Business
The SBF Scandal: The Players and the Money
From the Brownstone Institute
The complexities of the FTX scandal with Sam Bankman-Fried at the helm boggles the mind. Unlike the Madoff scandal, which was incredibly simple, the funding, influence, and political networks sounding the $32 billion collapse of FTX is byzantine by design.
Just have a look at the org chart of the company to get a sense. It’s all the better for avoiding oversight.
What we really need in the months or even years in which it will take to sort all of this out is some kind of key to the major players. What follows is a list which we’ve put together in order of network importance for easy reference. This small effort is made necessary because there seems to be very little attention being given to the entire SBF empire, both in terms of the players with whom he worked and where the money ended up.
It’s nowhere near being a guide to the fullness of the networks of funding and influence, and can only begin to hint at the real story of what was really behind this magic bean factory in the Bahamas. Their operations and networks are deliberately obscure and fan out over many countries, institutions, and individuals. There is a strange silence in the air about the details other than the general observation that Sam Bankman-Fried was up to no good.
And yet there were obviously many people involved. It’s probable that the main point was to fund political causes in a way that gets around federal election law, as the indictment suggests in count eight. However, a close examination of the networks keeps coming back to the strange theme of pandemic planning and support for various methods of controlling the population in the name of controlling infectious disease. Aside from political donations, this was a central concern. What that has to do with a crypto exchange is another matter.
All of which should raise a question given the time of the life of FTX (2019-2022): to what extent was the network surrounding this institution useful in providing back-channel funding support for (and lack of opposition to) the most unprecedented attack on human liberty in our lifetimes? This question applies to both the direct political contributions and the various other donations to institutions and individuals.
Corrections to this list are welcome.
Family
Sam Bankman-Fried: Went to MIT, worked for Centre for Effective Altruism (fundraising 2017) and started Alameda Research in November 2017, and then the crypto trading company FTX two years later, which he ran until 2022 when it all collapsed after becoming the second-largest donor to Democrats ($38M).
Barbara Helen Fried: mother of Sam, Harvard Law graduate, professor at Stanford University, booster of Effective Altruism, and founder of Mind the Gap, a secretive political action committee in Silicon Valley.
Alan Joseph Bankman: father of Sam, Yale Law graduate and later clinical psychologist, law professor at Stanford, and author and expert on tax law.
Linda Fried: Sam’s aunt on his mother’s side and Dean of School of Public Health at Columbia University and on the board of the World Economic Forum’s Global Agenda Council on Aging.
Gabriel Bankman-Fried: Sam’s brother who ran Guarding Against Pandemics, a lobbying organization supporting “pandemic planning” also known as lockdowns and vaccine mandates. It has a Capitol Hill headquarters that cost $3.3 million. He previously served on a Congressional staff.
Associates
Caroline Ellison: Schooled at Stanford, she is daughter of Glenn Ellison and Sara Fisher Ellison, both professors at MIT. She became CEO of Sam’s Alameda Research and reported girlfriend of Sam’s.
Sara Fisher Ellison and Glenn Ellison: Caroline’s mother is professor of economics at MIT with a research specialization in the pharmaceutical industry while her father has written at least four papers on epidemiological modeling.
Nishad Singh: former MIT roommate of Sam’s who is said to have built the FTX platform. He seems to have left the Bahamas for India.
Zixiao “Gary” Wang: Co-founder with Sam of FTX and Alameda. He graduated from MIT and worked for Google. Beyond that hardly anything is known about him. He seems to have left the Bahamas and is reported to be in Hong Kong.
Ryan Salame: Graduate of UMass-Amherst and head of FTX Digital Markets, plus proprietor of R Salame Digital Asset Fund through the Berkshire Taconic Community Foundation, allegedly for charitable purposes.
William David MacAskill: real name Crouch, William is an author and philosopher and founder of the Centre for Effective Altruism and a close colleague of Sam’s. He served on the board of FTX Future Fund until it collapsed. He is a media personality who gives TED talks and is a leader purveyor of the view that one should get very rich and give it away.
Funded Institutions and Individuals (some taken from here)
Together Trial: This elaborate trial of therapeutics ended up inveighing against Ivermectin and Hydroxychloroquine and was generously funded by FTX. But that has been scrubbed from the public website. This is a continuing problem.
Moncef Slaoui: The head of Operation Warp Speed, he received $150,000 from FTX to write SBF’s autobiography, according to a Washington Post investigation.
HelixNano: A vaccine company that claims to be developing mutation-resistant vaccines, which received $10M in funding from FTX Future Fund, according to a Washington Post investigation.
Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security: This institution ran the Event 201 lockdown tabletop exercise in 2019, and received at least $175,000 for a single employee, from FTX coffers. We don’t know the full extent but it was enough for the head of the Center to defend Sam and FTX in public. Nor do we know Alameda Research’s funding reach of this institution.
Guarding Against Pandemics: Run by Sam’s brother Gabriel, this 501c4 gave at least $1M to campaigns in 2022. We do not know how much money Alameda/FTX funneled to this institution. Sam fequently recommend it as a target for charitable giving.
Protect Our Future: run by the two brothers, this PAC gave $28M to candidates in the 2022 cycle. We do not know how much Alameda/FTX gave.
Center for Innovation in Global Health, Stanford University: FTX and its network gave $1.5M to the institution.
ProPublica: A grant of $5M from FTX Future Fund. Other reports say $27 million.
Centre for Effective Altruism: FTX Future fund gift of $14M
Effective Ideas Blog: It promised to pay $1K to good blogs, and its Twitter frequently links to other institutions and individuals in the FTX network. Funded by Future Fund: $900K
Piezo Therapeutics: “Work on technology for delivering mRNA vaccines without lipid nanoparticles with the aim of making vaccines more safe, affordable, and scalable.” FTX gave $1M
Council on Strategic Risks: “a project which will develop and advance ideas for strengthening regional and multilateral cooperation for addressing biological risks.” $400K from FTX
AVECRIS Pte. Ltd: “support the development of a next-generation genetic vaccine platform that aims to allow for highly distributed vaccine production using AVECRIS’s advanced DNA vector delivery technology.” $3.6M from FTX
University of Ottawa: “a project to develop new plastic surfaces incorporating molecules that can be activated with low-energy visible light to eradicate bacteria and kill viruses continuously.” FTX gave $250K
1Day Sooner: “work on pandemic preparedness, including advocacy for advance market purchase commitments, collaboration with the UK Pandemic Ethics Accelerator.” FTX gave $300K.
SAGE: “creation of a pilot version of a forecasting platform, and a paid forecasting team, to make predictions about questions relevant to high-impact research.” FTX gave $700K
Longview: “global priorities research, nuclear weapons policy, and other longtermist issues.” Advisor: William MacAskill. FTX gave $15M
Confirm Solutions: “support development of statistical models and software tools that can automate parts of the regulatory process for complex clinical trials.” FTX gave $1M
Lightcone Infrastructure: “ongoing projects including running the LessWrong forum, hosting conferences and events, and maintaining an office space for Effective Altruist organizations.” FTX gave $2M
Rational Animations: “the creation of animated videos on topics related to rationality and effective altruism to explain these topics for a broader audience.” FTX gift: $400K
Giving What We Can: “to create a world in which giving effectively and significantly is a cultural norm.” FTX gift: $700,000
The Atlas Fellowship: scholarships for talented and promising high school students to use towards educational opportunities and enrolling in a summer program. FTX gift: $5M
Constellation: “support 18 months of operations for a longtermist coworking space in Berkeley.” FIX coughed up $3.9M
Longview Philanthropy: “creating a longtermist coworking office in London.” FTX committed $2.9M
Long Term Future Fund: “longtermist grantmaking.” FTX committed $3.9M
OurWorldinData: graphs and charts portal. FTX committed $7.5M
Institute for Progress: “research and policy engagement work on high-skilled immigration, biosecurity, and pandemic prevention.” FTX was in for $480K. Additional support came from Emergent Ventures, which was modeled on Fast Grants that funded Neil Ferguson’s pandemic modeling at Imperial College London, which seems to have an entangled relationship with the SFB empire, one yet to be fully disclosed.
Conclusion
What is listed above only scratches the surface of the admitted $160 million given out, but the promise had been for fully $1 billion to go to various nonprofits in this network that seems to be supported or even founded in order to receive money from FTX-connected institutions.
We could only list some of the names and a fraction of the dollar amounts. There are many other institutions and names that could be part of this list but we lacked enough documentation to verify for this article. There is still the task of listing all political campaigns that were in receipt of the money as well as the public-relations boosters of the whole effort.
Building off the success of Bill Gates, Sam Bankman-Fried, and his many associates, clearly saw philanthropy as the path to influence, power, and protection. At the same time, many nonprofit organizations saw an opportunity too; to build their own empires through promised millions and billions from a crypto genius in the Bahamas who had an unusual passion for pandemic planning.
For three years, many of us have wondered how it came to be that the critics of lockdowns and mandates were so few and far between. There are surely many explanations but, as usual, it helps fill in the dots to follow the money.
