Last week, news broke that the giant crypto exchange firm FTX and its overly close sister company, Alameda Research, were likely abusing user funds, leading to a loss of $10 billion and the bankruptcy of a crypto empire. The founder of the companies, 30-year-old MIT grad Sam Bankman-Fried, had been painted by the media as a crypto wunderkind, a “Luke Skywalker” bringing sophisticated financial vehicles to the unregulated market of decentralized trading — as well as being a true believer in the concept of “effective altruism,” a philosophy popular in Silicon Valley in which one donates their wealth to better humankind through the most efficient means possible.

Instead, “SBF,” as he is widely known, appears to have been defrauding his users by siphoning off an alleged $10 billion in assets to invest in VC projects through Alameda Research. Whether he is in fact guilty of those allegations is up to the SEC, the DOJ, the CFTC, and Bahamian law enforcement, all of which are investigating the implosion. But at the very least, the scandal seems to be why Alameda has shut down, FTX has filed for bankruptcy, and Bankman-Fried remains supervised by American federal authorities.

As reporters picked over the FTX-Alameda scandal, several other revelations about SBF and his squadron of yes-men gamer nerds emerged. The FTX org chart was basically 10 mathletes in a trenchcoat — a “gang of kids in the Bahamas,” as one source told CoinDesk last week. They were allegedly so high on prescription stimulants they could drop fruit-based finance metaphors in VC meetings while playing League of Legends at the same time. They lived in the Bahamas, presumably for tax reasons, and in the same house, presumably for sex reasons. They shared a therapist. And they were allegedly entangled in some kind of polycule, perhaps to maintain what one member supposedly called an “imperial Chinese harem,” wherein everyone had “a ranking of their partners,” knew where they fell in the pecking order, and conducted “vicious power struggles for the higher ranks.” Had this gotten more attention earlier, perhaps fewer people would have sent them their life’s savings.

The “harem” quote seemingly came from Bankman-Fried’s “protégé,” roommate, and alleged ex-girlfriend Caroline Ellison, via yet another revelation: two Tumblr accounts rumored to be hers. On Saturday, the Twitter account @AutismCapital, which has been breaking several verified scoops, linked Ellison to a Tumblr called “worldoptimization,” which has been active since 2014. Subsequently, other armchair investigators uncovered “worldoptimization-lifeadvice,” a Tumblr from 2018 seemingly run by the same person. Both of these blogs were deleted yesterday.

Ellison, a chipmunk-cheeked Harry Potter superfan, was the CEO of Alameda Research and allegedly knew about the company’s secret borrowing. Like Bankman-Fried, Ellison worked at the secretive trading firm Jane Street after college. Like Bankman-Fried, she was also into effective altruism. It’s unclear whether she will face criminal action, though it can’t hurt that her father, MIT professor Glenn Ellison, used to report directly to SEC Chairman Gary Gensler. Ellison was also evidently an online girlie, and may have managed the two Tumblrs in addition to being a standout student at Newton North High School and Stanford, respectively. Though the blogs are gone, their legacy lives on in the Wayback Machine, as well on a website that compiled all their posts.

We reached out to Ellison to confirm the blogs’ authenticity, and while she did not immediately respond, there is fairly compelling evidence to suggest that she was involved. The administrator of “worldoptimization” apparently went to Stanford, majored in math, spent a fair amount of time in San Francisco (where Alameda was once headquartered), started working at a cryptocurrency exchange, left America for that job, moved to Hong Kong, practices polyamory, and really loves Harry Potter — all things that point to Ellison. More convincingly: In March of 2021, WorldOptimization announced that they had started a Twitter account. It linked to Ellison’s profile @carolinecapital, which was opened the same month.

(cont…)

https://twitter.com/carolinecapital/status/1379036346300305408

https://www.gawker.com/money/are-these-caroline-ellisons-tumblrs

>>17771661

(cont…)

If the blogs do belong to Ellison, they provide some crucial insight into the now-silent executive, who may be on the run — including some unsettling observations about race science, polyamory, and “enjoying Matt Yglesia’s Substack.” Could this be Caroline’s blog? We can’t say for sure. But let’s take a closer look at the person we’ll refer to as “WorldOptimization” (she describes herself as a woman, so we’ll do the same).

