Where did the 8 billion dollars go?

29 Sep 2023 · 1 h 8 min

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In short

Podcast Notes: Search Engine - Episode: Where did the 8 billion dollars go?

Episode Overview

  • Host: PJ Vogt
  • Guest: Zeke Faux, investigative financial reporter and author of *Number Go Up: Inside Crypto's Wild Rise and Staggering Fall*.
  • Focus: Examining the story of Sam Bankman-Fried, the former CEO of the crypto exchange FTX, who is accused of stealing over $8 billion from customers.

Key Questions

  • Primary Question: How does someone lose or hide $8 billion?
  • Secondary Questions:
  • What was the nature of the operations at FTX and Alameda Research?
  • How did the cryptocurrency landscape facilitate such actions?

Background on Sam Bankman-Fried

  • Formerly a billionaire and influential figure in the cryptocurrency space.
  • FTX was a major crypto exchange, promoting the idea of transparent and recorded transactions.
  • Public Persona:
  • Known for his odd yet compelling character; dressed casually in shorts, sweatshirts, and sandals.
  • Claimed a commitment to philanthropy and effective altruism.

Timeline of Events

  1. Rise to Prominence:
  2. Bankman-Fried amassed wealth through crypto trading and investments.
  3. Gained significant media attention, including Super Bowl ads featuring celebrities.
  1. Collapse of FTX:
  2. In November 2022, reports surfaced that FTX had less money than publicly stated.
  3. Bankman-Fried's companies abruptly collapsed, leading to legal scrutiny and charges.
  1. Criminal Charges:
  2. Facing multiple charges including wire fraud, securities fraud, and money laundering.
  3. Pleaded not guilty to all charges.
  1. Trial Preparation:
  2. Zeke Faux discusses the upcoming trial and the intricacies of the case.

Zeke Faux's Investigation

  • Transitioned from skepticism about cryptocurrency to investigating its complexities.
  • Initially hesitant to engage deeply with crypto due to perceived lack of sophistication in scams.
  • Eventually became engrossed in high-profile stories including Bankman-Fried's operations.

Where Did the Money Go? Allegations of Misappropriation

  • Funds were allegedly funneled through FTX to cover bad bets by Alameda Research and other dubious expenses.

Breakdown of Spending (Based on Zeke's Findings)

  1. Connections:
  2. Approx. $1 billion spent on building relationships with influential figures and celebrities.
  3. Example: $700 million investment in a relationship-building venture.
  1. Gambling:
  2. Significant investments in various cryptocurrencies and speculative ventures.
  3. Seen as an ecosystem to prop up the crypto market.
  1. Real Estate:
  2. $243 million spent on properties, including luxury residences.
  1. Charitable Giving:
  2. Claims of donations amounted to nearly $1 billion, although many were questionable or not purely charitable.
  1. Operational Expenses:
  2. Over $1 billion spent on various operational costs, including lavish perks and charters.

Total Estimation of Misappropriation

  • Over $10 billion when considering commingled funds and questionable investments.

Insights and Reflections

  • Conviction vs. Greed:
  • Zeke posits that Bankman-Fried may have genuinely believed he was acting for a greater good, which complicated moral and legal implications.
  • Effective Altruism Movement:
  • Raised questions about whether the ideology contributed to reckless decision-making under the guise of philanthropy.

Conclusion

  • The episode delves into the intricate dynamics of power, money, and ethical convictions in the cryptocurrency world.
  • Zeke Faux provides a compelling narrative that not only seeks to understand what happened to the $8 billion but also the systemic issues in the crypto landscape that allowed for such actions to occur.

Additional Resources

  • Zeke Faux's book: *Number Go Up: Inside Crypto's Wild Rise and Staggering Fall* for a deeper understanding.
  • Upcoming trial set for October 3rd, which will likely shed more light on the allegations against Bankman-Fried and the operational failures of FTX.

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Transcript

Automatic transcript. May contain errors.

0:00Welcome to Search Engine. I'm PJ Vogt. Each week, we answer a question we have about the world. No question too big, no question too small. This week on the show, the story of former crypto wunderkind Sam Bankman-Fried, who the government is saying stole over$8 billion from his customers. Our question, where did all that money go? We'll get some answers after these ads. I've never felt like this before. It's like you just get me. I feel like my true self with you. does that sound crazy? And it doesn't hurt that you're gorgeous. Okay, that's it. I'm taking you home with me. I mean, you can't find shoes this good just anywhere.

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1:21Can we just take a time machine back to very recent history for a moment? Two years ago. The price of crypto is through the roof. Everyone but you is getting rich, many of them from something called Dogecoin. It was an absurd state of affairs. Was this a good idea? Most people thought it wasn't. I was actually uncertain. What I was sure of, though, was that crypto was creating some of the best stories that the internet had provided in many years.

1:49And the very best one of all was the story of Sam Bankman-Fried. I think some people are overly familiar with the details of this story, but just in case. Last year, Sam Bankman-Fried was known as a 30-year-old crypto multibillionaire, one of the richest people in the world. He ran FTX, a crypto exchange, a website where investors could buy, sell, and bet on cryptocurrencies. It was sort of like a crypto casino. And what made Sam Bankman-Fried really unusual, even in crypto, were two things. One was that he claimed he was going to give almost all of his money away to charity. to buy mosquito nets, to prevent the next pandemic, to fight against an evil AI that could take over the world.

2:31And two, just for being a strangely compelling character. This schlubby guy, shorts, sweatshirt, socks, and sandals, who really, perhaps more than anyone else, was responsible for mainstreaming cryptocurrency last year. He was getting celebrities like Larry David and Tom Brady to appear in ads at the Super Bowl telling normal people it was time to join before it was too late. But last November, news broke that FTX had less money in its coffers than it was publicly saying. A lot less. Enough less that Sam Bankman-Fried's company collapsed, and then crypto, which had already been collapsing, further collapsed.

3:10The criminal trial of Sam Bankman-Fried begins in a few days, on Tuesday, October 3rd. He faces seven charges that amount to an allegation that he stole his customers' money. Sam Beckman-Fried has pled not guilty to all charges. We reached out to him through a spokesperson who declined to comment. We also reached out to FTX, which did not respond to our request for comment. Many questions about Sam Beckman-Fried have been asked, some you may never have been curious about. What kind of stimulant medication was he taking? Was he really in a polyhuel, or did he just date a co-worker? But the question I have that I cannot let go of is, how do you disappear$8 billion?

