They're going to study SBF in law school some day. In the same way a computer science professor would emphasize automated testing to catch edge cases, a legal professor will emphasize that no matter how intelligent and well-connected your client seems, they may still be suffering from "edge case" delusional behavior that destroys their case.
This is the same guy who dialed into tech conferences and made provably false statements after the public collapse of FTX and after his parents (both law professors) had retained counsel. And yet, nobody thought to explain to him how easily he might get caught up on witness tampering and obstruction of justice charges if he continued making public statements.
no matter how ... well-connected your client seems
Is SBF connected at all anymore? At this point, everyone knows he's a fraud (at least in the court of public opinion). There's no money to be gained by helping him; associations to him are toxic; favors are unlikely to ever be repaid. He may have used some of the money he scammed for donations to curry favor, but that only works up until the scam falls apart. What sort of connections are you thinking of?
I was referring to the general notion of someone who can satisfy exorbitant bail requirements and has two law professors for parents - legal counsel in such a case may mistakenly assume that their client is sophisticated enough to avoid obvious mistakes.
When you have 100bn you are well connected. When you had 100bn but now have nothing, you are not well connected. Even people you have litterally given 100mil to wont take your phone calls.
I think he was warned about the consequences of making public statements. I think he thought he knew more than anyone else. I am guessing that he will have an extremely hard adjustment to prison. But who knows? He could end up being the shot caller.
Someone may have explained to him that this was witness tampering, but as my mother likes to say “went into one ear came out the other” for SBF. He’s rarely faced consequences for his actions until now.
Yeah. On his PR tour he repeatedly made public statements that will negatively impact his defense; there's no way his council didn't try to shut that down. SBF isn't listening to his lawyers.
Dialing into tech conferences and lying his ass off wasn't necessary the wrong strategy. SBF's goal at the time wasn't "avoid jail;" it was "bail out company and course correct." He wanted to acquire a lot of large investors to save his company, and a lie-filled PR campaign was probably the best bet he had to do it. The estimated value of (tiny chance) * (stay a billionaire) versus the estimated value of (smallish chance) * (avoid prison) might have looked like a pretty good call to him.
Or, more likely, his life as he knew it was under threat and he was panicking by following the same script that always worked for him before. But it wasn't NECESSARILY the wrong call.
I see your point, but would more categorize his actions as a "messiah complex" belief in his own invincibility, reinforced by years of experience running the FTX charade. I doubt he was ever rationally examining the odds of pulling it off.
Playing by the book it's an easy, open and shut case that he loses very badly badly. No other conceivable outcome that way.
His only option is to throw the book out and create as much chaos as possible so prosecutors are faced with the unusual and novel and make mistakes his team can capitalise on.
It's a long shot, sure. He's got nothing else. This lunacy is all 100% rational behaviour on his part.
He's going to jail for many years, this is really unlikely to increase that duration to parole or change the facility to supermax but is a long shot, hail mary at reducing things or even getting off. Why not?
Classic asymmetric payoff. Any trader will see that. (Maybe my analysis is wrong and it /can/ make things meaningfully worse but if not, it's extremely rational).
You're correct that it can't make things meaningfully worse. Even if he got the maximum charge for obstruction of justice (5 years), it would be an insignificant risk for someone facing 120-150 years.
May not be a win, I sure hope there isn't one. There should not be one.
I just don't see him as meaningfully worse off. The muddier, smokier, more controversial and strange make it at least /possible/ there can be some lawyers "Aktuhally..." and he comes out somehow ahead. If not, nothing lost, he's unlikely to go to jail for longer or a worse one. It's a hail mary to be sure but it's a free throw of the dice.
Do you think this list of, um, "politicians" wants to give all the stolen money back that he donated? They sure have an interest in how this plays out, huh?
Nobody is giving back anything of course, but that's all in the past - that money is gone and no more us coming, so nobody is going to stick with him for that. His parents and their friends - maybe.
If he successfully tampers with the witness, enough to sow reasonable doubt and lead to his acquittal at trial, then it's worth it. That's why it's a crime - because there is a potential payoff to it. If actually tampering with the witness never worked, there would be no need to criminalize it.
Getting charged with tampering is much, much easier than successfully tamper. If he wanted to scare Elison publishing some dirt or sending texts is not going to do it - feds have much better ways to scare people into cooperation. And his very expensive lawyers told him as much, I am sure, because every lawyer would. But he probably decided he knows better.
But the payoffs are very much asymmetric. Getting convicted of tampering adds a few extra years to his sentence which will probably be more than his life anyway. Successfully tampering with the witness may avoid the conviction in the first place.
Except there's no chance of successful tampering the way he did it. Never was. Publishing dirt on one of his co-conspirators is not going yo negate his conviction.
I could actually see this being a viable strategy - create enough evidence and research burden for the prosecution so as to maximize the debate around admissibility of evidence and opportunities for limiting the trial's scope.
Yup and when I wrote that I was only thinking of the asymmetric payoff and had forgotten how much stolen money he donated to the powerful who don't want to give it back. Now that /should/ be totally irrelevant but will it be? Will they all stay 100% completely away from it even in secret? The level of corruption that are normal right now are unprecedented IMO. I'd like to be wrong about it but I'd like it if it were reformed a lot more.
Washington corruption is rampant and at an all time peak, both R&D, to be sure but he's got to give them some kind of smoke screen by making a really simple thing like his being a thief "complicated." The guy knows where the bodies are, he has some leverage. Probably not nearly enough but we'll see.
