There has always been a great deal of fishiness surrounding the collapsed crypto exchange FTX and its founder and former CEO, Sam Bankman-Fried. The company seemed to appear out of nowhere. In the crypto industry, in which I’ve been hanging around for 10 years, he was a complete unknown.
And yet, his company quickly became one of the leading exchanges in the world before going belly up in a spectacular meltdown following the midterm elections.
The company was hyper-political. His brother ran a “nonprofit” that dished out millions to lefty politicians under the guise of promoting “pandemic planning.” His parents are well-connected Stanford University law professors. His aunt was the dean of public health at Columbia University and a well-known author and researcher.
FTX was ostensibly devoted to the concept of “effective altruism,” a trumped-up fake philosophy to justify getting as rich as possible and doling out your winnings to your friends. A main beneficiary was Oxford professor William David MacAskill—whose real surname is Crouch—who used the loot to buy a castle for his organization with FTX money.
Bankman-Fried (SBF) sloshed roughly $160 million around during 18 months when lockdowns, mandatory vaccines, and masking were all the rage in politics and academia. These worlds were swirling with excitement that SFB’s magic-bean factory in the Bahamas had every intention to shell out another $1 billion. He was the new Bill Gates, except even better because he dressed and acted like Mark Zuckerberg.
Venture capitalists loved him and would drop billions without a thought. This money moved through various shell companies and altruistically landed in connected political action committees that supported mostly Democrats and some pro-lockdown Republicans. It occurred to investigators that perhaps this whole operation was merely a way to skirt campaign-finance laws. That’s entirely believable.
So was it a money laundering operation? It certainly became that. But as time has gone on, and looking at the dates of the rise and fall (2020–22), it’s very possible that the entire company, especially given its familial and industrial pedigree, was set up from the beginning to become exactly what it did become. It was never a legit company but rather a conduit for payoffs.
But what if the intrigue runs even deeper? The Justice Department just tacked on another charge against SFB. It turns out that the genius bribed some Chinese officials to unlock $1 billion that had been frozen in China-based crypto exchanges. They did it for him for a cool $40 million.
I’m trying to think about all this fancy finance in a plain sort of way. With any kind of bribe of this sort, the person doing it needs to have two critical pieces of information. One must know who to bribe and also have some sense of certainty that the bribe will be accepted. That’s two very high barriers to entry into the bribery business.
To add to the implausibility, Bankman-Fried was just a disheveled gamer who attended MIT. How the heck did he know Chinese Communist Party-connected people who were in a position illegally to unlock crypto accounts and release fully $1 billion, plus sock away $40 million as a payment for the service? None of this really makes sense.
What does he do, ring up the Chinese Communist Party (CCP), ask to speak to a crypto regulator, get the guy on the phone, and start screaming “40 million for 1 billion” into the phone? Oh sure. In any case, it had to be either through secure messaging or a phone call because certainly conventional email wouldn’t work. Meanwhile, what happened to the CCP officials after it was discovered that they achieved this remarkable exchange?
The CCP really wanted the West to lock down. And the plot worked. Economies all over the world died even as Xi consolidated his own power. He later used lockdowns in his own country to destroy rival factions in China itself, which is why the lockdowns targeted Shanghai so hard. It was torturing rival power centers to make the point about who’s in charge.
It’s not really possible to understand the lockdown period in the United States/UK/European Union without understanding all the networks of funding and influence emanating from Beijing and its aspirations to turn the page of American prosperity and power. It’s a war to the knife, sadly. I happen to believe that the whole thing could have been avoided, but that’s a subject for another day.
The question that’s newly on my mind, especially given how strangely quiet the national media has been on Bankman-Fried’s depredations, is: Just how close was the money laundering operation called FTX to the CCP? Perhaps the bribe that Sam paid wasn’t as illicit as it might appear but rather reflects a well-established relationship. Keep in mind that we only know so far what the Justice Department is telling us, which we should wisely assume is only the tip of the iceberg.
There are enduring mysteries too concerning why Bankman-Fried has been so treated with kid gloves and even loving interviews from The New York Times, given the vast scale of the racket he was running. The contrast to Bernie Madoff is striking. But consider that a good actor such as Ross Ulbricht is facing several life sentences for making a website on which other people sold what’s now mostly legal marijuana! Meanwhile, SFB is languishing and gaming in his Palo Alto mansion.
It’s all deeply suspicious. One would further wish that we had reporters digging more deeply into this story. For all the world, and from all information we have so far, it certainly appears that FTX and Alameda Research were front orgs for CCP influence in Western political and intellectual life and not real companies.
What’s more, their collapse gave the pretext to crack down on the whole crypto industry in the drive for a central bank digital currency, which is currently being pushed by the Biden administration.
That’s about all the conspiracy theorizing I have for the day, and for those who are allergic to such speculations, I do apologize. And no, I can’t prove much of the above. It flows from existing data glued together with intuition born of deep study of three years of incredible calamity. The best way to diffuse such theorizing, on my part and on the part of many, is simple: Open the books. Open them all.
