inciampati · 2 years ago

Very helpful! Thank you. They are blocked in some localities as well (Italy...), I believe due to bureaucratic/legal issues.

throwaway5959 · 2 years ago

Why is that?

kstrauser · 2 years ago

Say what? My brother’s a probation officer. I’d 100x rather be under a PO’s thumb and sleeping next to my own wife in my own bed in my own house than to live in even a minimum security prison.

Probation sucks. The only thing it sucks less than is prison.

woodruffw · 2 years ago

Maybe you could educate us.

voisin · 2 years ago

Can you elaborate?

SnorkelTan · 2 years ago

Probation is really only horrible for people that don’t plan on changing.

Source: friends on probation who have changed the way they live and friends that didn’t.

HelloMcFly · 2 years ago

Knowing someone who spent a few years in jail, there is no way they'd agree. Maybe a year on probation is more of a hassle than a year in jail (I don't think so, but acknowledge the possibility), but whatever generous spirit I'll give to this balance gets more and more out of whack the more time we're talking. And Brock shouldn't have been looking at one year in jail, he should have been looking at something a little more standard for the crime of sexual assault.

> The people that think he got off easy

He got off easy, give me a break..

eep_social · 2 years ago

Well shit, I sure did not consider the possibility that mentioning the canonical example of sentencing shenanigans would bring someone garbage enough to defend a rapist out of the woodwork, but here we are.

FTR, I’ve been on probation and therefore must vehemently disagree with your uninformed second-hand opinion.

pfannkuchen · 2 years ago

Don’t forget banishment, which isn’t really an option today. Though I don’t see why some large chunk of federal land couldn’t be designated as a banishment target.

soup10 · 2 years ago

They also had exile back in the day, among other punishments between life and death and incarceration.

glenngillen · 2 years ago

This might well be true, but it’s not the slam dunk people seem to be treating it as. A private investment round can be negotiated by as few as two people agreeing on a price. It says nothing about the market clearing price for any other investment or sale like it does with a public market transaction. Public markets give you an order book of other competing offers where you can make some reasonable assumptions about how much you could sell at which price if you wanted to liquidate. There may be no other buyer for Anthropic at or near the current price.

Conversely, it’s a private company and scarcity of opportunity to get in is also a thing. So it’s entirely possible someone will pay more than the previous round just to get in.

Basically we don’t know until the investment bankers have done their jobs.

gfsdgfsdgfeds2 · 2 years ago

How is it "very likely" when most startups fail?

timack · 2 years ago

Anthropic is still in private investment phase, lets not forget WeWork was "worth" $45B at one stage.

datavirtue · 2 years ago

Good luck cashing that out.

eru · 2 years ago

Lots of the money indirectly ended up with clients again.

FTX was an exchange. It was an attractive exchange partially because many things traded there offered tight spreads, ie difference between prices quoted for buying and selling. The tight spreads came from Alameda. Alameda was another entity connected to SBF.

The problem was that Alameda wasn't actually competent enough to quote tight spreads and make money off them. So they lost many to savvier customers. FTX lent money to Alameda to keep them afloat. But that money was never paid back.

There's lots of other things that went wrong. But this is probably the most ironic part: a large part of FTX's clients' lost money went to FTX's clients. (But not the same clients who lost money. And lots of money was lost in other ways.)

buitreVirtual · 2 years ago

Is there any place in the world where it isn't that way? Honest question.

How could SBF pay his victims back fully if he doesn't have enough assets?

Simulacra · 2 years ago

We do have a passion for vengeance in America. I think that feeling is what defeats prison reform, what politician wants to be seen a soft on crime?

hcurtiss · 2 years ago

Suffering consequences for crime is, to most people, an element of justice. That form of justice also has the benefit of deterring other would-be criminals. There are those who believe there is no deterrent effect. They're idiots.

rmk · 2 years ago

That’s reflected in sentencing guidelines. The more serious the crime the higher the sentence. Expecting to walk away from a crime of such magnitude is just not realistic.

Sometimes, it’s important to make an example out of criminals, so that future criminals are deterred. Thus, strict punishments are a social necessity.

EDIT: A lot of folks think financial crimes are pretty much victimless crimes, and thus financial criminals deserve leniency. However, just because we can’t see the harm doesn’t mean it doesn’t exist. SBF has probably reduced hundreds of not thousands to penury. Those people will pay the price for his wrongdoing, possibly for the rest of their lives.

ziddoap · 2 years ago

The post your are replying to didn't say that punishment wasn't necessary, just that punishment and justice aren't really the same thing. Ideally he would be punished for his actions and there would be justice for the victims (i.e. being made whole).

CydeWeys · 2 years ago

He's also going to jail to prevent him from defrauding more people. Meanwhile Adam Neumann is still out there starting new sketchy companies taking people's money, most recently some crypto token thing (because of course he would). If Masayoshi Son had been less interested in saving face and more interested in getting justice, Adam might be behind bars too. One could imagine a case for fraud being made there.

MrRolleyes · 2 years ago

Yes, we in the US have a punitive justice system, which emphasizes punishment under the dubious concept of punitive deterrence over remediation and other forms of deterrence (eg poverty reduction, though that is obviously irrelevant here).

Anyway, a law institution certainly has an incentive to push their own agenda when it comes to the theory of justice.

MrRolleyes · 2 years ago

> deterrence is also a key pillar of the justice system

Oh is that why our justice system is so terrible at actually reducing crime?

rossdavidh · 2 years ago

Actually the last estimate I heard was that victims might get 90% back from the bankruptcy proceedings, depending on how the Anthropic shares are handled, whether the FTX exchange is really restarted, etc. etc. Doesn't mean he didn't commit fraud, just that there is an outside chance of the victims being made whole again.

tempsy · 2 years ago

Eh disagree. Holmes got more than 10 years but she didn’t even try to profit by selling shares or borrowing against shares to buy a bunch of things. The scale of the financial fraud is enormous and on top of that they spent hundreds of millions of it on luxury items and influence peddling.

Would be shocked if he got less than Holmes.

hn_throwaway_99 · 2 years ago

Sorry to be harsh but you have no idea what you're talking about. Holmes was famously not found guilty of defrauding patients, only defrauding investors.

