Matt Levine’s Money Stuff: SBF’s Defense Will Be Tough

SBF Stuff

The essential charges against Sam Bankman-Fried are:

• Customers deposited billions of dollars at his crypto exchange, FTX, to buy crypto.

• Bankman-Fried’s trading firm, Alameda Research, secretly took that money to gamble on crypto tokens and make weird illiquid venture investments.

• Also a lot of the money seems to have been siphoned off to make political donations, buy celebrity endorsements, pay for Bahamas real estate for Bankman-Fried and his family, etc.

• When customers started asking for their money back last November, it wasn’t there.

This is bad! The basic combination of “the customers’ money is gone” and “you lived in a $30 ...