Don’t expect the Left-wing press to admit it got snookered by a shibboleth-spewing schlub.
Sam Bankman-Fried, who is accused of pulling off a Madoff-level investment scam, somehow still has the media in his otherwise empty pockets. Even his own shocking admission that his “woke” persona was as big a fraud as his cryptocurrency exchange may not be enough to stem the deluge of journalistic valentines.
SBF, as the friendly press likes to refer to the phony philanthropist, lost billions of dollars of his clients’ money. His company, FTX, helpfully held the coins of people who didn’t want to bother with “cold storage,” the complicated process of personally securing their crypto investments. Except he didn’t hold the money, he blew it. Oh, and SBF’s company FTX, had a crypto token of its own which appears to have been a total scam.
Now that SBF’s empire has crumbled and he may be prison-bound, you might think the financial press would turn on him. After all, he made them look like complete fools for buying his seemingly selfless pledges to give away a fortune once estimated at $25 billion to save the globe from global warming, pandemics, and evil conservatives.
But much of the media still seems to believe SBF is the good guy who slept on a beanbag chair in his office and eschewed respectable attire and personal hygiene to focus on solving the world’s problems. After all, this was the man who hobnobbed with Bill Clinton and Tony Blair, donated about $30 million to Democrats for the midterms, and promised to give billions more to a host of causes. “Earning-to-give,” was his policy.
“If what you’re trying to do is donate, you should make as much as you can and give as much as you can,” Bankman-Fried told Recode last year.
What are the leftist media hiding in their coverage of the failed cryptocurrency exchange FTX?
Its CEO, Sam Bankman-Fried, was one of the biggest Democratic donors in the last election cycle – second only to George Soros. https://t.co/xigg7l6DcN
— Media Research Center (@theMRC) November 17, 2022
But now that he’s lost – or stolen — the money with which he was entrusted, SBF won’t be able to spend it to save humanity. A Washington Post headline on Wednesday lamented the price mankind may now pay because of SBF’s tragic plight.
“FTX collapse dooms founder’s effort to prevent another pandemic,” it read before someone at the newspaper that once called the head of ISIS an “austere religious scholar” mustered enough shame to change it to, “Before FTX collapse, founder poured millions into pandemic prevention.”
A saccharinely soft New York Times interview with SBF was published Monday under the headline, “How Sam Bankman-Fried’s Crypto Empire Collapsed.” A good editor might have distilled the answer down to something like, “He’s a crook,” or found a few places to deftly work the word “fraud” into the copy. A great editor might have sent it back to the writer with a subject line like, “WTF?”
No, the Old Gray Lady tied itself in knots portraying SBF as a well-meaning, big-hearted entrepreneur who maybe should have paid closer attention to his customers’ money. It didn’t press SBF on why he allegedly gave at least $4 billion of other people’s money to a hedge fund run by his novice investor on-and-off girlfriend, who promptly lost it. There was nothing about SBF’s private jet and over $40 million Bahamas real estate portfolio, allegedly fraudulent bookkeeping, mysteriously wiped servers, or that “hack” that emptied the last $400 million from FTX coffers as the company collapsed.
It’s worth noting that SBF’s victims included not just big players like crypto lender BlockFi, which may soon file for bankruptcy because of its exposure to FTX, but a bunch of regular folks, too. SBF had a strategy of recruiting beloved sports stars like Tom Brady, Shaquille O’Neal, and Stephen Curry to make cryptocurrency investments appeal to everyday people.
The real SBF revealed himself this week in a Twitter direct message interview with Vox’s Kelsey Piper. The fawning media will hate reading what he said almost as much as SBF’s lawyers.
“Man all the dumb s*** I said,” Bankman-Fried wrote. “It’s not true, not really … some of this decade’s greatest heroes will never be known, and some of its most beloved people are basically shams.”
Piper prodded him: “You were really good at talking about ethics, for someone who kind of saw it all as a game with winners and losers.”
‘Ya hehe – I had to be,” SBF replied. “It’s what reputations are made of, to some extent. I feel bad for those who get f***ed by it … by this dumb game we woke westerners play where we say all the right shiboleths and so everyone likes us.”
Next week, the New York Times and World Economic Forum partner Accenture plan to co-host a live event featuring Sam Bankman-Fried, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky, Meta chief Mark Zuckerberg, and Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen among others.
You would think one of those guests might be disinvited. Don’t be so sure.
The views expressed in this piece are the author’s own and do not necessarily represent those of The Daily Wire.