There are some criminals that are genuinely delusional and think they are right and just need to explain more - could some element of that be present here. I know I've seen good examples of that kind of behavior, where people behave ridiculously because they're blinded by thinking they're kn the right, but I'm struggling a bit to come up with one. Skilling maybe?
There are plenty of better examples. Sam is essentially just a common crook. He put his hand in his own companies cookie jar. This idea that he's going to "be studied" just plays into his own paid for media created mythos.
This is the same guy who tried to make "effective altruism" part of his image. That was a pretty strong signal that the outcome we all witnessed was highly likely.
I don’t think the intriguing part of SBF is the crime he committed, which is a pretty common one. For me, it is how he, after getting caught, hurts his own case being proactive in doing and saying stuff publicly.
The common type of white collar criminal remains in silence and follow orientations from their very well paid lawyers. And it is a pretty proven strategy that leads to minimal or no relevant punishment. If SBF was a common criminal in this sense, he possibly could leave all of this judged not guilty by the justice.
I think this underestimated the abilities of the “common white collar criminal” — there are lots of chat logs of SBF and his coconspirators saying essentially “we’re doing fraud.”
Common white collar criminals say “let’s take this offline” in their chat transcripts.
Well there’s another high-profile case in the works where there are lots of transcripts of the coconspirators saying (occasionally explicitly), “we’re doing fraud.”
This is a trap very smart successful people fall into. They think they can figure out anything better than somebody who spent years learning the trade and acquiring the experience, just because they are so smart. Sometimes it's true, but often it's an illusion which can have life changing and sometimes deadly consequences.
Even in jail, he'll be 'a rich guy in jail', able to buy all the favours and protection that can be bought in such a place.
I probably won't attract many friends by separately pointing out that "it'll all work out in the end" was also the primary investment strategy of virtually every crypto "investor" who lost money, but that's another matter...
IANAL but it seems all this stupidity may cost him what really matters: he may lose any chance of minimum security prison. That’s the real prize if prison time is all but guaranteed.
He could still get a decade in ClubFed with work release which… while obviously not great, is a hell of a lot better than living under guard in a low or medium security prison.
> This idea that he's going to "be studied" just plays into his own paid for media created mythos.
It’s not as if people are saying he’s going to be studied because he’s fascinating. I don’t think he ever tried to cultivate the image that he’s idiotic bordering on the pathological, because that discrepancy seems to be study-worth.
It’s like on one side, there are Musk actions, some call them insane and idiotic, but they can be explained away, theoretically, and then there’s SBF where even the most adamant supporter would just stand there, open-mouthed.
The only reason some people struggle to understand the behavior of Musk, SBF, Trump, and others is because of an assumption that a certain level of wealth or power implies some level of rational behavior.
That assumption is often, but not always correct.
We aren't astonished or confused when a broke high school dropout maxes out their credit card on Candy Crush in-app purchases and drives drunk and crashes into a tree. Some people are stupid and stupid people are going to make stupid, thoughtless decisions.
People are more surprised when the rich and powerful do dumb shit like this because of a presumption that they must have been consistently able to not do dumb shit in order to acquire their stature.
But that assumption is very often wrong. Trump had his father slowly plow $700m of his wealth into his son in order to burnish his own image. Musk inherited wealth. SBF came from prestige and then lucked into a historical moment where fake Internet money could temporarily be exchanged for real money.
These people are just fucking morons with limited ability to delay their gratification or think through the consequences of their actions who happened to win the lottery. Most of the time, it's because they lived an entire childhood where they never needed to learn to think about the consequences of their actions because they were completely insulated from them.
I despise Elon Musk but I’m not going to stoop to making things up just because I don’t like him. It’s called integrity. There are plenty of verifiable things to not like him for.
It's probably only appealing to the tech set because he came from a upper middle family with law professor parents and fooled some silicon valley money... So basically he existed in the social circle of the academics and Palo alto tech elite.
It's a status thing as much as the crime. Who he had access to and what knowledge everyone involved could have had to detect it earlier. If that is real idk but that's the pitch
Crypto is a bit unique though. Not many markets would have tolerated this behaviour.
> Judge Kaplan: This defendant tries to go right up to the line - his use of the VPN to watch a football game over an account he wasn't authorized, there it is..
> Judge Kaplan: He subscribed from the Bahamas and used a VPN as if he were in the Bahamas when he was in Palo Alto and could have watched it on public TV. It shows the mindset. All things considered I am going to revoke bail.
> This is the same guy who tried to make "effective altruism" part of his image. That was a pretty strong signal that the outcome we all witnessed was highly likely.
My 2 cents is that it's because anyone who tries to convince you that themselves getting rich can somehow save the world is already deep into narcissistic sociopath territory.
Intelligence is unrelated to integrity, at least by common wisdom.
A common Warren Buffet quote passed around :
"We look for three things when we hire people. We look for intelligence, we look for initiative or energy, and we look for integrity. And if they don't have the latter, the first two will kill you, because if you're going to get someone without integrity, you want them lazy and dumb"
Building a company based on fraud is potentially more of a marker of ruthlessness over intelligence, but certainly we don't know with certainty, and it is likely a combination of the two.
I would agree. He was definitely connected, and definitely smart. Anyone would drive in such a position could make a successful company. But he was ruthless and also has no moral compass, so he became a crypto fraudster.
This is the same guy who dialed into tech conferences and made provably false statements after the public collapse of FTX and after his parents (both law professors) had retained counsel. And yet, nobody thought to explain to him how easily he might get caught up on witness tampering and obstruction of justice charges if he continued making public statements.