Apparently Alameda took huge losses when Luna went down, and sloppy accounting prevented Bankman-Fried from realizing how bad it was. Also, his meetings with regulators were “PR.”
Hey, remember yesterday, when I said Changpeng “CZ” Zhao had painted a target on his exchange, Binance, by helping topple FTX?
Well, the Republican who’s most likely to lead the House Financial Services Committee told The Block that Binance’s role in the debacle will be part of a hearing in December.
Also, Sam Bankman-Fried told Bloomberg — before his spectacular fall from grace — that FTX made about $350 million in profit last year. I wondered if that was correct yesterday. Seems like no: Reuters, now reporting on FTX’s financials, says that number was actually $450 million. Bunch of other great details in the story too!
New job perk just dropped: a “career coach” who also serves as the personal therapist for a large swath of the company. From Vice:
In his telling, Lerner worked for FTX not exactly as a therapist and certainly not as a doctor, but as a coach, even as he maintained independent doctor-patient relationships with about 20 employees and prescribed medication to at least some of them.
In this capacity, Lerner said, he was focused on the well-being of the company’s employees, not only concerning himself with their careers, but their personal (and even dating) lives, at times searching out potential “dating options” for company employees in the Bahamas in order to keep them at the company without relying on in-office romance.
I feel like I’ve been saying “yikes” a lot, but it is my general sentiment about this whole thing. If you’re affected by BlockFi or FTX and want to talk, I’m liz@theverge.com, and I want to hear from you.
He had friends in high places — and they are probably embarrassed right now.
The most expensive forum drama of all time?
The “lack of clarity” around FTX and Alameda means BlockFi can’t operate as usual, the company says. The company had just launched a new crypto yield product three days ago.
You may remember Ligma from hoaxing reporters outside the Twitter headquarters. Well, after that, he got a fake job at FTX, where he has now been fake-laid-off again. I can only hope he gets laid off from every major meltdown from here on out.