3:51That's significantly more than the entire GDP of Barbados. $8 billion is just a lot of money to hide or to vaporize, particularly in an ecosystem, crypto, where the whole point and promise is that every transaction is recorded and public on immutable ledgers. I wanted to know where the money had gone. So I summoned an investigative reporter to Search Engine's recording studio on Wall Street. First of all, can you just introduce yourself, like say your name and what you do? My name is Zeke Fox. I'm an investigative reporter for Bloomberg and the author of Number Go Up, Inside Crypto's Wild Rise and Staggering Fall.

4:33So I want to just talk about like your journey into this first. Like when and why did you start writing about cryptocurrency? and say? So my specialty is investigating shady things on Wall Street. And we're here in the like financial district right now. This is my spot because the real Wall Street firms are long gone. And all the towers like the one that we're in right now, there's tons of them that are filled with boiler room operations like pump and dump scammers, loan sharks. And for like 10 years, I made it my business to get to know these people, to figure out how their schemes work, and to write about them.

5:14And when crypto started booming, people would tell me, it would be perfect for you. You should investigate crypto. And I was hesitant to get into it. The hype around crypto was kind of a turnoff, and it was hard to see what I would investigate. Wait, why? Why was it hard to see what you would investigate? So what I love to do is to like decode a complicated contract and see how they're operating in like a legal gray area and trace money through their offshore companies. In crypto, a lot of the pitches were just like, hey, I got Shiba Inu coin. You should buy it because it's so funny. And then it would go up and people are getting rich on it.

5:53But I felt like basically sending an investigative reporter like me to investigate a crypto scheme was like sending the snooty New York Times restaurant reviewer to check out like the new branch of Taco Bell. Like, of course, I'm going to say it's a scam. So part of what was interesting about figuring out how to cover crypto was like figuring out like, was this scam? Was this scam? Which parts were scams? Which weren't? For you, though, it was more like, obviously, this system is going to create a lot of incentives for scamming. But the scams themselves to you didn't seem like elegant or sophisticated enough to be worth untangling.

6:32Yes. And like objectively, in hindsight, this was totally wrong. Right. Zeke feels he was wrong to have been so snobby about crypto scams, because once he dug in, he found a lot to be interested in. He covered Tether, Terra Luna, Celsius. But one of the most interesting stories during the crypto years, to Zeke, to me, to a lot of people, was actually the story of one person who did not seem to be running a scam at all. I think the first time I heard about Sam Bankman-Fried, I read about him in New York Magazine in February 2021. And this is the article that outed him as one of the biggest donors to the Biden campaign.

7:12Oh, interesting. And there's a photo of him on his beanbag where he claimed he slept every night. Yes. He's wearing his uniform, the cotton shorts, the white gym socks, and an FTX t-shirt, kind of showing off his thighs. And in the article, he talks about this arbitrage, how he'd made his fortune. and it was this kind of weird trick. It's like, you know, remember the old like online ad thing that you'd be like, lose 20 pounds with this one weird trick? Yeah. I think that's a good way to think of stories. If the story can be boiled down to this guy made$20 million with this one weird trick, that's like a good story that people will read.

7:56This is a trick that Sam Beckman-Fried actually figured out in 2018. He'd not yet started FTX, his offshore cryptocurrency now. Instead, he'd founded a trading firm called Alameda Research. And at the time, they were entirely devoted to executing his one weird trick. And the trick was that in the United States, one Bitcoin cost, at the time, maybe like$9 ,000. So if you wanted to buy a Bitcoin, you had to send$9 ,000 to Coinbase or a U.S.-based exchange. There you could buy a Bitcoin for 9 ,000. But in Japan, on Japanese exchanges, a Bitcoin went for the equivalent of$9 ,900 in yen. So in theory, you could buy one Bitcoin in the U.S., send it to Japan, sell it at a Japanese exchange for$9 ,900 and make an instant 10 % profit.

8:56then send the money back and do it all over again. And if you do the math on that, if you're earning 10 % a day, you will be a trillionaire, like, within a year. It's unheard of on Wall Street that you could get these kind of returns. But he pulled it off. This arbitrage only worked for about a month. And in that month, he was able to earn something like 20 million bucks. I was captivated by this story. And I also read in this story that, you know, he'd given$5 million to the Biden campaign, which made him one of the biggest donors. So what you see is like, OK, one, it's interesting that this person found one weird trick online to make$20 million, a thing that is often promised, rarely delivered.

9:40And two, it's interesting that this crypto person is immediately, clearly trying to exert political influence. Like$5 million to the Biden campaign is really significant. Yes. And he said that he'd never spoken to Biden. And he said, I have a lot of things to say. There are a lot of things I could talk his ear off about, but I'm pretty sure he wouldn't give a shit. And I thought, like, what a weird guy. Like, so I was pretty jealous of this story. But I honestly filed a way as like, I missed my chance. I guess that was his moment in the sun and we won't hear about this guy anymore. Of course, it didn't turn out that way.

10:19Zeke would see and hear about Sam Beckman-Fried plenty. June of 2021. The vaccines had just come out. Lockdown was ending. Many people were getting sick of hearing about crypto. Zeke was becoming more obsessed with it. Remember, crypto's spike had been, like sourdough starters, a pandemic phenomenon. Bored people stuck inside with their stimulus checks just betting on internet money. The crypto fanatics believed all this money would lead to a future. skeptics like Zeke were convinced that the whole Jenga tower had to fall down soon. And Zeke had a theory about what would bring the tower down, a coin called Tether.

10:55And he wanted to talk with Sam Bankman-Fried about it. Not because he thought Sam Bankman-Fried would be responsible, but just he wanted a quote from someone who had become, in a short span of time, a star in the crypto world. By this point, Sam Bankman-Fried had expanded well beyond his one weird trick. He now was worth, according to Forbes,$22 billion. He'd started a company called FTX, which was a lot of people's favorite crypto exchange. So the first time we met in person was at Bitcoin 2021 in Miami. Oh, he was at Bitcoin 2021? Yes. And I arranged a meeting with him because I wanted to talk with him about the mystery I was pursuing.

