Twitter might provide more information than the NYT, but there's a reason NYT doesn't publish it - because the NYT wants to be reliable. They want their claims to actually stand up to scrutiny and be an accurate portrayal of the events we know happened. Whereas big chunks of this article are just pure speculation. The whole section about how Alameda might have had a rogue algo are just made up out of whole cloth. Is it true? Who knows, there's certainly no evidence for it, but let's stick it down as $1Bn of loss anyway.
This article is very little more than just a gossip rag version of the NYT article.
> This article is very little more than just a gossip rag version of the NYT article
This characterization is so far from the contents of the article I have to assume this comment is in bad faith or you're extremely biased towards the NYT.
The article is 90% discussing facts/quotes from various sources and 10% speculation on what actually happened by people who are very familiar with crypto markets.
The NYT piece on the other hand contains almost no facts (90% narrative) and throws a pity party for SBF. It's a complete joke.
I'm not biased towards the NYT, what I'm saying is that what the NYT is doing is a different thing from this article. The NYT is an interview with SBF, interspersed with the story of what happened, and the NYT will stick to what it can actually prove. You're pissed the NYT is biased towards SBF but it's not - it's an literally an interview with SBF, you're not meant to take what SBF is saying in there uncritically.
Whereas this article has a tonne of speculation (none of the stuff about market making has fact behind it, it's speculation based on a handful of tweets) and a heavy reliance on sources that are at best questionable. The stuff about the rogue algo is entirely without evidence, and the stuff about drug taking, whilst lurid, could be entirely tangential to why the company actually collapsed. The NYT isn't going to quote random anonymous users on an EA forum claiming to be ex-employees.
The NYT is not supposed to 'stick with what they can prove'.
That's definitely not the bar they have or else they wouldn't be able to publish much.
Journalists should be a bit cynical, dig for info. The NYT has more resources than anyone, and should be able to ask around, do some actual blockchain work, interview others.
This story looks like one of the biggest frauds in history, likely because it is, it's the job of the NYT to show at least there's a lot of smoke and put puzzle pieces together (obviously with context), they are not a formal judiciary.
There are so, so many crazy parts of this story that were not addressed it reeks of something awry. For example the co-CEO. There's almost nothing about this guy, as though he does not exist. That's a huge mystery and it's only one small artifact of the story.
This article raises as much suspicion as it clears up.
They might be working on that article, but such an article will take time because they'll want to reach out to the anonymous posters and talk to them directly, find people who can do the chain analysis, verify people's stories, etc.
It's pretty insane to me that you think the NYT would ever deliberately print accusations they couldn't prove.
I also think you're massively overstating the role of the NY Times, yes they have resources but they have to cover massive breadth. The NY Times isn't really going to be an expert in every topic, and there are real expert reporters out there who are going to dig in to this for specialist information. In this case there are reporters covering tech and finance - so you're going to see good articles from Levine, and the Odd Lots people, Michael Lewis was literally shadowing SBF for 6 months. Arguably the Odd Lots guys got to this first - basically getting SBF to admit he was running a ponzi in an interview - an admission that made absolutely no difference because everyone kind of knew it was all a scam anyway. If you said to me there's an article about FTX I would be looking for it in Bloomberg or the FT, not the NYT.
"NYT would ever deliberately print accusations they couldn't prove."
That statement implies a misrepresentation of what I said, and a misunderstanding of what journalists do.
Journalist investigate, source, and provide clarity.
This is one of the biggest frauds in history, it's the job of the NYT to investigate the issue, and show us what's up. If there's likely fraud, they should be spelling that out.
They've already admitted to using deposits to make risky bets at Alameda, which is fraud. There should have been a lot more questions about that alone. Just to start.
Instead, it was a light nothingburger puff piece.
There are better sourced artifacts on Twitter - this very article provides more valuable information that the NYT.
"basically getting SBF to admit he was running a ponzi in an interview - an admission that made absolutely no difference because everyone kind of knew it was all a scam anyway"
To suggest that the people with collectively billions in FTX 'knew it was a ponzi/fraud' and willingly lost all of their money is absurd.
> It's pretty insane to me that you think the NYT would ever deliberately print accusations they couldn't prove.
What are they doing when they cite "unnamed sources"? They constantly publish accusations that they have no intention of ever backing up. I'm not saying that they don't believe their sources, but "100% bulletproof" has never been their standard.
>The NYT piece on the other hand contains almost no facts
Did you even read it? It has plenty of facts and public statements. It creates a thorough timeline of all things that happened over years.
