As the autopsy of Sam Bankman-Fried’s crypto empire begins, it’s worth saying that there were red flags all over the place. We missed them.
It was a success story almost too good to resist. In just over three years, FTX would go from nothing to a $32 billion company. Now it’s back to nothing.
Along the way, investors, politicians, regulators and yes, journalists, dropped the ball. In Bankman-Fried, with his chirpy energy, bottomless optimism and texts-me-back-on-deadline openness, we found a conduit to the crazy world of cryptocurrency that could help make sense of it all.
To accept the image, however, was to suspend disbelief.
The clues were there, often coming straight from SBF himself. Talking to David Rubenstein, one of the founders of the Carlyle Group and a Bloomberg TV host, Bankman-Fried explained why he created FTX. It would foreshadow the exchange’s demise.