11:33I was investigating this coin called Tether, and he was one of the biggest users of Tether. He would probably know some stuff about it. And maybe he'd tell me since, obviously, he likes to run his mouth. Real quick, I want to start with each of you telling me very quickly what your company does, why it's cool. So Zika's at Bitcoin Miami 2021. A moderator on stage is talking to Sam Bankman-Fried. There's two other panelists, very archetypical Bitcoiners. They both have novelty Bitcoin shirts on. Sam, compared to them, seems more sober. Yeah, so at Bitcoin 2021, surrounded by these, like, wackos, he seemed like, despite his casual slash slovenly dress, he seemed kind of like the grown-up in the room.

12:21Sam? Yeah, FTX, a global crypto exchange, where one of the bigger ones, not the biggest yet. It's very funny watching this. The dynamic is Sam will give a flatly generic LinkedIn-sounding monologue, and then the crowd will react like he's the fifth Beatle. It wasn't until I attempted to get a bank account while in crypto that I started to learn why maybe there was some impetus to try out a new financial set of rails. I love you, Sam! He had experience on Wall Street working at Jane Street Capital, which is like a really well-regarded high-frequency trading firm that hires only, you know, physics PhDs from MIT.

13:13Their reputation is that they don't take big bets. They're just like trading all day long and coming up with like these super complicated formulas to make sure that they're always earning like a tiny spread. Now, that's not to say you're not negative EV if you're doing 100x leverage, but you have to go further than just talking about probability of loss, right? If you have a 10 % probability of 10xing and a 90 % probability of going to zero, that's not a negative EV position to have on, right? And this is not something that - So he was good at talking in a way that was understandable to Wall Street guys or to someone like me who was used to covering Wall Street.

13:51He didn't sound like one of these like Bitcoin to the moon people. He sounded like a smart guy. who had found one weird trick and maybe now would find many other weird tricks and make a lot of money. The story of Sam Beckman-Fried at that moment, it went like this. He was a curly-haired whiz kid taking his Wall Street expertise to crypto. There, he was essentially minting money through two different companies. One was FTX, the online crypto exchange which made its money by taking commission from every trade that a customer placed. But then on top of that, Sam Bankram-Fried still had his existing company, Alameda Research, a crypto hedge fund.

14:34They'd started out with their one weird Bitcoin trick, but now they made all sorts of bets on crypto, many of them actually on FTX. As the billions piled up, what made Sam so irresistible to reporters was not just all the fast money he was making, it was what he said he wanted to do with it. He promised to anyone who would listen that his plan was just to give it all away. And not when he was in his 80s, to give it all away soon. It was part of this movement he joined, a philosophical movement that felt quasi-religious, effective altruism.

15:09Had you heard of effective altruism before him? I'm sure I'd read about it. Yeah. I hadn't given it that much thought. And what was his description of what it was? What he described to me was that when he was a teenager or in his early 20s and at MIT, he was a committed utilitarian. He wrote on his blog back then, I am a utilitarian. Basically, this means that I believe the right action is the one that maximizes total utility in the world. You can think of that as total happiness minus total pain. and he was really committed to this as like a driving principle for his life and he'd become a vegan because he thought you know sure it tastes good to eat chicken for 10 seconds but that that bird gets tortured for their whole life and the pain the bird suffers outweighs my enjoyment of eating the bird therefore I should not eat the bird and so when he was in college he was giving out, you know, animal cruelty pamphlets in like Harvard Square.

16:16He met this philosopher, Will McCaskill, who was kind of the founder of the effective altruism movement. And Will at the time was promoting this idea called earning to give. And he met Sam at a lecture there at the Oban Pan in Harvard Square afterwards. And Sam explained like he was really committed to doing good for the world. And Will, this young philosopher who was really just getting this whole thing off the ground at the time, was like, listen, anybody can hand out these pamphlets. You're very smart. You're good at math. What if you just set out to get rich instead? You could give all that money away and we could hire, you know, a thousand people to give out pamphlets or do whatever other good thing for the world we can think of.

17:01And he did. He went and got this job at Jane Street, this high-paying trading firm. And then less than 10 years later, he's sitting with me. He's 29 years old. He's worth$20 billion. He's one of the richest guys in the world. And he says he did it all just because of this meeting with Will McCaskill, basically. And I was just really fascinated by that idea and also by the question of would he actually follow through or had this 10-year mission to become one of the richest people in the world corrupted him. Right. And this is what I think about a lot with him is I don't know if he did it on purpose or by accident, but the thing I wonder about him now is like that question, is he serious about his promise to give the money away is such a hypnotic question.

17:52Like, it's so fun to think about and wonder about. And I feel like for most of us, that question was so attractive that it actually occluded other questions. It's almost like a shell game where you're like, you're watching the one hand where you're like, is he going to give the money away? And so at least for me, it never occurred to ask, does he have the money? Is the money his? How did he get the money? It was all the one question. Like, is he going to give it away? Totally. At the conference in Miami, Zeke did end up getting a quote for his Tether article from Sam Bankman-Fried. And he managed to sneak in the fun fact that the then 29-year-old billionaire happened to be in town because he'd gotten the Miami basketball stadium renamed after his company.

18:32It was now the FTX Arena.

18:37In the months after Miami, Sam Bankman-Fried's star kept rising. As the price of Bitcoin and most other coins surged, Sam Bankman-Fried was becoming the respectable face of crypto, a kind of nerd superstar. He seemed smart. He seemed less bro-y than other people in the space. In February 2022, FTX had maybe the most talked about Super Bowl ads, where it seemed like every celebrity you'd ever heard of was shilling crypto using scripts that felt nearly chat GPT quality. Here's Tom Brady convincing you to hand over all your money with some subpar sports slash crypto puns. Hang on, there's a possibility of a trade.

19:16A trade? Are you sure? Not a trade trade, I'm trading crypto. FTX is the safest and easiest way to buy and sell crypto. It's the best way to get in the game. Sam was in an ad campaign with the supermodel Giselle. He was dancing on TikTok. He was being profiled by journalists whose profiles were being interrupted by him giving Zoom interviews to other journalists, sometimes while also playing a video game.

19:41Zeke decides, screw it. He wants to write a story about Sam himself for Bloomberg. So shortly after FTX's big coming out party at the Super Bowl, Zeke flies to the capital of the Bahamas, NASA, to go to FTX's headquarters. So FTX, they had plans to build like a lavish headquarters, but they hadn't done it yet. And they were in this office park kind of near the airport. And it was a series of these little one-story buildings. It really didn't look like much. And very embarrassingly, when I got in the cab in the Bahamas, I was carrying my L.L. Bean backpack that I always have. and the cab driver just looked at me and was like, crypto guy, huh?

