It doesn't reach me personally, but of course con men have charm. It's kind of necessary in that line of work. You can't scam people of billions of dollars without a little bit of "charm".
> I don't understand how people keep falling for this.
Every successful fraud has people it's tuned for. For example, consider how terribly written most spam is. That selects for people who are not fussy about writing. Conversely, a lot of the people doing high-end financial fraud is done by people who are very polished, very good at presenting the impression of success. Or some years back I knew of a US gang running the Pigeon Drop [1] on young East Asian women in a way that was tuned to take advantage of how they are often raised.
Telsa's only has ~3% of the US car market, so they're definitely in the "fool some of the people all of the time" bucket. Musk's fan base seems to be early adopters and starry-eyed techno-utopians [2]. He's not selling transportation. He's selling a dream. They don't care that experts can spot him as a liar [3] because listening to experts would, like, totally harsh their mellow.
Although it's much closer to legal fraud, I don't think that's otherwise hugely different than how many cars are marketed. E.g., all of the people who are buying associations of wealth when they sign up for a BMW they can't afford. Or the ocean of people buying rugged, cowboy-associated vehicles that never use them for anything more challenging than suburban cul de sacs.
> The guy has a strong sense of ethics. I continue to be impressed.
That seems to be the case in general, but I have to say in this case it doesn’t really require that to decide to take the opportunity to slam dunk on someone when you discover you’ve been scammed into agreeing to be a speaker for their scam. A fairly normal degree of personal desire for retaliation would suffice.
> My father told me that con men preferred to go after smart people
This doesn't make a lot of sense. Most cons like the various Nigerian money scams and pyramid scams are designed to only get responses from less intelligent people.
>I don't think a proper con-man would go to the trouble of actually launching rockets/building cars/digging tunnels though...
Why do you think that? Wouldn't it just give away the fact that he is a fraud? A smart conman will be able to run the con as long as possible with as many victims as possible...
>You can argue whether or not he is conning people but to me it seems that even if that were true it's not on purpose.
May be he is a natural then. I mean, he is as stupid as the people he ends up fooling. I really think that might be the case here. So in that case he is not smart. He is just dumb is a way that is just in tune with a lot of dumb people out there, who then buy into his "vision" and invest in him, because their understanding of the problems are as shallow as the perp who is proposing the solutions...
> You would imagine a con artist of his caliber would be more careful than that, but still
They've been doing it for a long time and it's always worked, either because they've always been this sloppy but everyone else reviewing was sloppier or gave the benefit of the doubt for reasons, or that they've put less and less effort into it over time because it hasn't been necessary.
Also the simpler the fraud is in execution the more likely you might be able to explain it away as a simple mistake or lack of familiarity with certain "tradesperson" tools adjacent to the skills you have framed in latin blackletter on sheepskin.
It’s their job to get extremely good at being less suspicious. The more rejections they get, the more they refine their approach, their appearance, their story, etc.
I try to avoid giving credit to my ego for not falling for a scam/con (yet!) when capitalism and evolution are both optimized for finding efficient workarounds for any hurdle. Given enough attempts and enough time, capitalism will corrupt anyone and everyone.
> My father told me that con men preferred to go after smart people, like doctors. The reason is that smart people thought they were too smart to get conned, and hence were more gullible.
Another reason for going after high-status professionals (proxy for 'smart') is that they may be less likely to use violence as a method for dispute resolution?
Also, if they have to maintain a reputation of savviness, they may be less encline to make it public knowledge that they got swindled by pressing charges.
>The one thing that strikes me all the time is how arrogant, smug, full of themselves these scammers always sound.
You're reversing causation... Humans as a whole are more apt to follow people that sound confident. Therefore as a scammer, if you want to boost your success rate you need to sound confident. The scammer never wants you to doubt their ability, but they want you to constantly doubt your own.
> it's disturbing to me that even if a person weren't committing fraud, they might be viewed suspiciously simply because they didn't signal wealth in the ways wealthy people expect them to.
I think you're missing some of the cues - that's only part of it. It's not just that he didn't signal wealth, but that he was inconsistent about it ("his driver would be coming to get him") and straight-up lying when he did signal it.
Plus those were only three examples, no idea how much more there was.
> I actually find SBF quite charming and persuasive.
I genuinely find that fascinating, because from the first I ever saw or heard him (before the FTX stuff erupted), my reaction was the exact opposite. My most charitable reaction was that he was a scammer.
> he probably threw that in just to make you think there's an option besides the police
That's what I thought, too. For some reason, scammers often have high social intelligence. Maybe it's like with any other domain: if you understand how computers work, you are compelled to use computers a lot. If you understand how people work, you must be compelled to use people?
> And i would be surprised if they can connect him with bribery etc. He strikes me as that kind of person who likes power over a bag of money.
Money and power are generally fungible, and you don't have to handle a bag of money at either end to be part of a conspiracy that involves financial crimes.
The leaders of criminal conspiracies probably generally prefer power to money, with money being interesting, to the extent it is, as a means to power.
>As I get older, I do not understand how known scammers, especially the ones that raise millions over and over, get support time and time again.
Con artists are good at what they do. People are a thousand times easier to hack than a database server. And there's no security patches for human emotion; we are full of 10,000 year old zero days.
It doesn't reach me personally, but of course con men have charm. It's kind of necessary in that line of work. You can't scam people of billions of dollars without a little bit of "charm".
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