The NYT article is headlined "How Sam Bankman-Friedʼs Crypto Empire Collapsed". The parts of the article which actually answer this question are, in their totality, as follows:
> Alameda had accumulated a large “margin position” on FTX, essentially meaning it had borrowed funds from the exchange,
Par 6. Common knowledge, finance-splained and followed by equivocation and hand-waving from SBF.
> On Nov. 6, Mr. Zhao announced on Twitter that he was selling the FTT, spooking customers who rushed to withdraw their FTX deposits
Common knowledge for more than a week (in par 28). More well-known things about the Zhao deal in the next couple of pars. Obv suggesting the two key questions, why did they need a bailout in the first place, and what was wrong with the business that led Zhao not to invest? Needless to say, neither of them is answered in the article.
> Her voice shaking, she apologized, saying she had let the group down. Over recent months, she said, Alameda had taken out loans and used the money to make venture capital investments, among other expenditures.
> Around the time the crypto market crashed this spring, Ms. Ellison explained, lenders moved to recall those loans, the person familiar with the meeting said. But the funds that Alameda had spent were no longer easily available, so the company used FTX customer funds to make the payments. Besides her and Mr. Bankman-Fried, she said, two other people knew about the arrangement: Mr. Singh and Mr. Wang.
> The meeting was previously reported by The Wall Street Journal.
Several day old scuttlebutt taken from another newspaper in par 30+. (And nicely written to suggest that it's an urgent eyewitness dispatch "Her voice shaking")
That's it. Literally no actual news reporting was done in this article.
The high standards of reliability and standing up to scrutiny are worthless, because they are not actually applied to any useful or new information, but just to the human interest color that 90% of the piece consists of. Yes, the 'facts' that SBF has 15 room-mates and not 12, and that he plays League of Legends not Terraria are rigorously fact-checked, but they might as well not be. The actual question of Where did the money go is completely ignored beyond what is widely known.
This isn't news reporting, it's a form of entertainment journalism, which allows people out of the loop to get a sense of the excitement and glamor of what's it like to live in the Bahamas and have your crypto exchange go bankrupt. (And it equally fulfils the desire for other clueless people to tut and sigh over the way the world is going.)
I think you're misunderstanding what the NYT article is, it's not a piece of deep investigative journalism, it's an interview with SBF with context attached.
I am generally curious what your position is here? You seem to be arguing the NYT article is not a fluff piece but then with this comment you admit its not investigative journalism but rather a fluff piece? I don't understand.
> This isn't news reporting, it's a form of entertainment journalism
I don't see where you're justifying that. I read this article and it gave me a good overview of the situation. You're right, I guess, that it's not "new" investigative journalism and that if I'd been paying better attention I could have found the same info elsewhere and earlier.
I don't see how a correctly-reported review piece becomes "entertainment journalism" though. Do you make the same article about wikipedia?
I justified it, at length, in the above comment by pointing out how little real information there was in the article about what had actually happened to BTX and Alameda.
I did not say anything about "new investigative journalism". I said it was not news reporting.
The claim that is is entertainment journalism is very simple. This type of piece is written, not to inform, but to entertain. That's why it focusses on color and character, while missing basic story details - the 5 W's, any overview of how the bankrupt businesses worked, etc. Such pieces are often designed to give the impression of information, because this impression is part of the entertainment experience. You can easily find decent and free writing on this topic which provides way better analysis and is generally accurate and honest.
As you have probably noticed, stories about scams and frauds are a very big business, and articles about them are now part of a well-worn pipeline by which books, movies and mini series are made. Very few of these have any commitment either to accuracy in general or to useful information about why such scams are possible, why they are socially important, or how they can be stopped. They exist merely to entertain and titillate. A writer like the author of this piece, will be aware that they are part of this machine, and that there is lots of career advancement to be made in writing fluff about grifters, particularly in a way which tends to get you closer to other grifters.
Wikipedia is not news reporting either. Not sure of your point, however note that the wikipedia page about Sam Bankman-Fried, while shorter than the NYT article, contains vastly more detailed information about his career, and has 85 citations to its sources.
I'm still not understanding what part of the article you think is incorrect, and/or what information you wanted it to contain that it didn't. All this meta stuff about "what the article is for" is just confusing me.
Again, I read it and liked it. If you don't want me to read this piece, what summary should I be reading?
I'm not the OP but to me the article did everything in its power to muddy the waters. It seems to try get me to feel bad for or even like someone who appears to have committed major crimes and lost billions of peoples money. If you didn't know anything about the situation and read this article you would think Sam did nothing wrong, is blameless, and just had some bad luck.
Not once did the article tackle the question of where did the money go or why is it okay for this persons company to misplace billion of dollars of customer money?
The on-chain anaylsis, digging and commentary done by people on Twitter has been insanely insightful.