SBFs fraud totals were much, much higher than Holmes, and the federal sentencing guidelines indicate he'll be going to jail for much longer.

qualifiedai · 2 years ago

"she could've killed people" - I agree and infuriating part of her trial is that she was not convicted of endangering patients or defrauding employees. She was only convicted of defrauding investors (some of whom were famous politicians and lost some money because of her).

lolinder · 2 years ago

The original question was:

> This is life in prison, correct? I know he hasn't been sentenced but all counts is easily several life sentences at the federal level.

There is no a sentence yet. Deciding the sentence has yet to happen, so OP's answer to the grandparent is 100% correct: it's foolish to try to calculate the sentence right now, we just have to wait and see.

If anything, you comment goes to reinforce OP's point: you yourself list 3-4 different variables that need to be determined for each charge.

depereo · 2 years ago

This is massively reductive, but hey, this is HN.

The guidelines are 618 pages long. There are considerations for the person's history, for their pleas, for the # of counts, for the type of crime, for the victim impact, for the felon impact, for the societal impact, for precedent, for the type of intent & hundreds of other things get mixed in to the judgement as well. There's a good reason this will only be complete by March next year.

https://www.ussc.gov/sites/default/files/pdf/guidelines-manu...

drcode · 2 years ago

It's Turing complete

dmvdoug · 2 years ago

No, the judge begins with the sentencing guidelines calculations, and then takes into account a host of other factors. The judge has significant (but not absolute) discretion in choosing a sentence. As a general matter, white collar criminals more often get downward variances than others. But we’re still likely talking in the decades worth of federal prison.

marcus0x62 · 2 years ago

No, his bail was revoked.

sp332 · 2 years ago

https://www.cnn.com/business/live-news/ftx-sam-bankman-fried...

For example, the Rikers Island jail is mostly for pre-trial detention. People don't get sentenced to Rikers.

ozim · 2 years ago

Days spent in jail are counted for your “prison time” so it counts as such even if it is jail ;)

Animats · 2 years ago

Federal prison will be a step up from the Metropolitan Detention Center. Here's a guide to the best Federal prisons.[1] Since he will probably be serving more than 10 years, he's not eligible for the "Club Fed" minimum-security federal prisons. Low-security, probably. He's not violent or an escape risk.

[1] https://prisonprofessors.com/best-federal-prisons-to-serve-t...

pylua · 2 years ago

There are lots of mechanisms in place compared to other types of financial institutions including bank examiners.

tsunamifury · 2 years ago

You got it backwards. They became insolvent due to a bank run. Based on false speculation that they couldn’t liquidate their treasuries. Which the government then bought back 1:1.

So basically Peter Theil caused a run on a bank for no reason other than he got people panicked about their tbill risk ladder. Which by the way want as bad as Bank Of Americas right now.

vineyardmike · 2 years ago

They didn’t really do the same thing wrong. SVB did everything right, just not right enough.

“Real” banks, government approved ones, have laws governing how much cash to keep on hand, and how to “invest” the excess, etc. SVB did everything by the books and they’d probably have made it through to the other side if there wasn’t a bank run. They just had underwater investments if sold (but they’d be fine if held to maturity).

FTX was literal fraud and they didn’t protect money. They gave it to friends, and sister companies, and made a lot of bad decisions with it. There’s a big difference between that and SVB.

Oh and of course everyone was made whole in the end after SVB

acdha · 2 years ago

Auditing meant that taxpayers paid nothing and all of their customers were made whole, and the regulators changed policies to prevent that happening again. It’s not perfect but it’s worlds better than the cryptocurrency goat rodeo where we constantly see large, easily foreseeable losses and most of the “community” reacts by saying that the victims should have known better and bought the speaker’s favorite token instead.

wmf · 2 years ago

Note that FTX told their customers that they would not invest their deposits. Customers who opted in to margin lending could lend money to other customers but even in that case FTX went far beyond what they promised to their customers. It would be more accurate IMO to say that FTX embezzled (or just plain stole) customer deposits.

bagels · 2 years ago

Okay, one difference is that the guy put customer money directly in his own pockets. Most bank failures don't include such obvious incompetent fraud.

I agree with you though, bankers that are doing frauds should also be prosecuted.

dieselgate · 2 years ago

Reminds me of the Fyre festival guy getting out of prison and trying to make it right by doing the festival again

ceejayoz · 2 years ago

Relevant: https://www.popehat.com/2013/02/05/crime-whale-sushi-sentenc...

TL;DR: It won’t be the max.

compiler-devel · 2 years ago

This is reddit so of course it is based on feelings and not facts.

slowhadoken · 2 years ago

this conversation, a prison.

tempsy · 2 years ago

there’s an appeal process

duxup · 2 years ago

I suspect most people aren’t really up for life on the run.

paxys · 2 years ago

Mostly hubris. "I did nothing wrong, I have the best lawyers, I will beat the charges."

ww520 · 2 years ago

He ran out of cash?

prepend · 2 years ago

Remember he tried that when he was in the Bahamas. But he ran out of money and the Bahamians turned him over.

harambae · 2 years ago

Yeah I remember one of Sam's lawyers insisted he stay in the Bahamas and fight extradition if he was to have any chance of staying out of jail and the other lawyer said he should do the opposite and accept extradition.

Given how harsh the US is on financial crimes, I always thought the former opinion was smarter. Nick Leeson only got sentenced to 6 1/2 years in Singapore (and served 4). Or, alternatively, most stats show higher levels of corruption he could've finessed in his favor in the Bahamas.

As soon as he arrived on US soil it was over for him IMO.

selimthegrim · 2 years ago

Why even follow him, I’m sure hitmen are pretty cheap in Venezuela. I guess security guards are too.

tempsy · 2 years ago

yes, in early march https://x.com/innercitypress/status/1720228112695189509?s=20

dragontamer · 2 years ago

He had a cushy house-arrest deal at first (after paying for bail) and then started to abuse his computer-access to tamper with witnesses.

So yeah. I'm pretty sure he's getting the slammer while waiting for sentencing.

duxup · 2 years ago

In our case it was a civil trial and effectively we were just picking $ amount to pay out.

