Bankman-Fried was “dirty and rotten to the core,” according to short seller Marc Cohodes, one month prior to FTX’s implosion.
Photo: Alex Wong/Getty Images
There is a stereotype — often accurate — of a successful Silicon Valley investor: Vested with both Patagonia and series-A wealth, this venture capitalist has dispensed with the drudgery of dour Wall Street concerns (balance sheets and the like) and instead sees the world through a sunny California lens where business is life and life is people and the best businesses are produced by the few visionary founders able to grasp and embody that — Steve Jobs, Mark Zuckerberg, Jeff Bezos, and so on. But, of course, these founders’ ideas could only become realized with a few billion dollars of other people’s money. For the VC, finding one of these rare, transformative individuals is at the heart of everything they do — the quest has almost a spiritual significance. It is changing the world, and it is getting extremely rich in the process. (The nine- or ten-figure payoff is just the universe saying you backed the right founder.) Up until this month, Sam Bankman-Fried, founder of the wildly successful FTX crypto exchange and an associated hedge fund called Alameda Research, was on his way to the top of tech’s Mount Olympus: He was “the J.P….
