This FTX story is just fucking bonkers. Jessica Lessin’s coverage is spot on. “I would like to know whether Sequoia, SoftBank, Ribbit Capital and all the others who poured money into FTX knew about Alameda’s FTT holdings or even wanted to ask. You would think some of the smartest private tech investors in the world would have been looking into the issue. Even a modicum of diligence could have uncovered that huge potential liability. I wonder whether they also asked questions about FTX’s solvency, because yesterday Bankman-Fried said the exchange could cover the billions in redemptions that Binance’s move triggered. Today, it couldn’t.”
Matt Levine on FTX is a good read. “Is FTX worth tens of billions of dollars, if it can get through this week of heavy withdrawals and negative press? Maybe! Will Binance buying it allow it to get through this week of heavy withdrawals and negative press and return to profitability? Probably! Is Binance paying FTX tens of billions of dollars for its equity? I would be very, very, very surprised!”
Ed Zitron: The Death of a Statesman. “To really hammer it home: this is an incredibly bad situation, because this industry desperately needed Sam Bankman-Fried to keep being the respectable gentleman of the cryptocurrency world. Having SBF attend events with Bloomberg and say smart things about the economy was useful, because it suggested that there were executives in this industry that could both legally visit America and not commit massive amounts of fraud.”
Sean Garrett interviews Ashley Simon for Mixing Board. Sean’s an old colleague from Twitter; Ashley’s a more recent colleague from Medium, both are fantastic humans. And I loved this conversation. “I don’t know very many people, and I’m putting myself first here, that actually know how to live with failure and feel okay about it. Personally, I always still feel like something is wrong with me, or that I haven’t worked hard enough, smart enough, or whatever the case may be.”
Simon Willison: Mastodon is just blogs. That’s cool and all, but “get that kid a Mastodon!” is even worse than “get that kid a blog!”