It also turned out that we were all mostly on the same page.

Criminal stuff i certainly would have not agreed.

crossroadsguy · 2 years ago

Is the lunch nice? Do you get paid as well? What kind of hotels are you all kept in? Is it like in those Hollywood films? How common are things like jury tempering? Do you all have sufficient protection?

duxup · 2 years ago

Yeah we got free lunch, ordered it that morning. Good stuff, from a nice deli.

In our case if you reached a verdict you were done serving so no need to drag it out.

gnicholas · 2 years ago

Free lunch? Where is this? I've served in CA and have never heard of such a thing!

JohnFen · 2 years ago

Lucky you! We were not fed, except for the donuts and coffee in the waiting room. We were allowed to leave at mealtimes and get our own food.

duxup · 2 years ago

It was a pretty boring civil case. I suspect we were just deciding how much one insurance company was paying the other…

It was also a pretty one sided case.

romanhn · 2 years ago

Yep, the system is predicated on the decisions of a group that doesn't want to be there, but couldn't figure out a way to get out of it.

thanksgiving · 2 years ago

> Kind of scary that this is the rigor our justice system hinges on.

That’s not the scary part. The scary and eye opening part is that an obviously frivolous lawsuit against can bankrupt you.

There is a YouTuber with h3h3 productions and he got hit with a lawsuit and it cost them USD 50k + USD 170k, at least. Maybe chump change if you’re a billionaire but I’d lose by default if you were to sue me.

duxup · 2 years ago

Civil case and we found were all on the same page pretty fast. It was a pretty one sided case.

tptacek · 2 years ago

That's not so much going to be an issue in this case. But a lot of the time, especially in federal white collar cases, the defendant isn't in custody during sentencing anyways.

tptacek · 2 years ago

I got offense levels:

* 7 as the 2b1.1 baseline

* +30 for dollar loss, which caps out at $550MM, against CFTC's estimate of $8Bn

* +6 for 25+ victims, another cap

* +2 for financial misrepresentations, maybe, depending on how bankruptcy fits in

* +2 for either sophisticated means or deliberate use of foreign jurisdictions (the same clause, one of those predicates is definitely going to hit)

* +4 for jeopardizing (or, in this case, destroying) a financial institution --- at a minimum, +2 (same clause) for >$1MM gross receipts

* +4 for his function as the leader in the crime

* +2 for obstruction, maybe

* +1-2 for grouping/combined offense level, depending on how the conspiracy, wire fraud, and campaign finance stuff groups out.

So that's low-to-high 50s as an offense level. 43 is straight life. But there's probably a statutory maximum in the mix here that takes life off the table somehow.

Later: I miskeyed the 2B1.1b1 cap, as 10MM (the bottom of the page); it's 550MM (on the next page). Doesn't change the analysis much, which is why SBF is so fucked.

NoMoreNicksLeft · 2 years ago

What does it require, if not wires?

And are modern fiber optic cables wires in any sense of the word? Does the relevant statute in USC18 actually define "wire" for the purpose of the crime?

Part of me thinks that wireless communications must be included, but one might make the case that even then, information/communication is transmitted over wire at some point.

bagels · 2 years ago

Yes. I intentionally left that out, because I don't know what the guidelines are for that on these charges. The quote I gave just lists the maximum sentence for each charge.

akerl_ · 2 years ago

"consecutively" in this context is sort of right. But in practice, the charges group together. So if you get charged with 1000 counts of wire fraud, you don't math out 1000 sentences and then decide which ones are consecutive and which are sequential, you math out one wire fraud sentence and for the 'but how many times did you do it' multiplier, you get an extra hit for being prolific.

The parallel commenter linked https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kr8gSdJ_Ggw&t=272s , which is a great example. https://popehat.substack.com/p/beware-the-flood-of-trump-sen... is another, if text / blogs is a better medium, or the slightly older https://www.popehat.com/2013/02/05/crime-whale-sushi-sentenc... from the same author.

kosievdmerwe · 2 years ago

I don't know, but I very much assume so. He violated his bail already (multiple times) leading to it getting revoked.

The judge also previously said, when asked about whether SBF could remain out of jail during just during his trial after his bail got revoked:

> “Your client in the event of conviction could be looking at a very long sentence. If things begin to look bleak … maybe the time would come when he would seek to flee.”

I don't imagine the judge will give him time to get his affairs in order from outside prison, which is something I understand happens (like it did with Elizabeth Holmes)

ncallaway · 2 years ago

That's also a decision from the judge, though it's likely. Typically, post-conviction release is harder to get than pre-trial release, so if he's detained pre-trial (which SBF eventually was) it's extremely likely that he'll be detained post-conviction.

dragonwriter · 2 years ago

Damages blowing out the charts just means a very high guidelines offense level, it doesn't make the guidelines any less applicable (and there's not really charts for victim numbers, there's a few categories for financial offenses, but mainly the guidelines expect beyond a few the aggregate loss factor to handle it, and by the time you blow the top off that chart, you've also very nearly (with just that factor and the base offense level) maxed out to a sentence of life or whatever the maximum is for the offenses on which you were convicted -- it only takes a few additional modifiers like having a substantial portion of the criminal conduct outside of the US to do that.

Way too many people here have read Popehat's (very important!) piece about how reporting of aggregate statutory maximum penalties is usually extremely misleading because in the vast majority of cases the guidelines ranges (1) will be applied, and (2) will be much shorter than the aggregate statutory maximum and are hypercorrecting into "SBF's actual sentence will be far below the aggregate statutory maximum because sentencing guidelines", without any idea of how the guidelines would apply to the facts at issue in the case.

Ekaros · 2 years ago

It is sad there isn't some easy linear calculation like divide the amount defrauded by minimum wage and sentence is that number divided by 8 in days. It is always sad when people get discounts just because they stole lot of money compared to some that stole little...

jowea · 2 years ago

Does that work? I mean, he could plea guilty just to save some lawyer expense for his parents but I don't think he had a better choice than going for a hail mary.

canuckintime · 2 years ago

> Perhaps the only one (potentially, and not trying to derail this) might be Donald Trump (but I also have a hard time seeing him accepting a plea deal on the current raft of bullshit around him).

