you were stealing.
It isn’t helpful to write “a normal person wouldn’t,” because Sam Bankman-Fried isn’t a normal person - he acts with the selfishness and disregard that it takes to defraud millions of people and steal billions of dollars. He also isn’t quite as exceptional as he has been portrayed, because he really isn’t a boy genius - he’s a cunning little fraudulent technologist that worked out exactly how to walk, talk, and build to extract capital. And even at the end, he still believed he had gotten away with it - except I imagine that nobody in a bahamian jail cell particularly cares if he created a cryptocurrency exchange, or has any interest in Effective Altruism.
Bankman-Fried built his structure up carefully - a dorky “genius” techie that had made a magic money machine, but legitimately this time, and because he showed the right signs, people gave him more and more money.
Changpeng Zhao (AKA CZ, CEO of Binance) of Binance called his bluff, because he too was this kind of monster. I personally believe CZ released the FTX balance sheet, and that he knew about the significance of FTX’s scam - potentially to distract from the ongoing Department of Justice probe of Binance, though far more likely because he had become tired of Bankman-Fried’s preening, and decided, in an alarming moment of arrogance, to [sell their massive amounts of FTT token on the open market rather than sell to Bankman-Fried directly](https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2022-11-06/binance-to-sell-529-million-of-ftt-token-amids-revelations#:~:text=Zhao Changpeng%2C chief executive of,hold a minority stake in.). Deep down, I really don’t believe any of this had to do with money, or ethics, or anything other than seeing an opportunity to take down a competitor he had grown to dislike. Bankman-Fried was bringing cryptocurrency the kind of attention he didn’t like, and something had to be done.
That’s because CZ, much like Bankman-Fried, always assumed he was one step ahead. He believed that doing this would flush Sam from the industry, all while Binance kept the market stable enough for the bad news to pass as it had so many times, except…it didn’t. And now their auditor is so concerned about the validity of their analysis that they’ve pulled Binance’s audit and stopped working in crypto entirely.
Worse still, Dirty Bubble Media reports that Binance US and Binance.com are comingling assets (and that Binance US may use a foreign “market maker” to pump itself full of funds), which would be illegal considering that Binance is explicitly not allowed to operate in America. The exchange has been dealing with billions of dollars of withdrawals in the last week, and while it isn’t clear how bad things are there, the worm has turned. Reuters published a detailed report yesterday elaborating on the shadowy nature of Binance’s business, and how a company with supposedly tens of billions of dollars can exist without having a headquarters, board of directors, or even an obvious executive team. Now the Department of Justice is considering charging Binance - and CZ himself - with crimes including breaking anti-money-laundering laws and sanctions based on a criminal investigation that started in 2018.
What happens with Binance is anyone’s guess. They are likely some form of insolvent, though it’s not obvious if that means “we have the equivalent of assets” or “we do not have enough of anything.” But it’s not great when you have to pause withdrawals of a major stablecoin because people have been trying to pull billions of dollars at once, something that would not be an issue if you, say, had those billions of dollars sitting in your exchange.
That’s because none of these cryptocurrency “geniuses” ever plans for the most obvious thing of all - their own stupidity. CZ could have likely made billions of dollars in a relatively under-the-radar way, but he chose to delight in media attention assuming that, just like Marc Andreessen, they would always have his back. He assumed that nobody would look behind the curtain, or that anybody behind the curtain would dare break his confidence, either because he had intimidated or enriched them sufficiently enough.