FTX Collapses
FTX, valued at $32B in a January 2022 funding round, filed for bankruptcy in November after a CoinDesk report on the balance sheet of sister firm Alameda Research triggered a customer run. Roughly $8B in customer funds were missing, commingled with Alameda's trading positions. Founder Sam Bankman-Fried had spent two years cultivating endorsements from TV hosts, politicians, athletes, and CEOs. He was convicted on seven felony counts in November 2023 and sentenced to 25 years in federal prison in March 2024.
SBF appeared on Bloomberg, Forbes, Vox, and the front pages of multiple 'future of finance' pieces. The post-mortem exposed the reality of the era's 'narrative layer' — a network of podcasters, analysts, and reporters who were paid or positioned, directly or indirectly, not to ask hard questions.
06 · Social Media & Algorithms
Anyone with a phone is a potential market-moving source. Reddit can force a hedge fund into bankruptcy. A single tweet can swing two trillion in market cap. Now the accounts and the readers are both partly AI.
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