HER FAVORITE COLOR IS GRAY

In 2015, when WorldOptimization posted a quiz that outlined her favorite color, TV shows (Game of Thrones, Arrested Development, Silicon Valley, Downton Abbey, The West Wing, 30 Rock, Sherlock, Girls), store (H&M), and nicknames: “Car” or “Scoog.”

SHE LIKES LIS SMITH

WorldOptimization maintained an active Goodreads account, where she evidently read Matt Yglesias’ book (whom SBF wanted to recruit for a Substack competitor) and Pete Buttigieg’s old campaign manager’s memoir, Any Given Tuesday, writing:

A fun, dishy political memoir. I appreciated getting more of a view into who works on campaigns, what they’re like, what motivates them, how they think, and what they do.

She gave it three out of five stars.

SCALIA LIVED IN HER OLD HOUSE

In 2020, WorldOptimization detailed her “most interesting celebrity encounter story,” which was that she “used to live in a house Antonin Scalia used to live in.”

SHE READ GOSSIP GIRL FANTASY FAN FICTION

In one of the most recent posts, WorldOptimization linked to a fan-fiction story called “Worth The Gossip.” It was an apparent crossover between the characters of Gossip Girl and the world of Worth the Candle — a nine-part fantasy web series from “rational fiction” author Alexander Wales (also known by his handle, cthulhuraejepsen) — which WorldOptimization read and loved in 2019. She posted the link without context, so it’s unclear whether she wrote it herself. But it does appear to be the first attempt from its author, who goes by “infinite_librarian.” The story also comes with an Archive of Our Own warning: “Underage.”

SHE USED TO BE TRAD

WorldOptimization, as she details in multiple posts, used to be trad (as in, traditional in a vaguely Catholic, red-pilled, conventional gender role-having, reactionary kind of way). Specifically, as one 2021 post details, she was “somewhat of a ‘women are better suited to being homemakers and rearing children than doing Careers’ trad,” and a “the sexual revolution was a mistake” trad. That all evidently changed in a “dramatic deconversion,” over the course of “one night in a several-hour-long conversation.”

She has since become “a bit more agnostic on culture/society,” which you can see on display in a post from the previous month. “Honestly this is so uncool but I love it when fiction has representation of literal girlbosses,” she wrote, “like women managing people and running stuff. I’m like omg it me.”

HER TYPE IS GUYS WHO CONTROL “MOST MAJOR WORLD GOVERNMENTS”

Here’s a post from February 2021:

Right on.

SPEAKING OF THOSE GUYS, SHE DABBLES IN RACE SCIENCE

This past January, WorldOptimization took it upon herself to defend the legacy of European kinship structures (sic):

She tagged the post “hbd cw,” likely a “content warning” for “human biodiversity,” the alt-right euphemism for a whitewashed and modernized eugenics, which claims there are “scientifically proven (and therefore apolitical) genetic differences between groups of humans.” WorldOptimization, who occasionally outlines more progressive views on her blog, doesn’t appear to ascribe to the HBD outlook, though she did post about it at least eight times. However, she does evidently “appreciate” HBD, as outlined in this post from 2020:

(cont…)

https://twitter.com/carolinecapital/status/1379036346300305408

https://www.gawker.com/money/are-these-caroline-ellisons-tumblrs

>>17771661

>>17771687

'''(cont…)

…However, she does evidently “appreciate” HBD, as outlined in this post from 2020:

SHE UNDERSTANDS THE RELATIVE IMPORTANCE OF THINGS

In 2021, WorldOptimization lamented the fact that she didn’t “spend nearly enough time thinking about the relative importance of things, you know?” Fortunately, she spent some more time mulling it over and produced this chart, ranking topics by QALYs — or “quality-adjusted life year,” or the metric used to assess quality of life in economic and medical intervention terms, where one QALY is equivalent to “1 year of life in perfect health.”