(Not sure what “current raft of bullshit around him implies” but derail ahead)

Trump is no stranger to settling cases and making deals with prosecutors(1)(2) but all cases he’s facing now having such face-losing punishments even on plea that he can’t afford to take any.

(1) https://www.reuters.com/article/us-trump-lawsuit-idUSKBN13D1...

(2) https://www.newyorker.com/news/news-desk/how-ivanka-trump-an...

rossdavidh · 2 years ago

My understanding is that he was, in fact, not offered a plea deal.

idlewords · 2 years ago

His highest expected payoff option now is to cooperate with any AI who will take him in hopes that it will release him when the Singularity comes. So I think we all know what his plan will be.

mikeryan · 2 years ago

The outstanding creditors probably think the timing was pretty good.

BWStearns · 2 years ago

Most of the companies I've worked at will pay your normal salary while on jury duty (you're not allowed to get the jury duty pay but that's a pittance).

drexlspivey · 2 years ago

Do you stop receiving your salary when you are on jury duty or what?

2muchcoffeeman · 2 years ago

Yeah, I’ve been called up and the company I worked for had to write a letter because they couldn’t let me leave that long.

They need a better system. I can’t get a shorter trial. There’s no system to put you in a pool when you are freer.

p1necone · 2 years ago

If the company you work for won't pay your salary while you're serving jury duty you should probably start looking for another job that treats you with respect.

dragontamer · 2 years ago

> and this pizza sucks

I feel like that's impossible to happen in Manhattan federal court. That city's pizza is so good.....

Then again, if you live there, maybe your Pizza standards are just higher?

TylerE · 2 years ago

Not sure how it is at the Federal level, but when I was called (but not selected, phew!) for local court it was insulting low. Like $50/day... and most of the parking near the courthouse is paid. Basically minimum wage equiv, which was like $8.25/hr then.

Edit: Just checked the state website... it's even worse than I remembered: "Trial jurors receive $12 for the first day of service and $20 for each day thereafter. If you serve more than five days, you will receive $40 per day."

bigger_cheese · 2 years ago

I am Australian. When I was assigned Jury duty in 2016, my Company continued to pay me (I think this is a legal requirement if you are a full time employee), I showed my manager the letter from the court and I was instructed to enter a leave request via usual HR system we use - there was an option for Jury duty.

I was also paid by the court for attending jury duty (a physical check that arrived in the mail a few months later). It was not very much money (I think around $20 per day) - this money was supposed to cover things like Transport, parking fees and meals. In my case the trial was called off after 3 days so the check was for around $60.

Maybe if you are part time or on a contract it is different.

JohnFen · 2 years ago

> On a serious note - not sure how much you get compensated on Juries

I served on a jury a number of months back, and in my part of the US, they pay $10/day. They ask if you want to donate it to the fund that stocks and maintains the jury waiting area, and 90% of everybody says yes.

If you can show that you'll suffer an undue hardship (like, for instance, financial distress or having to care for a loved one), they'll dismiss you from service and mark you as having served.

sib · 2 years ago

When I was in university, the state I lived in paid $0.50 / mile for travel to jury, in addition to some trivial daily rate.

I was called for jury duty via email sent to my home when I was studying abroad for a semester, 4,500 miles away.

Unbeknownst to me, my parents requested an excuse from jury duty on my behalf because I was out of the country, which upset me, as I was hoping for the 9,000 * $0.50 in travel allowance...

Seemed like so much money at the time!

afavour · 2 years ago

I'm not an expert but I imagine if you're exceedingly rich both of those countries could be plenty of fun.

downWidOutaFite · 2 years ago

Bernie Maddoff got 150

jjtheblunt · 2 years ago

Thanks for the link; i hadn't noticed there was an article about that area.

I know Stanford's campus and professorville too, having lived near it for years, but what LA Times reported looks like the ability to use that house (implicitly its Stanford-owned land included) is questionable?

Here's a reference (that's imperfect)

https://www.businessinsider.com/sbf-parents-house-on-leased-...

pests · 2 years ago

I beleive the default for Federal convictions imposed at the same time are concurrently unless the statue or judge specifically asks otherwise.

dsr_ · 2 years ago

Obviously they should divide it into a low-risk low-return tranche and a high-risk high-return tranche and market two tokens, with an LLM informed of the rules providing final arbitrage.

hanniabu · 2 years ago

If RWAs were adopted and the tokens were non-custodial then not much. The issue with FTX is it was a centralized company and all funds were fully custodial. And while all this was happening SBF was buddy buddy with Gary Gensler. Aka it was a tradfi problem, not a crypto problem.

CobrastanJorji · 2 years ago

I think this is a terrible idea, but I fully endorse it because of the chance that it could hilariously result in FTX investors losing the same money twice.

nl · 2 years ago

It's unclear there are buyers for this amount of private shares at the market price.

It's one thing for Google etc to invest billions in cash and cloud services[1] into Anthropic with the understanding that money will be used for engineering and growth.

It's quite different for any buyer to come in and spend $4B on the secondary market for nothing but shares, with none of that money going to Anthropic.

There is a large appetite for exposure to the big AI companies, so maybe the demand is there. But it's not as simple as selling a large stock holding on the public market.

[1] https://www.axios.com/2023/10/30/google-invests-2-billion-an...

quickthrower2 · 2 years ago

Maybe. It is not liquid like stocks though. They'll probably try to auction it off?

AdamN · 2 years ago

If there's a way to sell it at a fair price, yes. Otherwise, they have a fiduciary responsibility to hold it until a buyer can be found to pay a fair price. They won't hold it just to let it ride though - that's correct. IANAL :-)

CydeWeys · 2 years ago

Anthropic isn't publicly traded yet so it can't have too many investors.

s1artibartfast · 2 years ago

The shares may not be transferrable, or some investors may not want to go to the trouble.

Schnitz · 2 years ago

Anthropic doesn’t want dozens (hundreds?) of disgruntled creditors on their cap table and there might be provisions preventing such a transfer.

wmf · 2 years ago

They ghosted their own creditors but somehow found the time to be interviewed for the new Bloomberg crypto documentary.

resolutebat · 2 years ago

Zhu Su was arrested in Singapore about a month ago. Davies remains on the run.

