New York Times Runs Softball Story on FTX’s Sam Bankman-Fried

Sam Bankman-Fried, CEO and Founder of FTX, walks near the U.S. Capitol, in Washington, D.C., on September 15, 2022.

Sam Bankman-Fried, CEO and Founder of FTX, walks near the U.S. Capitol, in Washington, D.C., on September 15, 2022.
Photo: Graeme Sloan/Sipa USA (AP)

FTX filed for bankruptcy on Friday, leaving reasonable people to wonder how a cryptocurrency platform founded in 2019, which reached a valuation of $32 billion in 2021, could plummet to zero in such a short time. There’s a new piece in the New York Times which gained exclusive access to FTX founder Sam Bankman-Fried, but if you’re looking for answers, you’re not going to find it there. In fact, the interview with SBF, as he’s often called, is presented with such a gauzy lens that you have to start wondering what the hell is going on with crypto reporting at the Times.

The new article in the New York Times by David Yaffe-Bellany lays out the facts in ways that are clearly beneficial to SBF’s version of the story and leaves many of his highly questionable assertions without proper context or even the most minimal amount of pushback. The result isn’t to illuminate the shadowy world of crypto. It reads like if the Times had conducted an interview with Bernie Madoff after his ponzi scheme collapsed and ultimately suggested he just made some bad investments.

As one example, take a paragraph near the beginning of the article that quotes SBF’s dealings with hedge fund Alameda Research, the sister organization of FTX, run by SBF’s sometime romantic partner…

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