Just remember, SBF wasn’t donating money to these causes: he was donating his customers assets. These organisations are lucky the assets don’t get clawed back because this money should be considered stolen or proceeds of crime.
So I shouldn't have mentioned it because it's a meme, and SBF should be in the clear now because he donated a few dollars of stolen funds, mostly from individuals who got sucked into it, to medical research. Solid.
I don’t understand the pressure to give bad people their money back. What’s it supposed to accomplish? I’m not sure it should even be legal to send money to SBF. It’s seeming more and more likely that he’s head of a criminal conspiracy.
> I'm not sure how anyone could argue that what SBF was doing fits it any way with that. He's just been found guilty of fraud on multiple counts,
EA strikes me as the same sort of ambiguous slime as "breast cancer awareness."
You read the words and think hey, that sounds right. Benefit others as efficiently as possible. Guy's a Robin Hood type, stealing from the rich to benefit others. Good for you, buddy. Godspeed.
Except you look at what he's actually doing and see he's not stealing from the rich and giving to the poor. He's stealing from the foolish and giving to "others," who turn out to be his friends and associates. $500m to Anthropic? $5b for Twitter? This shit isn't charity.
It's kleptocracy masquerading as charity. I can't see his charitable causes as anything more than an ephemeral funds-parking scheme storing funds in a chain of IOUs.
What SBF has done is not a victimless crime though: lots of fairly ordinary people lost money because of what he did, some of them lost everything.
Yes, I know some of the people who lost money are rich, and much is being made of that by people who want to troll by saying that's the only reason he really got into trouble (e.g., on Reddit). But that's not true: there are plenty of victims from SBFs crimes, both rich and not rich.
And in this kind of discussion I suggest it's helpful to avoid hypotheticals and to look at the real situations and outcomes relating to the case we're talking about.
Finally a take I agree with. The victims here are IMHO victims of their own greed. They wanted all the reward of putting money into unprotected and unregulated schemes and now many cry that the risks didn't go their way.
It doesn't make SBF less of a criminal but it does make the victims less victimised.
That's an extremely charitable interpretation of the events, in my opinion. Misappropriating custodial funds is not ever acceptable when you are running an exchange, no matter how good your EV looks like.
And I'm not buying into his whole effective altruism thing. What I think is that SBF had a strong desire to make money, ethics be damned, but had a troubled conscience. Effective altruism gave him moral comfort and helped him rationalize his actions.
SBF's case is not analogous to a bank robber paying his bail out of the duffle bag used in the robbery. It is plausible that SBF had assets prior to misusing customer funds. The presumption of innocence should not just be a nice story we tell ourselves.
I don't understand how he could hope to raise money if his idea is "We return it to the people I stole from." I have no doubt that, like Adam Neumann, there is some circumstance where VCs would give him another turn, but it would be because those VCs thought they could make money, not because they want to donate their money to make SBF's victims whole.
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