This is f** wild. I don't understand level of incompetence it took to trust him with that much money. People who trusted them with this much money are fools. Fools with large $$$.
I figure the people giving him their money were just betting they were in at the relative top of the Ponzi. Everyone knows these are scams, they're just hoping to hit the jackpot and drop the bag on some other sucker before it all falls apart.
These stories sadden me because I can’t help but wonder, what else could you possibly “need” after your net-worth is above seven or eight? Figures?
Watching the Bernie Madoff documentary on Netflix I couldn’t get away from the question “why”? Same thing with the movie The Wolf of Wall Street. Why would someone “need” another 50 million dollars? How is it worth risking life in jail?
We know what happened. Smart rich kid uses his connections to get loaned $50M and gets wildly rich from arbitrage. I'm not sure why more and more people decided he was worth trusting with even more insane amounts of money, especially when it's just a gang of kids running the company.
A $100 million wire transfer. Is this literally how people invest in start-ups, just wiring huge sums of money to someone they do not know , on a promise/hope.
This has got to be one of the most absurd situations I've ever seen. Absolutely fucking insane that this could have even lasted that long. Every single charitable interpretation of this situation, every single possible way that they could have somehow argued their way out of it being a clear scam, it's all just obviously stealing.
I think it's absolutely absurd that "smart money" was pumped into this to the tune of billions upon billions of dollars. The popularity of this delusion, and the madness of the billion-dollar crowd is so much worse than anyone could have thought.
What a great man. Such a shame that he gave it all away to a bunch of scammers and then a different bunch of billionaire scammers come out and try to claim that they're affiliated with this great man to boost their own reputation when in fact they're nothing alike.
A lot of smart people knew he had to be a kind of fraud, but they thought he was their fraud -- it was assumed he was making money through some kind of front running.
To me, the craziest thing is that he basically lucked into an insanely profitable position and STILL ended up losing so much on his dumb hedge fund he started stealing from clients...
I watched the full NYT interview today and he's either an amazing well-coached liar (very possible) and or he really is a kid in way over his head, who got to take advantage of reputation circles (VCs, media, politicians, etc) to make reckless massive gambles without any adult risk-adverse old-school finance guys in the room.
Basically demonstrating zero personal responsibility for the the money he had control over.
Maybe more will come out to show he's is in fact a modern Bernie Madoff, with a grand hidden scheme at work to directly enrich himself, but that's not 100% obvious yet. I'm looking forward to what comes out in the future.
He also bought a mansion and a few cars and divorced and gambled a lot in Vegas and online casinos and hot stock tips?
What's amazing is that this person put his name in the WSJ as a gullible fool who can now be targeted by spearphishing scams (including that Crypto Recovery scam that has was even spamming HN recently) and shunned by his peers and potential clients.
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