NEW YORK, March 15 (Reuters) - Sam Bankman-Fried should spend between 40 and 50 years in prison after being convicted for stealing $8 billion from customers of his now-bankrupt FTX cryptocurrency exchange, prosecutors said on Friday. … “Even now Bankman-Fried refuses to admit what he did was wrong,” prosecutors wrote in a sentencing memorandum. “His life in recent years has been one of unmatched greed and hubris; of ambition and rationalization; and courting risk and gambling repeatedly with other people’s money.”
This makes no sense. He himself was a billionaire who fucked over both rich and non rich people. Just because he failed and took other rich people down a peg doesn’t make him some sort of martyr.
How did he become a billionaire? From what I’ve heard his parents were connected and well-off, but not billionaires. And he doesn’t seem old enough to have made billions on his own before FTX. If he only became a billionaire by temporarily scamming people, I don’t think that counts.
He was supposed to have made his money before FTX by doing crypto currency arbitrage, but people have gone back and done the maths and his supposed profits were mathematically impossible (or just exceedingly improbable). The fact that his crime here was investors money went straight into a slush fund for his and his friends personal use suggested he didn’t make that much money first either.