20:28You going over to FTX? I don't think you like scan as a crypto guy. Like if you're walking down the street and someone was making fun of people on the street, I don't think they would look at you and be like, crypto bro. Thanks BJ. Well, in the Bahamas, I totally did. And I had to be like, yes, please take me to the crypto place. Please take me to where you take all the other nerds. so I Sam had a assistant who was very nice who was like my main point of contact and I'm talking with her in the kitchen of this little office and they'd just gotten back from the Super Bowl and she's like telling me about all their experiences there when in walks this curly haired guy in his you know, no shoes, wearing his socks.

21:19He walks into the break room, opens up a cabinet, takes out a packet of microwavable chickpea korma, like one of those like ready to eat things you might see at Trader Joe's. Does not microwave it, rips it open and just starts spooning it into his mouth. And I'm like, that's like one of the richest guys in the world right there. And then And his assistant is like, Sam, this is like the reporter who flew down here to profile you. And he's just like, well, hey. Had you ever met another person like that? Like in people you profiled or business people or anything? No, definitely not. But I actually found this very charming in a weird way because I'm kind of a slob myself.

22:05I would eat chickpea corned cold. and I actually thought to myself, I don't think that they hired a private detective to research me and learn how to win me over, but if they had, this might have been the solution that they proposed. That's so funny. Like, just eat some gross stuff in front of Zeke. Of course, looking back now, I wonder, you know, was it all a show? And that's something I talk about with his old friends. Like, did he sort of act in this way to seem authentic or was this really who he was? Yeah. It's also just funny, like, do you feel strange? And, like, everybody did the same thing.

22:44I don't mean, like, do you feel strange that you had come into the space being like, I think this is a scam and I'm investigating scams and that you were walking around the scammy part of the scammy thing and that you, like, couldn't smell the exact scam? Does it bother you or do you think, like, nobody exactly smelled the exact scam? No, it bothers me all the time. Like, he was pulling up, like, financial records for his company right in front of me. This was, like, my big shot. I could have taken down a fraud that goes down in history, and I didn't. So I definitely am not happy about that. I remember Zeke's profile of Sam.

23:21It was a big deal. The subhead, the line after the headline, nicely encapsulated everybody's thumbnail understanding of Sam back then. Quote, Sam Bankman-Fried drives a Corolla, sleeps on a beanbag, and has a Robin Hood-like philosophy. In the accompanying photo, Sam wears a slightly mischievous smirk under a curly bird's nest of hair. That was April 2022, just six months before FTX would implode. But before that happened, Zeke would see Sam Bankman-Fried on top of the world one last time. So the last time you see him sort of before the downfall, I believe, is Crypto Bahamas, is that right? Yes.

23:59Can you just tell me the story of seeing him on stage there and what that was like? So I published this profile that I had traveled to interview Sam for and did not identify this giant fraud. But he was having this big conference a couple weeks later called Crypto Bahamas. And like everybody who was anybody in crypto was coming to it. Welcome to the Bahamas. FTX released a promo video for this event that is, in hindsight, a strange document. Over music library-grade techno, you just see a lot of big luminaries, like heads of state, at an event that, besides the famous people, actually seems a bit sparsely attended.

24:45The Bahamas is going to be a financial center of the future. It was his first conference. He was going to celebrate the success of FTX. And here was Bill Clinton flying in to speak on stage with Sam, Tony Blair, Katy Perry, you know, it was a hot ticket on Wall Street. And Sam took the stage and he was there to be interviewed by the writer Michael Lewis.

25:17One of the things that interests me about your world, to which I'm very much an outsider. I mean, we have Sam Bankman-Fried, who founded FTX. We have Katie Hahn, who's now founded her own venture capital fund, which invests principally in cryptocurrency businesses. And I'm an author who has written lots of books, none of them about cryptocurrency. I'm an outsider here. Michael Lewis, the famed financial journalist, one of the many luminaries here. He was writing a book about Sam, but Zeke was surprised to see him on stage interviewing his subject. I grew up reading his work. really admired Liars Poker and The Big Short.

25:54And I was kind of curious, like, here was a guy who showed me how Wall Street had wrecked the global economy with collateralized debt obligations. What does he think about crypto? And he's on stage interviewing Sam, which already strikes me as kind of odd. Like, to appear at a corporate conference that's hosted by FTX is in some way an endorsement of FTX. So I'm curious what Michael Lewis is going to say. And his questions for Sam are like total softballs. He's like, Sam. I mean, it is to me amazing that like three years ago nobody knew who you were. and now you're sitting on the cover of magazines and you're a gazillionaire and your business is like one of the fastest growing businesses in the history of the planet.

26:49You know, one of the richest billionaires in the world and you're breaking land speed records. You're breaking land speed records. And I don't think people are really noticing what's happened, just how dramatic the revolution has become. There's a status upheaval that's going on in the financial world and you're sitting right in the middle of it. So just like very brief talk about the beginning of these change and then I want to pivot to Katie. Yeah, I mean, basically, and I think the way that sort of I approached it was like, what should the product be? Like, you know, let's take everything that we've seen, everything that we can think about, and just like from the being like...

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27:28It goes on like this, a series of questions that are pretty polite, not especially probing. Whatever doubts Michael Lewis might have harbored, he was not airing them here on stage at Sam Beckman-Fried's own conference. In the audience, amidst a sea of Sam's admirers, said Zeke. What were you thinking watching him? Because I feel like part of the subtext of what you're saying about seeing so many sort of notable people in the room is like, everybody wants to say that they knew everything was going to fall apart. But at least for me, when I suspected that it might, the other thing I would think is like, am I smarter than all these people?

28:02And I often felt like, no, I'm not. And if you're seeing like, I mean, you're probably like a better reader of the world financial system than Katy Perry, but like Bill Clinton is pretty bright. And Michael Lewis, I think he got this wrong clearly, but he's like a brilliant, brilliant reporter. What are you thinking? I mean, I don't think of myself as the smart person in the room, the one who knows everything. But I'm not questioning, did I miss something? At this point, like, I'm quite confident that there's not much to, like, any of these crypto things. So I'm just thinking, like, what am I supposed to do?