PretzelPirate · 2 years ago

Keep in mind that "NFTs representing digital art" are a subset of what NFTs are. GenAI might have impacted art tokens, but wouldn't affect NFTs as a whole.

wrsh07 · 2 years ago

I am fairly confident there is private money that would gladly buy 3.5 billion worth of anthropic at the current price

But 100%, it's not just about getting repaid. Yes that helps, but not having your money last year might have mattered to some ftx customers

nyssos · 2 years ago

Openly, and all at once? No chance whatsoever.

fisherjeff · 2 years ago

It’s an interesting question. The shares are likely not transferrable without amending the LLC agreement or whatever. If you want in on Anthropic, though, and you know the FTX estate has to liquidate, then there’s a chance you can get to a good price; maybe less than $3B but probably not a ton, because lots of other people want in too.

On the other hand, the current investors probably won’t want to make an exception for FTX if they know it’s going to cause them to write down their stakes.

ramraj07 · 2 years ago

As long as you’re able to sell those shares immediately, a bunch of money loaded investors will be waiting to get your fraction of the AI pie from you.

yieldcrv · 2 years ago

you would settle for cash after the FTX trustees sell those shares on private secondary markets

CamelCaseName · 2 years ago

Seeing as Google and Amazon just closed billion dollar deals buying up Anthropic equity, it seems quite likely in my opinion.

snypher · 2 years ago

There are places like this;

https://www.x-claim.com/marketplace/how-it-works

Scoundreller · 2 years ago

Buying a creditor’s claim is nothing new.

But they’re usually a bad deal for the unfortunate creditor in a bankruptcy unless you absolutely positively need liquid cash immediately. Or have some non-public info that suggests the claims buyer is way overvaluing things.

General advice is to let your claim ride.

FTX’s bankruptcy filings are full of entries about transfers of creditor claims by some random hedge funds.

ncallaway · 2 years ago

No.

As a defendant you have a right to not testify at all. You can decide not to take the stand. No one can request you take the stand, and the prosecution absolutely cannot make arguments about your decision not to take the stand in front of the jury.

But if you do take the stand, then the prosecution gets to ask you questions that you must answer (unless there’s a sustained objection about the specific question).

This is why so often defendants do not testify. Testifying on direct (when the defendant’s lawyer is the one asking questions) will almost always help the defendant. But the risks created by exposing oneself to cross examination are massive, so most choose not to take the stand.

simonw · 2 years ago

You misspelt "excellent" there.

(Seriously, if you're going to claim that Molly White of all people did a bad job covering cryptocurrency you're going to need to bring receipts.)

JackFr · 2 years ago

Yeah you don’t just automatically get an appeal. You need to point to specific errors in the trial. Of which it didn’t seem like there were many.

NoMoreNicksLeft · 2 years ago

He can only appeal on grounds that were raised during trial. Did his lawyers even object to anything? Did they try to prevent the admission of key evidence? Did they raise any points of constitutional law?

If not, he might be fucked. Appeals aren't just "the lower court convicted me and I want to try again", they are "the lower court got it wrong, my lawyer brought the point up, but then they ignored it".

qingcharles · 2 years ago

I wouldn't agree that it is necessarily hard -- I've done dozens of appeals -- but often with trials there is not a lot of meat left on the bone; most appeals I see are trying to make mountains out of molehills.

What will usually happen is that the defense team will find dozens of trial errors, but none of them will get over the bar of being serious enough that they would have swayed the jury, since the evidence presented was too conclusive. So, the appellate court will note that the trial judge could have done a better job, but then leave the conviction intact.

Most criminal convictions in the USA are only overturned on constitutional violations relating to searches and seizures, probably none of which apply here.

pcwalton · 2 years ago

I suspect he'll appeal. When you're looking at life in prison, as Bankman-Fried is, there's no reason not to make the Hail Mary play.

az226 · 2 years ago

Even he was like he had to use a VPN to watch the Super Bowl, but this year it was streaming for free, no VPN needed. Just a liar throughout.

HolyLampshade · 2 years ago

Depends on the jurisdiction and sentencing guidelines, but my layman’s understanding is so that both parties have time to construct and file arguments over the severity of the sentence.

ShamelessC · 2 years ago

Not sure I like the unnecessary dig at people who study more math and don’t study enough English classes at the end there.

phire · 2 years ago

So... it turns out anyone can file a lawsuit for any reason. Doesn't mean it's true.

This lawsuit was later dropped, so it seems to have been without merit. And it was part of a power struggle that happened on the Uber board after he resigned, not related to anything that happened while he was CEO, or any of the shitty things that Uber did.

> Had SBF somehow raised say just $1-2b, which seems to be what the gap will be for the recovery, I wonder if today he'd still be a billionaire and out of jail like TK and AN.

Well, yes.

But only because he wasn't caught. Not being caught doesn't make the fraud legal.

ozr · 2 years ago

Madoff got 150.

dragonwriter · 2 years ago

> That's what's possible if sentencing guidelines weren't a thing.

It's what possible given the facts in this case under the guidelines, too.

> Jeff Skilling (Enron) was convicted on more counts and ended up serving 14 of a 24-year sentence.

The number of charges isn't the driving factor in calculating total punishment under the sentencing guidelines.

The Wire Fraud charge alone, looks like it gets a Offense Level of:

7 (base) + 30 (amount of loss over $550 million) + (breadth of victim impact between 2 [more than 10 victims, irrespective of degree of hardship] and 6 [caused substantial financial hardship to at least 25 victims]) + (2 for a substantial amount of the fraudulent scheme conducted outside of the US) for a total of 41 to 45.

The maximum level in the guidelines, calling for a life sentence (but limited by the aggregate total maximum sentence of the charged offenses if none support a life sentence), regardless of criminal history category, is 43.

syndicatedjelly · 2 years ago

Exists

planede · 2 years ago

They probably took half of the advise and just went.

