<a href="https://twitter.com/innercitypress/status/1712461930424631499" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https://twitter.com/innercitypress/status/171246193042463149...</a><p>This guy has been doing amazing work of live blogging the trial if you want to follow along.<p>The biggest revelation that I found out that wasn't in Michael Lewis' book is that alameda got preferential trading treatment from FTX the exchange.<p>Molly White has also been doing great work of doing daily summaries.<p><a href="https://newsletter.mollywhite.net/p/the-ftx-trial-day-six" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https://newsletter.mollywhite.net/p/the-ftx-trial-day-six</a><p>The winners of the FTX bankruptcy may end up to be those of us who bought up FTX bankruptcy claims for 20 cents on the dollar after it came out that FTX invested $500M in Anthropic back in 2021.<p>That investment alone could be worth atleast 4x that value now.
><i>When the prosecution asked Ellison whether she could identify Bankman-Fried for the jury, Ellison stood, squinted and scanned the room. It took almost a minute for her to locate him.</i><p>Sounds hilariously awkward, must have felt like an eternity
So not a ton that's that surprising as someone who's been following this, but this was something special:<p>> Ellison testified how colleagues at Alameda set up accounts on the Chinese exchange tied to the identities of Thai prostitutes, hoping they could somehow use those accounts to siphon the money away from the frozen account.
This whole episode can offer some perspective for startups because it shows how the popularity of a startup is not necessarily connected to it's actual merit.<p>It's not that merit and popularity aren't related, it's just that they aren't the same thing. Also, receiving a lot of investment or having many customers is not the same thing as being a real business.
> In early 2021, a Chinese cryptocurrency exchange froze Alameda's trading account, and the firm lost access to approximately $1 billion in assets.<p>The anti-thesis of cryptocurrency.
Zeke Faux's book(1) on crypto pretty much sums up what most people believe: SBF knowingly ran a Ponzi scheme, or at the very least knowingly stole from investors, but that all of them had a knowing hand in it and bear responsibility.<p>Michael Lewis's book(2) however is much more sympathetic, painting SBF as a hapless nerd with autism, who meant well but wasn't socially adept enough to knowingly commit a crime; he broke the law for a good cause; altruism.<p>I think the jury is going to have to wrestle with these two ideas, a crime versus culpability of "super smart kids" that got in over their heads. I think therein lies what will be a hung jury.<p>1. Number Go Up: Inside Crypto's Wild Rise and Staggering Fall by Zeke Faux<p>2. Going Infinite by Michael Lewis
> Ultimately, Ellison said, Alameda transferred $100 million in payments to what she understood to be Chinese government officials to unfreeze the account, which could constitute a bribe.<p>Heeeey, $100 million <i>could</i> constitute a bribe. That's more than I make in a <i>year</i>!
Sequoia needs to be investigated and those who were involved in perpetuating this fraud need to be imprisoned. They are as culpable in this as anybody else.
Some other discussion: <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37851870">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37851870</a>
Starting to think the whole "put my ex girlfriend in charge of the business where I am committing massive financial fraud" plan had some flaws but I'm a boy genius on magazine covers so that can't be right
The canonical link for this is <a href="https://www.npr.org/2023/10/11/1205045583/sam-bankman-fried-trial-caroline-ellison-ftx-alameda-research" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https://www.npr.org/2023/10/11/1205045583/sam-bankman-fried-...</a> so this should point to that.
I mean obviously this is a court and you're supposed to not lie. But is there not a conflict of interest here? They were together at one point, were business partners.<p>Why wouldn't she just blast him as hard as possible, as that's her way out. Surely most of this testimony has to be taken with a grain of salt. She is 100% not capable of washing her hands, she knew what she was doing.