28:35Like, I'm hearing about all these asinine schemes, but, like, does anyone want to read an expose of them? Again, I had no reason to think that FTX was a fraud, But I was even more convinced that this was like an unsustainable bubble. But I'm starting to think, I don't know. If the number goes up high enough, maybe they'll make up some legitimate uses for crypto later. Like, I'm starting to feel like, what could pop this bubble?

29:04After the break, many things pop the bubble all at once.

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30:40Island. We'd started covering crypto a few months before, which means we began when the prices were extremely high, and we had a front row seat to the moment soon after when everything plunged. That April 2022, I'd just been to Bitcoin Miami, a 25 ,000-person festival dedicated just to the worship of a specific internet currency. The price of Bitcoin when I visited was about$42 ,000 a coin. Being there, then, was a hallucinogenic experience. Vivid, but scary. I'd met working people who'd plunged a lot of money into crypto, who were very confident, and who I felt worried for. Who knew what was going to happen, or when it might?

31:23On May 20th, just over a month after Miami, the hall began to crack. A currency called Terra exploded. Not too long after that, a crypto hedge fund called Three Arrows Capital went up in flames. That spring through the summer, it felt like every week something you'd never heard of fell down. On Twitter, longtime skeptics went viral making fun of the explosion. On message boards, people who'd lost money shared the numbers for suicide hotlines. Meanwhile, I just remember trying to make sense of it. It was confusing, but it was also exciting, like when the power goes out in your city. Until November, though, the system was still holding together.

32:02In no small part because Sam Bankman-Fried, backed by his company, FTX, was going around almost behaving like the government, using his money to bail out some weak parts of the system. And then, this very ominous news article was released, November of 2022. The crypto website Coindesk published what it said was an internal balance sheet from Sam Bankman-Fried's trading company from Alameda Research. The balance sheet, meaning the private document listing their assets. For this long moment, everyone in crypto just stared, trying to figure out what it was they were supposed to be seeing in these numbers.

32:42Again, here's Zeke. Essentially, no one knew what to make of this Coindesk article, which reveals that Alameda owns billions of dollars of stuff. And it's all these different crypto tokens. And one of the crypto tokens that Alameda had was called FTT. And FTT was this proprietary token that Sam had made up that related to his exchange FTX. It was sort of like a way, if you wanted to bet on just FTX, the casino, buying FTT, I know this is imprecise, but it was sort of like buying FTX stock. That is a perfectly good shorthand. It's essentially like thought of as FTX stock. So this article, people didn't know what to make of it.

33:33It was kind of like puzzling. So just to recap, because I think this part's a little confusing. Here is what everyone knew at that moment. Alameda Research, Sam's trading company, had been trading at FTX, Sam's exchange. This balance sheet shows Alameda Research's wallet. And instead of the billions of dollars everyone assumed Alameda Research had in that wallet, what was actually there was in large part just lots and lots of these FTT tokens. This would be like finding out that someone's wallet is filled with not money, but poker chips. Poker chips they themselves made at their own casino. Anybody else holding on to these tokens, which represented faith in Sam Bankman-Fried and FTX, suddenly they felt very nervous.

34:27CZ, who ran the rival exchange Binance, he reacted to this article and he said, I also own FTT tokens. I am now going to sell them. I do not want my FTT tokens anymore. which sets off this run on FTX. So customers who'd sent real money to FTX to gamble with were asking for it back because they were thinking, all right, I'm not sure something's wrong, but if something's wrong, I don't want to be the one who left my money at the casino. I just want it back for now. The problem was that the casino was gambling with the money. Yes.

35:13FTX customers who are trying to withdraw their money learned that they could not get their money back. The money was gone. Here's what had happened. According to two FTX employees, as far back as 2019, they'd been asked by Sam Beckman-Fried to write a secret piece of code into FTX's database. That code gave Alameda Research special privileges on FTX. Alameda could borrow essentially an unlimited amount of money to make bets on the exchange. And when Alameda lost on its bets, which it did, often, the company could just take customer money from the casino, from FTX, to buy back into the game. When all of this became clear, it was obvious to pretty much anyone paying attention that this was going to end with someone in jail.

35:58The most likely candidate? Sam Bankman-Fried. November 30th, just a few weeks after this blow-up, Sam had a pre-existing commitment to appear at the Dealbook Summit, this New York Times event where he was supposed to be interviewed by star reporter Andrew Ross Sorkin. In the span of about one week, Sam Bankman-Fried went from a billionaire, the white knight of the crypto world, and running one of the largest exchanges to what some people think has become a wanted man. Sam had been posting online a lot, but it was pretty hard to imagine he'd videoconference in so that he could be grilled by a reporter in front of a live audience.

36:37And yet, there he was. Sam, broadcasting live from the Bahamas. He's alone in a corner, fidgeting under apology video lighting. Clearly, I made a lot of mistakes or things I would give anything to be able to do over again. I didn't ever try to commit fraud on anyone. I was excited about the prospects of FTX a month ago. I saw it as a thriving, growing business. I was shocked by what happened this month. Andrew Ross-Dorkin will spend the next hour peppering him with a series of increasingly exasperated questions. You can tell he wants to get an admission of guilt somehow. At one point, he pitches an analogy designed to make Sam admit that what he did was just simple theft.

37:25If I worked at a bank and was a bank teller, and I decided to leave the bank at the end of the evening and take the cash that I ostensibly had access to, even if I intended to bring it back to the bank later, even with more money to give them back, I still stole the money. I mean, look, I wasn't running Alameda. I didn't know exactly what was going on. I didn't know the size of their position. A lot of these are things I've learned over the last month that I learned as I was sort of frantically digging into this on November. Sam Bankman-Fried is saying, I didn't know that my crypto trading company had lost a ton of money on a bunch of bad bets.

38:07In fact, I didn't know because I was intentionally not paying attention, because I didn't want to create a conflict of interest. If this were true, it would mean that Alameda Research, Sam Bankman-Fried's company, had stolen money from FTX, also Sam Bankman-Fried's company, without his permission and without him noticing. But I haven't been running Alameda. I haven't been, you know, thinking about its finances. I haven't been, you know, making those decisions. But, you know, as CEO of FTX, it was still my duty to make sure that someone was doing diligence. I was a large owner of it. That is true.

