As I read “Infinite Games” by Michael Lewis, I thought that SBF might be a modern day and Robin Hood. I decided to work with Bing Chat to help me explore this. You can see the chat here. What’s interesting is that Bing does a good job of drafting basic content on FTX and ethical altruism. It also does a good job of bringing up ideas I hadn’t thought of, specifically, “Is ethical altruism worse off because it’s figurehead is a criminal.” What’s really intersting is that Bing makes up content in a very odd way. It will say something like: check out Why I’m Giving Away All My Money by Sam Bankman-Fried which explains his philanthropy. However, the article has nothing to do with SBF.
Sam Bankman-Fried, or SBF, was the founder and CEO of FTX, a cryptocurrency exchange that went bankrupt in late 2022, leaving millions of investors in the lurch. He is now facing 13 criminal charges for fraud, money laundering, and other offences. But was he really a villain, or was he just trying to good in the world.
I occurred to me that SBF might be a sort of modern day Robin Hood, the legendary outlaw who stole from the rich and gave to the poor. He stole from the rich by creating a large crypto enterprise, FTX, which eventually went bankrupt, but he gave a large amount of money to the poor though Ethical Altruism.
He stole from the rich with FTX
SBF founded FTX in 2019 with his partner Gary Wang. FTX was a cryptocurrency exchange that offered various products and services. FTX quickly became one of the most popular and innovative platforms in the crypto space, attracting over one million users and billions of dollars in trading volume.
However, behind the scenes, FTX was always on shaky ground. SBF used his other company, Alameda Research, a trading firm that he also founded, to manipulate the prices of FTX’s native token, FTT. He also used customer funds to prop up Alameda’s trading positions and cover its losses.
In November 2022, everything came crashing down when a report by CoinDesk exposed FTX’s fraud and triggered a massive run on the exchange. FTX could not meet the demand for withdrawals and filed for bankruptcy. As a result, millions of investors lost their money and their trust in crypto. Many of them were wealthy individuals or institutions who had poured millions or billions into FTX.
He gave to the poor through ethical altruism
SBF was the face of the Ethical Alruism movement. Ethical altruism is a philosophy that states that people have a moral obligation to help, serve, or benefit others, even if it means sacrificing their own interests. Ethical altruists believe that an action is morally right if the consequences of that action are more favorable than unfavorable for everyone except the giver.
He donated millions of dollars to various causes, such as fighting climate change, ending malaria, promoting animal welfare, and supporting effective charities, and funding political campaigns. According to Lewis’s book, he told Caroline Ellison, “Jane Street was just a place to play some games and increase the number in their bank account. Alameida research was going to be different. It was a vessel to save a vast number of lives.”
In Lewi’s book, Sam seems to have been wanting to use the money for the best of society. However, as this Axios article points out, SBF gave relatively little in Effective Altruism, instead spending the vast majority of his money on political donations (which benefited him) or naming rights of stadiums. Overall, the idea that he was a modern-day Robin Hood are appealing but the facts don’t seem to bear that out.
This might also be interesting. What is Effective Altruism, the philosophy of FTX’s Sam Bankman Fried?? (indianexpress.com)