Kye · 2 years ago

I hoped there would be a "Category: lawyers who fired famous clients" or something like it, but no luck.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Withdrawal_from_representation

pseingatl · 2 years ago

It is extremely difficult to represent someone who thinks they did nothing wrong. I have a semi- high-profile case where the client honestly thinks he did nothing wrong. I tell him that doesn't matter; they can prove you did. You've provided nothing to make them question their judgment. Still he persists, "but I did nothing wrong." I've been sending him excerpts from the SBF prosecution to get him to wake up, but no luck.

IKantRead · 2 years ago

> My guess is they made money of this clown

I've always felt this was probably the case. Take an idiot that needs to feel important, tell him he's a "boy genius" who can do no wrong and is always going to be misunderstood, and you basically have the perfect patsy. Till the end SBF just could not let go of that idea that he was smarter than everyone else, never realizing that this was always just a marketing gimmick.

At least Caroline Ellison had the sense to realize that she was living a delusion and quickly did what she could to walk away with minimal harm done to herself. In a few years she'll probably find herself making book deals and getting paid outrageous consulting fees once memory fades enough.

nvm0n2 · 2 years ago

> in America's tech culture

To what extent were SBF and Ellison tech though? This trend of labelling more or less any new company that attracts VC funding as tech is bothersome. It's the mental loophole that allowed Adam Neumann to embezzle huge amounts of investor money too (but he did it "right" so gets away with it), by claiming that WeWork wasn't just an office leasing company but a tech platform. None of these people are engineers of any kind, none of them have developed any kind of new tech. They are just ordinary business types who run a business that happens to employ a few coders.

tim333 · 2 years ago

It wasn't really a ponzi. It was a legit crypto exchange apart from stealing customer funds. Here's a positive CNBC article before it went wrong https://www.cnbc.com/2022/01/31/crypto-exchange-ftx-valued-a...

But yeah if he hadn't been caught, he'd be doing well now.

totally_human · 2 years ago

I'm somewhat out of the loop on this whole story -- can you explain how the IPO would have helped? What was his exit plan? My understanding of Ponzi schemes is that they always collapse eventually because everyone will want their money back sooner or later.

Breza · 2 years ago

It's wild to think of what would have happened if Alameda had gotten out of crypto and instead put all the stolen customer money in an index fund. The CFTC complaint says they started misusing customer funds in 2019. Stocks have increased a lot since then. FTX would have been able to meet any customer request for withdrawal, Alameda would have presented staggeringly large returns (trading profit / legally invested money), and SBF would still live like a king.

nosequel · 2 years ago

Work for enough SF startups and you would meet a ton of SBF clones. I wasn't surprised by any of his actions at all. I don't know what it is, but there are so many SBFs in the startup world who think they know everything and don't think there are any consequences for their actions.

callalex · 2 years ago

He was raised at Stanford by two Stanford professors and surrounded by blowhards that subscribe to the insane concept of “effective altruism”. It’s really no surprise he ended up this way.

mrguyorama · 2 years ago

If you surround yourself with yes-men/women, you will eventually believe them. Most normal humans literally cannot afford to do that because you can't buy groceries with ego, but if you disconnect yourself from normal life by being one of the privileged few born with a silver spoon in their mouth and connections before leaving the womb, you can avoid reality for a long time.

If SBF was born to an average family, none of this would have happened and he might even be a normal person, maybe a little cocky. Or he would be constantly struggling to live a basic life between jobs as he keeps being fired or let go for being insufferable.

I highly doubt he would have gotten into Jane street

kelthan · 2 years ago

He displays many of the tendencies of a narcissist or sociopath: never wrong, what benefits me is what matters, I'm the smartest one in the room, willing to flout societal norms, frequently lying or shading the truth to benefit themselves. All of this was testified to in court by the people who worked with him.

To be fair, he was clearly quite smart. But...not as smart as he thought he was.

I'm not a doctor or a psychologist, so I'm not making a diagnosis, just offering the possibility that that may be what is at the root of the situation.

YossarianFrPrez · 2 years ago

While Michael Lewis never says it outright, the picture painted in his book Going Infinite suggests that SBF has a few things going on. Self-delusion and rationalization, ego, etc., but he also might be on one or more neurodivergent spectra.

ipython · 2 years ago

I listened to wondery’s multi part podcast “spellcaster” about sbf.

One of the most fascinating takeaways I had from that show was the fact that he used to play the game Diplomacy with a specific strategy: he would intentionally make alliances with other players, then stab them in the back. He would do this over and over. Why nobody figured this out, I don’t know.

So when I go back and view his actions through this lens, it makes perfect sense.

therealcamino · 2 years ago

As an aside, there is no federal parole anymore.

https://www.nolo.com/legal-encyclopedia/is-federal-parole-sy...

paganel · 2 years ago

Take two or three steps back, and reason like this (if you’re SBF’s defenders, that is): the evil Democrats have made SBF do their dirty political doings for them because, well, they’re evil -> try and turn this whole case into a political thing (see the evil Democrats from before, also see Dreyfus from 100 years ago) -> try to turn SBF into a political cause celebre, again, like Dreyfus 100 years back -> 2024 comes and there are chances that those hating the evil Democrats I had mentioned are in the White House -> with SBF a political cause celebre put in prison by those Democrats there would be by then very big chances for a presidential pardon, because by then this would have transformed into a political issue, not a simple “some guy stole a lot of money”.

For added chances of success also try to find some pro-Palestine social media statuses or anything similar just hinting to that in the past of the district attorneys and federal agency people who had anything to do with this whole trial, and this being the very liberal Southern District of NY of course that there are big chances for that type of content to be found, and in so doing further turning SBF into a political prisoner instead of just a money swindler.

That’s as good a strategy that he could have had given the circumstances, i.e. going for a future presidential pardon and turning his trial into a political case, because, technically, of course that he did all of those things and that by the rules that apply to big money swindlers he should spend the rest of his days mostly in prison, but that’s the whole thing, if he still wants to be free anytime soon his defenders should have turned this trial into something totally different than a big money swindler case.