38:47Part of what made this story hard to believe is that the person running Alameda Research was someone Sam knew pretty well, Caroline Ellison, his sometimes girlfriend. One reason that I didn't really believe the story that Sam was trying to say about where this money went, his ex-girlfriend and top lieutenant, Caroline Ellison, who had been in charge of the hedge fund side of the operation, in November, after FTX had collapsed, there were a couple days when it looked like Binance was going to save FTX and everybody was in the clear. Oh, right. Yeah. CZ was like, I'm going to look at their finances and then I'll make a decision.

39:30But like, it looks like they would essentially do a bailout of their competitor. Yeah. And so she thought she was getting a bailout. And she called a company-wide meeting of everyone on the hedge fund side. And at this meeting, she basically told everybody her version of what had happened. And what her version was, was that Alameda had essentially run out of money, and they had made the decision to keep Alameda going by borrowing the FTX customer funds. And that she discussed this with all the top people at the company. Sam had made the decision. They'd done it on purpose. And more recently, the prosecutors have obtained a tape recording of this meeting.

40:17And they published not the tape itself, but a transcript of what Caroline said. Oh, wow. Here's what she said. Starting last year, Alameda was kind of borrowing a bunch of money via open-term loans and used that to make various illiquid investments. Then with crypto being down, the crash, the credit crunch this year, most of Alameda's loans got called. And in order to, like, meet those loan recalls, we ended up borrowing a bunch of funds on FTX, which led to FTX having a shortfall in user funds. Then she said, I guess, like, then, yeah, what does this mean? I guess mostly I want to say, like, I'm sorry.

40:59This really sucks. It really sucks for all of you guys. I think it's, like, really not fair to you guys. Like, I think you've been doing a great job. You've been working really hard. She's saying, we didn't tell you that we stole customer money and bet it and lost it. And then she's apologizing the way a friend in college apologizes for eating something out of your mini fridge. Yes. So, like, the people hearing this speech, right, they're very smart people. And some of them are like, wait, did she just tell us that we've stolen the customer money? And one of them asked, who made the decision on using user deposits?

41:37And Caroline said, um, Sam, I guess. So I think that this is going to be very tricky for Sam at his trial, because this is like a contemporaneous record of someone who thought that no one would ever find out, basically admitting that they'd made this decision to dip into the customer funds, which is a crime. They're admitting to a crime, and they're very clearly laying out who knew about it and who ultimately had decision-making power, which is Sam. Right. And you could now say, oh, Caroline and the other people who are going to testify about Sam, they're only doing it to save themselves. They'd say anything now to stay out of jail.

42:16But not with this. She said the same thing a couple months ago when she thought that everyone was going to be fine and no one would find out about any of this. Yeah. It's also just you hear the way she's communicating information and you think, I can't believe these kids were trusted with billions of dollars. It just never should have happened. Yes. So FTX is in bankruptcy, and the court has appointed a new independent CEO whose job it is to essentially take stock of what money is left and eventually distribute it to all the customers. This guy's name is John Ray. He was also in charge of the Enron bankruptcy, which was famously complicated.

42:59And Ray, after his initial look into FTX, testified before Congress. Mr. Ray, you have compared FTX as worse than Enron. Can you please elaborate on some of the specific ways FTX is worse than one of the largest corporate frauds in history? the FTX group is unusual in the sense that you know I've done probably a dozen large you know scale bankruptcies over my career including Enron of course

43:37every one of those entities had some financial problem or another they have some characteristics that are in common this one is unusual and it's unusual in the sense that literally you know There's no record-keeping whatsoever. It's the absence of record-keeping. Employees would communicate, you know, invoicing and expenses on Slack, which is, you know, essentially a way of communicating for chat rooms. They use QuickBooks, a multi-billion dollar company using QuickBooks. QuickBooks? QuickBooks. John Ray exhibiting true disgust. Not even for the magnitude of the alleged crime, but just the sheer sloppiness of it all.

44:20They were approving expense reports with slack emojis. You get the sense that John Ray, an older gray-haired man in a Navy suit, is perhaps nostalgic for the days of Enron. You know, Enron was a different company. Crimes that were committed there were highly orchestrated financial machinations by highly sophisticated people to keep transactions off balance sheets. This is really old-fashioned embezzlement. This is just taking money from customers and using it for your own purpose. Not sophisticated at all. Old-fashioned embezzlement. This is just taking money from customers and using it for your own purpose.

45:03Not sophisticated at all. In January of 2023, Sam Bankman-Fried is arrested. From crypto king to criminal suspect, Sam Bankman-Fried's stunning fall has just gotten worse for him. One of the most powerful people in the cryptocurrency industry, Sam Bankman-Fried, arrested overnight in the Bahamas. The federal charges just unsealed. The charges against a 30-year-old former billionaire include wire fraud, wire fraud conspiracy, securities fraud, securities fraud conspiracy, and money laundering. Nearly everyone around Sam Beckman-Fried, the friends he started FTX and Alameda Research with, have turned on him.

45:44They are cooperating with the government. In some instances, they've taken their case against him directly to the press or to Twitter. Many questions about him have been answered. But again, not the one I was most curious about. $8 billion is missing from FTX. Money that belonged to customers. That they were storing on the exchange because they wanted to invest in or bet on crypto. $8 billion gone. Where?

46:14After the break, Zeke helps us understand.

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47:46Welcome back to the show.

47:50Sam Bankman-Fried's criminal trial begins in a few days, October 3rd. Besides the government, Sam Bankman-Fried will be fighting several class action lawsuits from former customers. There's also, separately, FTX bankruptcy proceedings, where newly appointed CEO John Ray, the one who sounds nostalgic for Enron, is going through the company QuickBooks, trying to piece together what happened here. All of these court proceedings will generate more clarity, more answers in time. But here's what we know now about the pipeline that took billions of dollars, ran them through Sam Bankman-Fried's companies, and turned those billions of dollars into vapor.

48:28Here is the picture drawn by the government's allegations. It's 2022. FTX is flying high, and I decide I want to buy some crypto. And I want to buy it on FTX. I send the exchange$100. In return, I get some crypto. FTX takes a fee. And now, when I visit the FTX website, I can just see it. I can see my crypto. I can imagine that it's just sitting there, which is what I've been told. But that's not true. Instead, according to the government, FTX was stealing that crypto, which they'd promised to hold for me. Some of it went to Alameda, where the company used it to cover its bad bets. Other money went to cover FTX's own business expenses, some of which were questionable.

