He is a an exceedingly large donor to the establishment, especially to the party currently in charge (matters not which one). With his connections, he is in the different tier. No judgement here on whether it’s good or bad.
despite having donated to both parties extensively, i think it's largely a perceptional issue. while the FTX collapse IS mainstream news, the mainstream largely isn't impacted and has already written off crypto as a massive scam. so in some regards, i think joe regular-guy enjoys the spectacle of crypto people losing their money because it validates their skepticism of the entire ecosystem.
for either party to feel really motivated to arrest or prosecute, they'd want joe regular-guy to be clamoring for that action and i don't think that's the case.
He admitted donating to Republican dark money groups. He claims he donated roughly the same amount to conservative causes as he did with Democratic orgs. Plus, another exec in his organization, Ryan Salame, donated $24 million to Republican candidates.
Between Sam's dark money donations and Ryan's $24 million, it's possible Republicans received more FTX money than Democrats. I don't know if that's true, but it's possible.
Sam is a liar, that much is a widely documented fact. That much is known. Your numbers are incomplete and misleading.
We somehow know both SBF and Ryan Salame's personal donations, and he claims dark money went to Republicans but how much dark money went to Democrats? 0? What about the other staffers at FTX? SBF has appeared in public with Maxine Waters and Bill Clinton. His own mother is a major Silicon Valley booster for the Democrats [1]. You telling me no money made it to his own mother's Democrat PAC?
Sam's public claims are not reliable. He is a pathological liar. He manipulated his own accounting books to make his company appear solvent for fundraising purposes. You cannot trust the damage control PR of a pathological liar.
These are the numbers we know. I can't assess the numbers we don't know. That's why I was careful to use the words "possible" and "not sure if this is true". I wasn't trying to be misleading. I fully understood there might be donations we don't know about. But I guess that was for naught since you're calling me a liar anyways.
I would tend to believe him on the Republican dark money. Sam needs all the help he can get right now. It makes sense to make these donations public knowledge. Plus, in the legalized bribery known as campaign donations, it makes sense to donate to both sides. Most companies which do political donations make donations to both. A few very ideological execs will only donate to this side or that, but Sam doesn't strike me as one of those.
Maybe I'm wrong. But I doubt it. The winning move is to donate to both sides. If the Republicans received zero from Sam, they'd have every reason to reveal this to the world. To hurt Democrats and punish the guy who gave them nothing. But the Republicans aren't doing this. Silence to me is evidence that Sam gave at least part of what he claimed.
As for the numbers we don't know, I'm not making any claims. Maybe a billion went to Democratic PACs. Maybe nothing did. Who knows? It's worthless making assessments on this until further evidence comes out.
We're talking about a major political donor who just defrauded people for billions of dollars, whose parents are extremely well connected to the DNC and have actually written a substantial amount of legislation put forward by Democratic lawmakers, and who was sleeping with the niece of the current head of the SEC who was appointed by Biden. He has every single motivation to lie about this.
Oh my god dude, his parents are tax professors, you are being so incredibly disingenuous with your posts and then to hem and haw about conspiracy theories in response.
Now that's a conspiracy theory worthy of a movie with, say, Aaron Taylor Johnson as SBF and Margot Robbie as his gf (I think she should be pretty in the movie!)
His co-president gave over $20M to republicans and some republican congressmen were among his staunchest defenders and were actively trying to prevent the SEC from investigating. It would behoove people to read a little bit about the case before they start pontificating on their pet conspiracy theories.
I saw elsewhere you're now claiming that SBF was sleeping with Gensler's niece which is a straight lie as far as I can tell? I think it's just a mistaken reference to Caroline Ellison's dad working in a different department at MIT when Gensler was there?
> Cynically, this makes sense to me as what he was buying was really lack of government oversight.
Yeah, I think a lot of people forget that for something like this he didn't need to actually get the government to do anything: simply delaying action gave him the chance to do hundreds of millions of dollars in fraud.
It's been coming out that he donated lots to them too so I guess we'll see. My impression overall though is that he will end up in jail, it's just going to take a while for everyone who received his money to come to terms with the scale of his fraud.
It's a dumb conspiracy in the first place -- he was a large donor to some congressional candidates, many of whom lost (over $10M of his 2022 funds went to a losing candidate in an Oregon primary). In any case, it's obvious he has zero money and zero future prospects to be politically useful so there's no reason that anyone in charge would go out of their way to "protect" him (contrary to someone like Corzine, Menendez or Rick Scott).
These theories are just weird HN conspiracies to add mystique to the very normal slow Federal justice process.
If you were a politician interested in getting more of that sweet fraudster money, tell me, what would you do to send a signal that you're open for business to the next batch of fraudsters, hang the guy that paid you, or help him out?
Sure, this may just be bullshit, we dont know, etc etc, but "he has no more money" is not a very good argument