Of course, that’s also how OJ got out of all the mess he had put himself into the first time around, i.e. because his trial had very rapidly turned into a political case, it was not about a murder case anymore.

jeffwask · 2 years ago

You can only hear you're a genius so many times before you start believing your own press.

guhidalg · 2 years ago

Gaslighting is a such a great phrase. It's a very specific kind of cognitive dissonance that is so common in the workplace. I find the worst gaslighters are "leaders" who surreptitiously change their stance on something without communicating why. Over time everyone under them just loses the motivation to do more than the bare minimum because they don't know if the goal will match the leader's requests.

red-iron-pine · 2 years ago

the term your looking for is narcissist, or maybe "charismatic sociopath"

grvdrm · 2 years ago

Wow, amazing phrasing. I work for this person now!

dboreham · 2 years ago

It's not really a "thing people do", more "how their ChatGPT works". Holding consistent state over a long time period is pretty advanced brain stuff. E.g. mice and even monkeys don't need that capability much. We delude ourselves into believing that human brains have filesystem-level persistence, but really they don't. SBF is just a bit more sigma from the mean.

evancox100 · 2 years ago

Why would they have offered him ANY deal? (Do we know they did?) All the co-conspirators agreed to testify, and it was a slam dunk case. He could have plead guilty of his own conscience, of course, but no reason for the prosecution to offer any incentives in this case.

riversflow · 2 years ago

This would actually be convincing if SBF did have ready wealthy parents, lol.

8ytecoder · 2 years ago

You’re basically getting rid of prisoner’s dilemma. No one will ever snitch.

tim333 · 2 years ago

Speaking as a victim, this seems to have been basically Sam's doing. Fair enough his underlings didn't shop him but that's a lesser offence.

ncallaway · 2 years ago

That would absolutely remove the incentive for anyone to cooperate with the government ever again.

Such a system would make it nearly impossible to proesecute the higher levels of a criminal enterprise.

It’s easy to prosecute the foot-soldiers of a criminal enterprise with outside evidence. The leadership of it typically requires testimony from others within the enterprise.

So, your approach of eliminating all benefits to criminal defendants for cooperating with the government would *massively* enable organized crime, and would end with a criminal justice system that comes down hard on the low-level members, while giving the organizers and planners a walk.

kawhah · 2 years ago

SBF could simply have chosen to plead guilty, then this would have been roughly what happened.

cornholio · 2 years ago

They handed Elison a plea deal waving all charges except criminal tax violations, which she's unlikely to be found guilty of.

However, she was the principal co-conspirator, presiding over a bucket shop that drained 7 billion directly out of the accounts of FTX. As a Stanford finance graduate with trading experience, it's ridiculous to claim she was not aware of the "backdoor" source of Alameda's liquidity and the massive loses they accrued gambling with the money of FTX customers.

8ytecoder · 2 years ago

Right! Justice dept doesn’t handout plea deals where you don’t plead guilty to the most serious of the crime - even when you’re a cooperator. The sentencing might be lighter for cooperation.

pclmulqdq · 2 years ago

I would rather trust the opinions of experienced criminal lawyers than someone who gets their information by running a "sentencing points" calculator:

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2023-11-03/sbf-s-inn...

"Ellison, Wang and Singh will likely get no or very little prison time for their testimony, several criminal defense lawyers who’ve followed the case said."

kaibee · 2 years ago

Yeah... but otoh, being a lower level peon shouldn't be a get out of jail free card. The incentive is then 'well as long as i flip on the big guy if he gets caught, i can make some nice piles of money in the mean time and maybe i can exit before it blows up anyway'

pclmulqdq · 2 years ago

The fall guy is usually someone high up in an organization where the entire organization does something bad. In 2008, chief risk officers, CEOs, and COOs were the fall guys over the failures of their respective banks.

quickthrower2 · 2 years ago

It is almost logical. They would not be maximums but prescribed sentences if they always use the max.

tptacek · 2 years ago

That's true, and a good point.

dragonwriter · 2 years ago

> the upper end of the range when you math out the sentencing guidelines" and "the amount you get if you take all the base charges and add them up and assume they're sequential" start to blend together because of the sheer scale.

No, it doesn't “start to blend together”. The amount you get when you take all the base charges, assign then the maximum sentence, and have them run consecutively isn’t something that the upper end of the guidelines range coincidentally blends into despite not actually directly applying, its the actual legal limit, and for that reason is directly applied (by assigning the statutory maximum to each offense and having them run consecutively) in the guidelines as the limit case. (It also, while the guidelines are not mandatory and judges may depart above or below them, is the upper limit—and, where it exists, the statutory minimum the lower limit—for sentences that depart from the guidelines.)

> But it's not like when the scale gets big enough, the whale sushi hypothetical math starts becoming the real way we calculate sentences.

Yes, it is. If, after all the other pieces of the guidelines calculation are done and all the offenses that aren’t required to be sentenced separately at their own statutory amounts are grouped in the way that they would run concurrently were the guidelines sentence short enough, the guidelines specify that you look at the total punishment, if it fits in the legal maximum for the offense with the longest limit, you do that and run everything else concurrently, if not, you run enough consecutively, if possible, yo reach the total possible, until you run everything consecutively at its max legal sentence and stop. “Whale sushi” is exactly the mechanism applied by the guidelines in the limit case, not something that the upper end case under the guidelines happens to approximate coincidentally.

> It's just that the guidelines really do try to account for super villain levels of crime.

No, its that the guidelines are, well, guidelines for calculating a sentence which is constrained on the lower end by any statutory minimums and on the upper end by thr statutory maximums for the individual offenses (and also, by statutory rules on which offenses must be sentenced separately and not concurrently with which other offenses), so each of those binding rules is expressly part of the guidelines sentence calculations.

tptacek · 2 years ago

Madoff got 150 years. It comes down to the dollar amounts.

ohhnoodont · 2 years ago

> She only got 11 years and 3 months.

Her sentence has already been reduced to 9.5 years.

jahewson · 2 years ago

Holmes was only found guilty on 4 of 11 charges, totalling around $300m raised from investors. SBF is guilty on all counts of stealing 26 times more than that - $8bn of his customers deposits.

pcwalton · 2 years ago

> And this also means statutory maximum sentences come into effect, and I personally don't know how that interacts when you've got multiple charges.

