Amid all the jubilation and gloating by Joe Biden, Chuck Schumer and pals over the Democrats’ better-than-expected showing in the midterms comes a disturbing story that may explain something about how they won such a curious election.
Biden’s second-biggest donor, cryptocurrency billionaire wunderkind Sam Bankman-Fried, a k a SBF, saw his business file for bankruptcy days after the election, but not before pumping $40 million into the Democratic Party to spend on “get-out-the-vote” and other shadowy ballot-harvesting mechanics for the midterms.
The shambolic 30-year-old whiz kid, once said to have been worth $16 billion, had spent $10 million helping get Biden elected in 2020.
SBF’s mother, Stanford law professor Barbara Fried, also is co-founder of left-wing political action committee Mind The Gap, which has raised a reported $140 million to help Democrats win elections through the same “get-out-the-vote” grift.
A more unlikely billionaire you could not find — and of course his money was built on thin air. A math genius with poor social skills, SBF reportedly lived in a “polycule” — a polyamorous relationship with multiple people — in a luxury penthouse with about 10 co-workers in the tax haven of the Bahamas, where his collapsed crypto exchange FTX was headquartered.
Otherwise, he was sleeping on beanbags in his office, eating vegan fries and, according to his own Twitter feed, popping amphetamines and sleeping pills to regulate his chaotic sleeping habits.
Now Reuters is reporting that between $1 billion and $2 billion of customer funds have vanished from FTX, conveniently after the Democrats safely spent his money.
At last report, SBF and his mysterious co-founder, Gary Wang, were being held “under supervision” by Bahamian authorities after reportedly planning to flee to Dubai, according to fintech publication Cointelegraph.
It is a stunning fall to earth. The financial media and big investors have feted the young billionaire as a saint who shunned earthly pleasures like Lamborghinis and Rolexes, but lived only to give away all his money and make the world a better place.
He was the most famous millennial adherent of a cult known as “Effective Altruism,” which originated at Oxford University, found fertile ground in Silicon Valley — and now has gone down in flames along with him.
EA is a disguised form of socialism, because all the “good” that is done just happens to match up perfectly with the left’s obsessions, whether climate change, social justice, equity, banning meat or his favorite, “pandemic preparedness.”
In a Nas Daily online video, an awkward Bankman-Fried was featured this year as a role model of altruism for young people: “Sam is not a traditional billionaire because he believes in the concept of ‘earn to give’ … Next decade he will probably give away more than $10 million … He wants to get rich in order to impact the world and change it.”
SBF certainly “impacted” the midterms, funneling his millions into the Democratic National Committee and Democrat-friendly PACs such as Protect Our Future and Guarding Against Pandemics.
He donated to committees aligned with Nancy Pelosi and Chuck Schumer to help Democrats win races.
He lavished his largesse on “pro-crypto Democrats” like New York Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand, who was sponsoring a bill to lock the Securities and Exchange Commission out of regulating the crypto market.
He also visited the White House, meeting with top Biden adviser Steve Ricchetti on April 22 and May 12, according to the Washington Free Beacon.
No wonder the Biden administration has been weak on regulating the crypto market. It was the goose that laid the golden egg.
Meanwhile, the media massaged his profile.
Both Forbes and Fortune had him on the cover. “The next Warren Buffett?” asked Fortune.
Never mind that the actual Warren Buffett consistently ripped SBF’s product, cryptocurrency, as worthless.
“It draws in a lot of charlatans,” said Buffett, “where people who are of less-than-stellar character see an opportunity to clip people who are trying to get rich because their neighbor is getting rich buying this stuff that neither one of them understand. It will come to a bad end.”
But what would he know.
SBF appeared with Bill Clinton and Tony Blair at international crypto summits, and with Tom Brady in glitzy TV ads and social media videos.
Larry David did a big Super Bowl ad for FTX, all designed to trick unsuspecting Americans into losing their shirts on what was quite simply a Ponzi scheme.
“I’m all in. Are you?” said the celebrities.
Another “altruistic” venture by SBF was having FTX back a cryptocurrency donation website launched by the Ukrainian government. There wasn’t a woke cause he didn’t hit.
The sinister neo-socialists at the World Economic Forum (WEF) loved SBF so much, they made FTX a “corporate partner” — but that page on the WEF website has vanished in the last 48 hours, leaving an error message.
Venture capital firm Sequoia was a big backer, investing over $200 million in SBF, a lot of which he then invested back in Sequoia, whose chairman and managing partner Michael Moritz is a big donor to the Dems as well as to anti-Trump hate group the Lincoln Project, and reportedly is a neighbor of Nancy Pelosi in San Francisco.
Six weeks ago, Sequoia hired a freelance writer, Adam Fisher, to write a puff piece on SBF, depicting him as a “future trillionaire … I don’t know how I know, I just do. SBF is a winner … I couldn’t shake the feeling that this guy is actually as selfless as he claims to be.”
The article, which was replaced on Sequoia’s website over the weekend with a somber note to investors, describes how SBF wowed Seqouia’s partners into giving him $1 billion during a Zoom meeting throughout which he played multiplayer online video game League of Legends.
“I LOVE THIS FOUNDER,” typed one partner.
“I am a 10 out of 10,” pinged another.
“YES!!!” exclaimed a third.
Fisher visited Bankman-Fried in the Bahamas, describing a man who does not make eye contact, plays video games all day and is constantly plugged into his computer with a headset. All his meetings are by Zoom — with people in the same room.
The author concludes that the FTX founder is “neurodiverse,” but not “spectrum-y or Asperger-y.” SBF says he has “some ADD,” and never has read a book, as information should be in “a six-paragraph blog post.”
The article describes Bankman-Fried’s recruitment into the EA cult when he was a young man at MIT as being “nerd-sniped,” which is “the practice of attracting brainpower by presenting problems as puzzles.”
In other words, SBF’s analytical IQ and social ineptitude made him a prime recruit for the cause of hijacking capitalism to divert money to left-wing causes.
Like Greta Thunberg, the teenage eco-evangelist, SBF was manipulated into serving a useful purpose.
In his case, it was money made from nothing that arrived in Democratic coffers at exactly the right time.
The very least the Democratic Party should do is refund the $40 million to the people who were ripped off by their crypto benefactor.
www.cnbc.com