SHE IS NOT A CRYPTO TRUE BELIEVER

This past March, WorldOptimization weighed in on Ellison’s industry: crypto. “I didn’t get into this as a crypto true believer,” she wrote, “but like, I have also come to see a real and pressing need for crypto, prob best expressed in this thread (‘there are no constitutional rights in substance without freedom to transact.’)” At the same time, she conceded: “yeah it’s mostly scams and memes when you get down to it.”

SHE APPRECIATES ARCHIVES

In June, WorldOptimization mourned the gradual erasure of records and information, lost to time, physical ruin, or digital obsolescence:

So hopefully, she’ll appreciate blogger MilkyEggs’s archive of every WorldOptimization post.

(end)

https://twitter.com/carolinecapital/status/1379036346300305408

https://www.gawker.com/money/are-these-caroline-ellisons-tumblrs

>>17771708

Prob looking for Kari Lake to concede.

>>17771554

Caroline

@carolinecapital

nothing like regular amphetamine use to make you appreciate how dumb a lot of normal, non-medicated human experience is

6:41 AM · Apr 5, 2021 Twitter Web App

501 Retweets 694 Quote Tweets 1,940 Likes

https://twitter.com/carolinecapital/status/1379036346300305408

>>17771661

>>17771687

>>17771713

gawker did a story on her and says:

As reporters picked over the FTX-Alameda scandal, several other revelations about SBF and his squadron of yes-men gamer nerds emerged. The FTX org chart was basically 10 mathletes in a trenchcoat — a “gang of kids in the Bahamas,” as one source told CoinDesk last week. They were allegedly so high on prescription stimulants they could drop fruit-based finance metaphors in VC meetings while playing League of Legends at the same time. They lived in the Bahamas, presumably for tax reasons, and in the same house, presumably for sex reasons. They shared a therapist. And they were allegedly entangled in some kind of polycule, perhaps to maintain what one member supposedly called an “imperial Chinese harem,” wherein everyone had “a ranking of their partners,” knew where they fell in the pecking order, and conducted “vicious power struggles for the higher ranks.” Had this gotten more attention earlier, perhaps fewer people would have sent them their life’s savings.

https://www.gawker.com/money/are-these-caroline-ellisons-tumblrs

>>17771785

WHAT WE KNOW ABOUT FTX GETTING FUXXED

The effectively altrusitic billionaire Sam Bankman-Fried has effectively bankrupted his crypto company

Over the summer, a coalition of America’s remaining print magazines — Vogue, GQ, Vanity Fair, and The New Yorker — debuted a glossy, four-page advertising spread featuring supermodel Gisele Bündchen and Sam Bankman-Fried, the 30-year-old crypto billionaire, effective altruist, and Democratic megadonor. The caption read: “THE FUTURE OF INVESTING IS FTX. YOU IN?”

Bündchen had gone “in” with Bankman-Fried on a company that had, in a matter of three years, put him on the Bloomberg billionaires list and turned him into one of the most-trusted figures in the volatile crypto industry. FTX was a cryptocurrency exchange, or a kind of crypto bank, where users can deposit money in exchange for Bitcoin or Ethereum or any of their myriad and stupidly named competitors. The “In On” campaign marked the pair’s promise that crypto could create “positive change” and “impact for good.”

This seemed poorly timed when it ran in June; the implosion of the stablecoin TerraUSD had sent crypto into a steep decline that disappeared some $2 trillion from the ecosystem. But it’s even more embarrassing now that FTX has undergone a death rattling liquidity crisis that cratered Bankman-Fried’s net worth by 94 percent, evaporated billions in user investments, and triggered investigations from both the Securities and Exchange Commission and the Department of Justice. The story has already been compared to Enron and the crypto industry’s “Lehman moment,” though much remains unclear (for example: who runs this anonymous Twitter account named for Baby Yoda, seemingly started yesterday, that seems to have some inside scoops?). But here’s a brief recap of what we do know now:

WHO IS SAM BANKMAN-FRIED?

