Scamodelic!

What the hallucinatory rise and fall of Sam Bankman Fried and FTX tells us about the solvency of our political and economic system

“Boy wonder” Sam Bankman Fried with two other aging children

I am excited to keep exploring metaphysical and esoteric ideas in this newsletter. What I intend to do, next time, is compare and contrast the vision of existence found in Indo-Tibetan Buddhism with that of Western occultism, particularly investigating the incredible ideas of Rudolf Steiner. But before doing that, I feel the need to deviate.

I find myself compelled to look, briefly, into last week’s amazing cryptocurrency crash: The sudden, spectacular meltdown of 30-year-old Sam Bankman Fried and FTX, his exchange. SBF went from being one of the world’s wealthiest people ($26 billion estimated net worth) to having negative-zilch, under police surveillance in the Bahamas, probably headed for a long prison term, over the course of a few days. In it its own way, this is quite an achievement.

Let’s continue to lionize wealth for wealth’s sake, until the Earth dies.

I find SBF’s name, in retrospect, to be hilarious (how can the universe be so perfect?): He is, indeed, the fried — fricassee’d — bank man. Apparently SBF was addicted to amphetamines as well as the computer game, League of Legends. You can see him trembling awkwardly in recent interviews. Post-collapse, he has taken to issuing obscure one-letter Tweets at eight-hour intervals. He doesn’t seem to quite understand what has happened to him, or what he has done.

I can’t help it: I feel kind of bad for rumpled, amoral, childlike SBF. As I read about him, I learn he had a “polycule” in the Bahamas, living with a small coterie of classmates from MIT who also worked for him. One of his main girlfriends, 28-year-old LARP-and-amphetamine enthusiast Caroline Ellison, was also the CEO of Alameda, his trading firm — the broken cog in the machine that brought FTX down. It turned out that SBF was secretly, illegally funneling billions of FTX customer funds to Alameda, which had big debts, potentially linked to last season’s invigorating collapse of the Terra/Luna crypto-ecosystem.