... and it’s not just because of the Bankman-Frieds or Elizabeth Holmes.
Marc Tessier-Lavigne, the president of Stanford, is also under investigation for scientific misconduct. There are also lawsuits around student deaths and a person who posed as an undergrad on campus for a whole year.
[The San Francisco Standard]
Joseph Bankman and Barbara Fried, parents of Sam Bankman-Fried, won’t be teaching at Stanford next quarter.
The two taught at Stanford Law School. This news was first reported by the Stanford Daily, and Fried told those journalists that it has “nothing to do with anything else going on.” Just a normal retirement, sure.
[Intelligencer]
What happens when a story has impact?
Me, in May, writing about failed crypto: “Sam Bankman-Fried, the founder of FTX, listed Luna and Terra on his exchange despite having a pretty good idea of what was going to happen.”
The New York Times, today: “Federal prosecutors are investigating whether FTX’s founder, Sam Bankman-Fried, manipulated the market for two cryptocurrencies this past spring, leading to their collapse and creating a domino effect that eventually caused the implosion of his own cryptocurrency exchange last month, according to two people with knowledge of the matter.”
Man, if SBF cut the brakes of the car he was riding in, I am never going to stop laughing.
[The New York Times]
Incredible lede:
At a dazzling new hotspot in the center of Miami’s crypto scene, the remains of Sam Bankman-Fried’s collapsed empire are stuffed in trash bags.
Hundreds of FTX Miami T-shirts. A framed FTX-branded Heat jersey. A poster signed by chess grandmaster Magnus Carlsen in an FTX-sponsored tournament. Navy FTX bean bags, evoking where the now-bankrupt exchange’s whiz kid claims he slept.
You should click through for the photos alone, but the party reporting is top-notch, too.
Signature, a big name in crypto banking, is backing away from the sector after this year’s turmoil. Almost a quarter of its $103 billion in customer deposits was crypto-industry-related as of November, The Financial Times reports.
Writing in literary magazine n+1, Laura Preston tells us what it was like to impersonate Brenda, a chatbot whose fallbacks were “poets and writers with MFAs, but there were also PhDs in performance studies and comparative literature, as well as a number of opera singers.”
Getting this talent was possible because, at $25/hr, they got paid better than they would as adjuncts in academia.
The only way to keep pace with the inbox was to go into a state of focus so intense that at times I felt on the verge of astral projection. I heard nothing and felt nothing, not even the cues of my body. I sometimes became light-headed, and it would occur to me that I hadn’t been breathing. A senior operator watched our inbox stats at all times, and if a message went unanswered for more than a few minutes, we were in for a public shaming on Slack.
Silvergate Capital, a famous crypto bank, has filed a letter with the SEC from its CEO, Alan Lane. Apparently, he is using it to correct what he terms “speculation — and misinformation — being spread by short sellers and other opportunists.”
Okay! Unfortunately for Lane, this question raises more questions than it answers, such as what his “extensive due diligence” on FTX and Alameda consisted of!