49:13That, broadly, is how the government alleges over$8 billion in customer money got illegally spent. But I was curious, spent on what exactly? And Zeke says we do have some partial answers here on where customer money went. So first, it gets thrown into a big pile with the rest of the company's corporate funds. Then it gets spent in all sorts of ways. We have divided that spending into four buckets. Bucket one, connections. Sam Bankman-Fried, through his companies, spent a lot of money buying friends and political allies. Although it took Zeke some time looking at these documents to understand exactly what was going on here.

49:54So, digging into it, the biggest chunk of where the money went was Alameda, the hedge fund, had sunk tons of money into illiquid investments. And what that means is, like, kind of obscure investments that would be hard to liquidate. And I'll just give you one of the craziest examples. So, at the Super Bowl, Sam had gone to a party at this guy Michael Keeves' house. Michael Keeves is a former Hollywood talent agent who's a super connected guy. He knows Bill Clinton. He took Sam to the Super Bowl with Katy Perry and Orlando Bloom. Sam was quite taken with this Keeves guy and his ability to introduce Sam to famous people.

50:42And with apparently very little due diligence, Sam's hedge fund, Alameda, sent Kives$700 million for Kives to invest in other stuff. But Kives got$125 million personally for his ownership stake in this investment firm. Like it sounds like someone just paying someone to be his friend. I mean, it kind of does. And Sam talked about this. He called Keeves something of a one-stop shop for relationships that we should utilize. So one place where Sam spent nearly a billion dollars alone was just on his relationship with this one person, Michael Keeves, a former Hollywood agent who knew a lot of celebrities.

51:32Keeves actually helps at least partly explain another mystery, which is why so many celebrities were in Sam's orbit and why he was in theirs. And I have to say, from one point of view, investments like this one were actually pretty smart. The celebrities got FTX attention, which got the company more customers. Those celebrity endorsements also made FTX seem safe. I remember last February, Katy Perry, the singer, posting on Instagram this joke about how she was quitting music to become an intern at FTX. Keeves was valuable to Sam because he'd introduced him to Katy Perry and to a lot of people like her.

52:07So bucket one is just an old American pastime. Rich nerds using their money to make famous friends. This brings us to bucket two, which is a big bucket I'm going to call gambling. Coins like Solana, SRM, Maps, but also they bought a bunch of bored apes. They bought into this company called Stepin that paid you in crypto for walking. They bought into Axie Infinity, a video game where you could earn real crypto by playing. It was popular as a job in the Philippines until the price collapsed. Sam at the time presented Alameda Research as just an investment firm, but Zeke has a cynical theory about what might have been going on here.

52:47It could be seen more as like, we need to keep this crypto thing going, so we need to support the crypto world by investing in, like, everybody. Because, like, your view as a person who covers financial fraud is that most or all of crypto is a series of pump-and-dub schemes. In that theory of the case, a few billion more dollars got vaporized with them being like, we need to make sure that the pump of every pump and dump is a big spike. And then, like, all these people will come into the casino to get into all these little scams, and we'll get the money back from them. Yes. So when I flew down to the Bahamas after the collapse and I was interviewing Sam on this like marathon interview, he revealed to me that there was one thing that he had misled me about the first time he was willing to admit to.

53:36So he had said my net worth is around$20 billion and it's mostly based on the valuation of FTX. FTX. So he's like, most of my wealth comes from my offshore casino, and it's a very valuable offshore casino, but that's where my interests lie. And what he said is that actually, on paper, at that time when I was meeting with him, he was worth more than$100 billion. And this was all at his hedge fund, Alameda, which just had huge stockpiles of all these crazy coins. So his interests actually were more aligned with keeping coin values high than I had thought. Because he had two businesses. He was in the running the casino business, and he was in the gambling at the casino business.

54:29The gambling side was much more important to him than I had known. Which is crazy because the casino was a really good business. Like, he could have just done that. For sure. And like, even now people trade crypto every day and there would be money to be made in running the crypto casino. Okay, so a chunk of it gets vaporized on a bad investment that might be about making friends in celebrity world. A large chunk of it gets vaporized by gambling across crypto, which is just sort of the definition of an unhedged bet because the whole market tends to rise and fall together. What else do we know about the money?

55:06So they went on this real estate spending spree in the Bahamas. Ah, bucket three. Sam, Bankman, Freed's companies also lost their money the way so many Americans do, spending too much money on real estate. They spent$243 million. They bought 30 properties, including the$30 million penthouse in the Albany Resort, which was called the Orchid Penthouse. And that's where Sam lived with his other top lieutenants. And this is, I should say, this would have been the home of the alleged polycule. Right. I do not think there was any polycule. These are like college kids essentially living in a dorm. Of course, some of them are going to like date each other.

55:51Yes. Yes, that's my read on as well. Although, like in this sort of like gap between like how Sam presented himself and who he was, the$30 million penthouse was like a nice asterisk on, I sleep in a beanbag chair all the time. It's like, I sleep in a beanbag at work when I'm not going home to like a very nice penthouse that I share with some friends and my sometimes girlfriend. Definitely. So those are the three buckets of spending that, if not frivolous, at least ran counter to the story Sam Bankman-Fried told, which is that he was earning to give. But there There's a fourth bucket, the actual charitable giving, the supposed point of all this.

56:30So what did Zeke find there? He did give a fair amount of money to charity. Oh, he did. Like more than me. And Sam and I, when we were sitting together, this was the thing that he seemed most broken up about when we were talking. I read him some tweets that his mentor, Will McCaskill, the founder of the Effective Altruism movement, had put out around that time. And Will had essentially said, if what I'm hearing about FTX is true, Sam Bankman-Fried has betrayed our movement. Like, I disown him. And Sam was trying to say to me, I feel so bad. Like, this is such a powerful movement. It's going to hurt the movement that I'm associated with it.

57:14And, like, I really did try my best. I really did give a lot of money to charity. And we were tallying it up there. And if you were being really generous in what you counted as charity, you could almost get to a billion dollars of charitable donations. But that includes$500 million or so that he invested in an AI startup, which he counted because he believed they were going to develop good AI, and that would somehow make it possible to stop the development of, like, the evil AI which threatens our civilization. A minor quibbly fact check here, not on Zeke, but on Sam Beckman-Fried. He may have invested the money in an AI company to fight the evil future AI, but this was a traditional investment, not a charitable donation.