A run-down of Bankman-Fried’s C.V. would include the following: he graduated from MIT in 2014 and traded international ETFs at Jane Street Capital for four years. He quit in 2017 and took on two other roles that help explain his current renown and increasing infamy. First, he served briefly at the Center for Effective Altruism — a nonprofit dedicated to the philosophical movement, or “moral crusade” rather, of ”effective altruism,” aka E.A. The basic concept of E.A., reductively, is that one should do good in the most evidence-based way possible.

Vox would later describe Bankman-Fried as a guy who “uses math…for everything,” and that was certainly true of his next venture. He left to start a quantitative trading firm called Alameda Research, where he traded the firm into multi-million-dollar daily transactions by exploiting a pricing discrepancy that made it cheaper to buy Bitcoin in Japan than the U.S. In late 2018, he moved to Hong Kong. The following spring, he started FTX.

WHAT IS FTX?

FTX was not necessarily promising when it launched in 2019. Cryptocurrencies were recovering from a massive crash the previous fall, and what remained of the market was already dominated by several exchanges already in operation, like Coinbase. FTX’s basic pitch was a trading platform with minimal fees and high volume, where you could not just buy new currencies, but more sophisticated financial vehicles and derivatives, like leveraged tokens or options.

Within two years, FTX transformed from a minor competitor to a massive company. First, they acquired the portfolio tracking application Blockfolio, in August of 2020 for $150 million. By March of 2021, Bankman-Fried’s net worth was conservatively estimated at $10 billion. Four months after that, FTX raised $900 million in Series B funding, sending the company’s value to $18 billion. Three months later, a second funding round raised that number to $25 billion.

'''(cont…)

https://www.gawker.com/money/how-sam-bankman-fried-crashed-crypto-giant-ftx

>>17771785

>>17771819

(cont…)

IS THAT ALL HE DOES?

FTX made Bankman-Fried rich, but E.A. arguably made him famous. That’s because as his net worth rose, Bankman-Fried began to act on one major tenet of the philosophy: that practitioners should increase their own earning potential in order to increase the amount they can give away. In 2020, he made headlines after becoming one of the tech world’s largest contributors to Joe Biden’s presidential campaign, donating at least $5 million to the Silicon Valley super PAC Future Forward (an LLC he founded tossed in another $5 million), which went on a $100 million Biden ad blitz. (He later told reporter Teddy Schleifer, who was on the SBF beat before most in mainstream media, he had “crunched the numbers on how much impact each dollar would have if he donated it.”)

For a minute, Sam Bankman-Fried seemed like he could become the left’s answer to the Koch brothers, and was spending to prove it. In 2021, he started a 501(c)4 called “Guarding Against Pandemics,” which spent “hundreds of thousands” on lobbying and ads to get pandemic-preparedness built into Biden’s BBB bill. When that failed, he tried to get a similar measure in California; then started another super PAC to back Democratic candidates in the midterms. In May, he announced plans to spend as much as $1 billion on Democratic candidates by 2024.

Dems, unsurprisingly, seemed to like him back; the same year, Sen. Cory Booker interrupted his testimony before Congress to tell him he had “a much more glorious afro than I once had.” Journalists were also keen on him, not least for his contributions to media companies — giving $5 million to ProPublica and backing Ben Smith’s newly launched venture, Semafor.

But Bankman-Fried’s promises have begun to fail or evaporate over the past year; his $12 million investment in an Oregon House candidate imploded; his California ballot initiative failed to qualify for the midterms. He backtracked from his $1 billion donation estimate, and paused donations just short of $40 million.

WHY IS EVERYONE MAD?

Shit hit the fan for Bankman-Fried in early November, after CoinDesk wrote a story about a leaked document from his quant trading firm, Alameda Research. This particular document was Alameda’s balance sheet, which detailed its substantial portfolio: $14.6 billion in assets.

The thing that stood out was that much of Alameda’s assets were held in FTT — a token issued by FTX itself, which “grants holders a discount on trading fees on its marketplace.” Nearly a fifth of Alameda’s assets — $5.82 billion — were one of two kinds of FTT. “While there is nothing per se untoward or wrong about that,” CoinDesk wrote, “it shows Bankman-Fried’s trading giant Alameda rests on a foundation largely made up of a coin that a sister company invented, not an independent asset like a fiat currency or another crypto.”