Author
I Testified Before a Senate Committee About the CBC
I recently testified before the Senate Committee for Transport and Communications. You can view that session here. Even though the official topic was CBC’s local programming in Ontario, everyone quickly shifted the discussion to CBC’s big-picture problems and how their existential struggles were urgent and immediate. The idea that deep and fundamental changes within the corporation were unavoidable seemed to enjoy complete agreement.
I’ll use this post as background to some of the points I raised during the hearing.
You might recall how my recent post on CBC funding described a corporation shedding audience share like dandruff while spending hundreds of millions of dollars producing drama and comedy programming few Canadians consume. There are so few viewers left that I suspect they’re now identified by first name rather than as a percentage of the population.
Since then I’ve learned a lot more about CBC performance and about the broadcast industry in general.
For instance, it’ll surprise exactly no one to learn that fewer Canadians get their audio from traditional radio broadcasters. But how steep is the decline? According to the CRTC’s Annual Highlights of the Broadcasting Sector 2022-2023, since 2015, “hours spent listening to traditional broadcasting has decreased at a CAGR of 4.8 percent”. CAGR, by the way, stands for compound annual growth rate.
Dropping 4.8 percent each year means audience numbers aren’t just “falling”; they’re not even “falling off the edge of a cliff”; they’re already close enough to the bottom of the cliff to smell the trees. Looking for context? Between English and French-language radio, the CBC spends around $240 million each year.
Those listeners aren’t just disappearing without a trace. the CRTC also tells us that Canadians are increasingly migrating to Digital Media Broadcasting Units (DMBUs) – with numbers growing by more than nine percent annually since 2015.
The CBC’s problem here is that they’re not a serious player in the DMBU world, so they’re simply losing digital listeners. For example, of the top 200 Spotify podcasts ranked by popularity in Canada, only four are from the CBC.
Another interesting data point I ran into related to that billion dollar plus annual parliamentary allocation CBC enjoys. It turns out that that’s not the whole story. You may recall how the government added another $42 million in their most recent budget.
But wait! That’s not all! Between CBC and SRC, the Canada Media Fund (CMF) ponied up another $97 million for fiscal 2023-2024 to cover specific programming production budgets.
Technically, Canada Media Fund grants target individual projects planned by independent production companies. But those projects are usually associated with the “envelope” of one of the big broadcasters – of which CBC is by far the largest. 2023-2024 CMF funding totaled $786 million, and CBC’s take was nearly double that of their nearest competitor (Bell).
But there’s more! Back in 2016, the federal budget included an extra $150 million each year as a “new investment in Canadian arts and culture”. It’s entirely possible that no one turned off the tap and that extra government cheque is still showing up each year in the CBC’s mailbox. There was also a $93 million item for infrastructure and technological upgrades back in the 2017-2018 fiscal year. Who knows whether that one wasn’t also carried over.
So CBC’s share of government funding keeps growing while its share of Canadian media consumers shrinks. How do you suppose that’ll end?
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From the Canadian Taxpayers Federation
The Canadian Taxpayers Federation is calling on the federal government to rein in the bureaucracy following today’s Parliamentary Budget Officer report showing the bureaucracy costs taxpayers $69.5 billion.
“The cost of the federal bureaucracy increased by 73 per cent since 2016, but it’s a good bet most Canadians aren’t seeing anywhere close to 73 per cent better services from the government,” said Franco Terrazzano, CTF Federal Director. “Taxpayers are getting soaked because the size and cost of the federal bureaucracy is out of control.”
Today’s PBO report estimates the federal bureaucracy cost taxpayers $69.5 billion in 2023-24. In 2016-17, the cost of the bureaucracy was $40.2 billion. That’s an increase of 72.9 per cent.
The most recent data shows the cost continues to rise quickly.
“Spending on personnel in the first five months of 2024-25 is up 8.0 per cent over the same period last year,” according to the PBO.
“I have noticed a marked increase in the number of public servants since 2016 and a proportional increase in spending,” said Parliamentary Budget Officer Yves Giroux. “But we haven’t seen similar improvements when it comes to service.”
The Trudeau government added 108,793 bureaucrats since 2016 – a 42 per cent increase. Canada’s population grew by 14 per cent during the same period. Had the bureaucracy only increased with population growth, there would be 72,491 fewer federal employees today.
The government awarded more than one million pay raises to bureaucrats in the last four years, according to access-to-information records obtained by the CTF. The government also rubberstamped $406 million in bonuses last year.
“The government added tens of thousands of extra bureaucrats, rubberstamped hundreds of millions in bonuses and awarded more than one million pay raises and all taxpayers seem to get out of it is higher taxes and more debt,” Terrazzano said. “For the government to balance the budget and provide tax relief, it will need to cut the size and cost of Ottawa’s bloated bureaucracy.”
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