57:58But still, whatever. Let's count it. And then, similar to how he invested in, like, every crypto startup, he seemed to write a check for, like, anyone associated with effective altruism who asked him for money. He gave a$300 ,000 grant to an individual to write a book about how to figure out what humans' utility functions are. That's an amazing book advance for a terrible idea. Yeah, we got to wait for this to come out and we'll know he got$300 ,000. And even better is the foundation gave a$400 ,000 grant to an entity that made animated videos on YouTube about rationalism and effective altruism.

58:44Jesus. So you got these like bad investments, you got real estate, you've got donating money to charity. No, I will also say a lot of this stuff Sam wouldn't really dispute. Like, when I sat down with Sam, this was my question to him. I was like, where did this$8 billion go? And he wasn't really disputing that all this stuff had happened. And he even said he lost another billion on what he called fuck-ups. And that he'd spent$1.5 billion on expenses. I mean, they were supposedly chartering a jet to fly their Amazon packages in from Miami. But if you believe that you're like the heroes who are going to save the world, Anything that enhances your productivity can kind of be justified.

59:28I mean, that's how I, like, justify cabs that I shouldn't do. Like, I know that internal voice is like, well, this is worth it because if I get this work done. It's just crazy to hear it at the billion dollar level.

59:44So where did the money go? Here's the final tally, a summary of Zeke's reporting. Over$5 billion in investments. some of that connections, a lot of it in crypto bets and acquisitions. A quarter billion on real estate, a billion on charity if you squint, a billion on fuck-ups, a billion and a half on expenses. The company had about 300 employees. And then, actually didn't mention this, but another measly$2.5 billion buying out rival company Binance's stake in FTX. All of this adds up to actually over$10 billion. Again, that's a mix of customer money and the company's money. It is, as the SEC likes to say, commingled money.

1:00:28Zeke says that eventually a more comprehensive breakdown will come out of bankruptcy court, but this is the best available estimate based on the information we have right now. When you look back at Sam and your conversations with him, and you look back at what is now publicly known, like, what is the picture for you that emerges of him? Like, do you think he was just a money-hungry scammer? Do you think he was somebody who was kind of a gambling addict who believed he was doing it for charity? Like, what level of honesty do you think he was? So I may be too committed to my original thesis, but I do think that he wanted to make money and give it away.

1:01:09And that him and his top lieutenants became convinced that they were essentially the heroes of their own sci-fi movie. and that their ability to make billions was the only thing standing between humanity and, like, the invasion of the killer robots. You mean literally, like, that was one of the effective altruism ideas was that one of the most important threats to defend against was an evil AI. Yes. And, like, by making billions of dollars and giving it to the right researchers, there was some non-zero chance that they could save the world. So if you really believe that and you are presented with this choice, admit defeat, go bankrupt, don't make any money to give away, or take the customer's money, gamble with it, hope that the number goes up and we can make it all back, and we will potentially still be in a position to make all this money and give it away.

1:02:07Put in those terms, that's the better choice. God. So I think, like, that's what made him so dangerous and willing to take risk was that he did really believe in this stuff. It's also funny because if the question about him for most of this time was, like, is he just a greedy person lying or does he have convictions? It sounds like he had convictions. He rationalized a lot of terrible choices in the name of those convictions. Had he just been greedy, everybody might be in a better position. Like, had he been greedy, it would have been, like, run the casino and make some bets. But because he convinced himself that if there's a 51 % chance in his mind of saving the world from killer robots or God knows what else, he should take insane bets and disregard his customers, his fortune, his own future.

1:02:54Like, if you're right in your read of him, his convictions made him more dangerous, not less dangerous. Yeah, I mean, even if there's like a 0.0001 % chance that you're going to save the world from killer robots, you should do whatever it takes. You know, because you're not just saving the current world. You're saving all the, like, trillions of people that would be born in the future, if not for the coming of the killer robots. Which is why some effective altruists have moved away from their original plan, which was, like, really, really observable charitable impact. Like, buying bed nets for people in Africa to prevent malaria.

1:03:35Yeah. They swung the total opposite direction and go for, like, really, really speculative things that might have huge impacts. I will say if in a few years we're all being hunted down by, like, artificially intelligent printers with knives or something, I will feel dumb for thinking that they have been dumb. Yeah, and I mean, at that point, we may need to break Sam out of prison. To run a new casino. I guess everyone would just give their money to stop the killer robots at that point. We would not need this convoluted mechanism to funnel money to anti-killer robot efforts. I don't think so. Zeke, thank you for talking about this and helping us understand where this money has gone.

1:04:20Thanks, Vijay. Zeke Fox. His book is called Number Go Up, Inside Crypto's Wild Rise and Staggering Fall. I, this year, will read every Sam Bankman-Fried book. I will enjoy every Sam Beckman-free book. Zeke's, I have to say, is the funny one. Just a very funny chronicle of what it was like for a skeptic to watch crypto rise and then to see it come down. I really recommend it.

1:05:04And Doug. Here we have the Lemu Emu in its natural habitat, helping people customize their car insurance and save hundreds with Liberty Mutual. Fascinating. It's accompanied by his natural ally, Doug. Uh, Lemu? Is that guy with the binoculars watching us? Cut the camera. They see us. Only pay for what you need at LibertyMutual.com. Liberty, Liberty, Liberty, Liberty. Savings vary. Underwritten by Liberty Mutual Insurance Company and affiliates excludes Massachusetts. Thank you.

1:06:03to the team at Jigsaw, Alex Gibney, Rich Pirello, and John Schmidt. And to the team at Odyssey, JD Crowley, Rob Mirandy, Craig Cox, Eric Donnelly, Matt Casey, Casey Clauser, Maura Curran, Josephina Francis, Kurt Courtney, and Hilary Schuff. Our agent is Orrin Rosenbaum at UTA. Our social media is by the team at Public Opinion NYC. Also, congratulations on the wedding, Stanker and Ren. You can follow and listen to Search Engine with PJ Vote now for free on the Odyssey app, on Spotify or wherever you get your podcasts. Thanks for listening. See you next week.

From the publisher

This week, the story of former crypto wunderkind Sam Bankman-Fried. The government alleges he stole over eight billion dollars from the customers of the crypto exchange he started, FTX.
Our question ... how do you blow eight billion dollars? Investigative financial reporter Zeke Faux helps us answer our question.
Be sure to check out Zeke's book, Number Go Up: Inside Crypto's Wild Rise and Staggering Fall. If you'd like to support the show, head to our newsletter: pjvogt.com.

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