The judge can order consecutive sentences for multiple charges, making the effective statutory maximum in such cases very long indeed. Sholam Weiss [1] was an extreme example of this, racking up 845 years for a $450M fraud in the 90s.

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sholam_Weiss

tptacek · 2 years ago

The statutory maximum still doesn't mean you just add the maximum sentence for each count up.

Mistletoe · 2 years ago

If I had to guess, the number of suicides from this is much more than one.

cubefox · 2 years ago

Then what is the benefit of deciding between guilty / not guilty when all the importance lies in the degree of guilt?

meepmorp · 2 years ago

What countries are these?

JackFr · 2 years ago

IANAL, but I think you misunderstand her plea agreement.

phire · 2 years ago

She pled guilty to 7 counts. 1 Count of actual wire fraud and 6 counts of various "Conspiracy to commit wire fraud, commodes fraud, securities fraud and money laundering". They have a total maximum sentence of 110 years.

Prosecution agreed to not pursue any additional charges, except perhaps criminal tax violations.

JackFr · 2 years ago

> "the defendant will not be further prosecuted criminally by this Office for any crimes, except for criminal tax violations"

That has nothing to do with her sentencing and is typical of any plea agreement. I’m not going to plead guilty to crimes without the guarantee that you’ll not charge me with more. What would be the point of pleading guilty then?

az226 · 2 years ago

Agreed.

john_miller · 2 years ago

Here are 140:

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bill_Clinton_pardon_controve...

blindriver · 2 years ago

Let me clarify, he won't pardon SBF before the 2024 elections, but afterwards he will, either in 2025 or 2029 on the last day of his term. And if Biden dies, then his VP will pardon SBF.

I would definitely take the $1000 bet, but I don't make bets with strangers who probably won't pay up.

peyton · 2 years ago

The campaign finance trial is next March I believe. Could also trigger more scrutiny into everything if Sam pleads not guilty. I think guy’s stuck in prison, but who knows. A guilty plea from Sam might be preferable.

retube · 2 years ago

What they actually posted was far, far less. Less than 2m if i recall.

JohnFen · 2 years ago

He was never offered a plea deal, and I doubt that him asking for one would have been successful. I'm about 90% sure that his lawyers asked.

StressedDev · 2 years ago

You hit the nail on the head here. Here is a list of some of the people he blamed for his fraud/downfall:

1. Binance / CZ (Binance's CEO)

2. Caroline Ellison

3. Sullivan & Cromwell LLP (https://www.sullcrom.com/)

4. John Ray III (FTX's bankruptcy CEO)

compiler-guy · 2 years ago

Any defense lawyer worth their salt would have known everything the prosecution had. It all came from ftx and sbf himself in one form or another. It is very unlikely that anything presented on rebuttal was a surprise.

dragonwriter · 2 years ago

"That's how he talks" and "it is quite contemptuous" are not opposed concepts.

seabass-labrax · 2 years ago

I too am confused. Is it not the barrister's job to respond on behalf of the accused? Presumably Sam Bankman-Fried was not actually obliged to read anything aloud (except of course the court's oath), and just chose to for some reason.

gwd · 2 years ago

That's what the judge and your lawyers are for. As you say, you can't randomly ask people to read something. It would have been a document that he wrote, or approved, or something -- something already admitted into evidence. The putative purpose would be to ask SBF more questions about the evidence, which is fair.

Remember that SBF never had to take the stand at all -- he could have pleaded the fifth and not testified; which is almost always the right thing to do. But once he decides to take the stand, the prosecutor gets to ask him questions about all the evidence they've collected -- which includes asking him to read things that he wrote or approved of.

tacon · 2 years ago

>And further, as a juror, why would it enrage you to not see him comply? You say on a jury, you'd want to attack the defendant, but at that point you should not believe he is guilty, or innocent!

This is a criminal trial, a formal procedure society uses to determine the course of someone's life. Dozens of people, including me, are devoting several weeks of their lives to making a careful determination of guilt or innocence. His entire defense appears to be that he acted at all times "in good faith". He just spent a day on the stand testifying to his good faith efforts to run his company. Then he turns around and cannot even follow the simple requests in the process as we try to determine his guilt or innocence. Where the fuck are his good faith efforts in this testimony? Of course I am not going to actually attack the defendant, but now I have to work extra hard to separate this childish behavior from the actual facts of the case, as I deliberate on the charges.

rmk · 2 years ago

About reading statements maligning oneself, you are right that a presumed innocent person doesn’t have to do this. But SBF waived that right when he agreed to testify. This is why it’s considered a bad idea to take the witness stand when you are the accused…

closewith · 2 years ago

I don't think that's true for the worst case. His time on the stand could significantly increase his sentence within the guidelines and I think that will be the case now.

javier123454321 · 2 years ago

Actually, in this situation, there are only negatives to take the stand. As was the case when he kept giving interviews right after the fiasco came to light. There was no possitive that would come of it. Remember, in the US everything you say can be used against you, and only against you. That is why you lawyer up on any interrogation and the first thing the lawyers will tell you is to SAY NOTHING.

kosievdmerwe · 2 years ago

Mostly because expectations were so low.

Especially after the disaster that was the evidentiary hearing where he offered some testimony without the jury present. (The judge wanted to see if what he wanted to testify was allowable)

During that testimony (where he was under oath), he rambled, misinterpreted questions, gave evasive answers and generally acted like he did in some interviews.

On the Friday, with the jury present he actually told his life story (to humanize himself) and answered mostly softball questions, before ending his direct with reframing deflections of the evidence and other people's testimony.

smcl · 2 years ago

The way he was completely charmed by SBF was really quite surprising.

agilob · 2 years ago

Yes, I went too far with Google and Facebook, I had this in mind:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gRelVFm7iJE

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_v._Microsoft_Cor....

arethuza · 2 years ago

Advocates are the Scottish equivalent of barristers - specialised lawyers who can appear in the highest courts. During training one of the things they have to do is act as an unpaid assistant for a senior junior (but not a senior!) advocate for a year or so - during this time they are known as Advocate's Devils.

The process is known as devilling but, you might expect, this means different things in different parts of the UK:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Devilling#Scotland