Four days later, one of FTX’s biggest rivals took advantage of the situation. Changpeng Zhao, the head of the exchange Binance, announced that his company would offload its entire share of the FTT token — an estimated $580 million — due to “recent revelations that have come to light.” The news sent FTT holders into a sell-off, cratered the price by 80 percent in some 48 hours.

According to Reuters, Bankman-Fried told staff that some $6 billion in crypto had been withdrawn from the firm in three days. It’s now clear that the surge in withdrawals put FTX in a massive bind, as much of their holdings were leveraged. They just didn’t have the cash on hand to pay everyone trying to get their money. On Tuesday, FTX suspended withdrawals — anyone with money still in the platform could not get it out. However, it looked like FTX had found a solution to cover the withdrawals: Bankman-Fried had reached a non-binding agreement with Binance to buy FTX’s international assets, worth several billion. That bailout would help them cover the withdrawals.

The bailout was short-lived. On Wednesday, Binance walked away from the deal, explaining, “The issues are beyond our control or ability to help.” As of Wednesday evening, it seemed FTX was headed for bankruptcy. As Bankman-Fried told shareholders: “I fucked up.”

'''(cont…)

https://www.gawker.com/money/how-sam-bankman-fried-crashed-crypto-giant-ftx

>>17771785

>>17771819

>>17771830

(cont…)

WHICH CELEBRITIES SHILLED FOR FTX?

A lot of crypto companies have celebrity backers. And FTX had its fair share of stars happy to hop in bed with a project that’s turning into a massive disaster.

Gisele Bundchen and Tom Brady: In addition to Gisele’s photoshoot, the now-divorced couple did a $20 million ad campaign for FTX that kicked off during last year’s NFL season. According to the Hollywood Reporter, that campaign “outperformed every commercial except for an ad by Chevrolet,” driving, “almost half a million searches for the new trading platform in the minutes following its two airings during the game.” They also got an equity stake in the firm, and an “unspecified amount and type of crypto.”

Steph Curry: Last September, Curry tweeted “Just getting started in the crypto game…y’all got any advice??” He must have gotten some great advice, because the next day the Golden State star was a “global ambassador” for FTX. Unfortunately for Curry, his payment was an equity stake in FTX. His charity, Eat. Learn. Play, also partnered with FTX’s nonprofit initiatives.

Naomi Osaka: Tennis queen Naomi Osaka signed a “long-term partnership agreement” with FTX in March, to “produce content” and bring women to the platform. She got an equity stake that’s now worth love.

Shohei Ohtani: The MLB megastar, the first player to get the All-Star treatment as both a pitcher and batter, became a “global ambassador” for the FTX last fall. His payment was a stake in the company and compensation “paid entirely in cryptocurrency.” Talk about a double threat.

Aaron Jones: The Packers’ running back Aaron Jones made some green last September, when he joined FTX’s ambassador roster. You’ll never guess what he got paid with. It was FTX equity and crypto. He also announced he would invest a portion of his future marketing earnings through FTX, and that he and his brother would become FTX shareholders through their family’s LLC. Bummer!

Larry David: Mr. Seinfeld himself made a 60-second ad spot for FTX in February, marking the company’s first “anti-sponsor,” to address the crypto skeptics of the world. Regrettably, the skeptics look pretty good right now. Hopefully this will come up in Curb.

The Miami Heat: Last year, FTX shelled out $135 million to rename American Airlines Arena, the NBA home of the Miami Heat, “FTX Arena.” That was supposed to last for 19 years! Let’s see how that goes.

(end)

https://www.gawker.com/money/how-sam-bankman-fried-crashed-crypto-giant-ftx

>>17771838

It's prob the size of your image. IJS I've had that issue w/size.

>>17771842

Guess they couldn't cheat hard enough, with so many eyes on 'em. Plus KL refusing to concede. KEK

>>17771855

Oh my bad, was just trying to help anon. I have changed the size of memes and then they go thru w/ the invalid character error.

>>17771756

I ain't skeered are you guise skeered? I been tryin' boss, doin' my best atm. Ty for your persistent in this matter! o7