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The SBF Scandal: The Players and the Money

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14 minute read

From the Brownstone Institute

BY Jeffrey A. TuckerJEFFREY A. TUCKER

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

  • Jeffrey A. Tucker

    Jeffrey A. Tucker, Founder and President of the Brownstone Institute, is an economist and author. He has written 10 books, including Liberty or Lockdown, and thousands of articles in the scholarly and popular press. He writes a daily column on economics at The Epoch Times, and speaks widely on topics of economics, technology, social philosophy, and culture.

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You Are Not Eating Ze Bugs…

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Cricket Farm Axes Jobs

I remember back a few years ago, making my way down to the midway of the Calgary Stampede to check out all of the new flavorful wares.

The Midway hasn’t really offered much by way of new rides since I was a kid, not entirely sure I’d be interested in riding them, even if they did…

The Budweiser beer grounds get old, when a cold beer sets you back over $10.

Mini donuts have lost their luster…

But every year, there are new menu items that had given a reason to at least make the cost of admission worth giving this another shot.

Walking through the grounds, the wife and I noticed that one of the new Stampede Delicacies was pizza with bugs on it…

Scorpion pizza : r/WTF

And I remember commenting to the wife that commercially made pizza has always had bugs in it…just nothing that they’d admit too for fear of being closed down by health regulations.

I mean…what’s next – boasting about mouse droppings in your soup?

But this bug thing has seemingly still managed to take off for reasons I cannot fathom. Are cow farts really impacting the planet that much?

It’d be hard to believe and harder to prove, even if this were true.

But then to read about some massive cricket farm in Eastern Canada, where cricket proteins were to be used in the mass production food items – chips, crackers, protein and energy bars and even flour – were soon to become a thing made me even more leery of processed foods.

Acheta Powder, by listing in ingredients…because this is the soft way to slip something onto the “may contain”, listings…which seems more innocuous than bugs or crickets…

But because my consumption of processed food items is low, were never much of a consideration and hunting for this on items I had no intention on purchasing anyways, seemed an awful waste of time.

The Eastern Canadian Cricket farm was built by Aspire Foods, for the tune of about $90 Million Bucks…$8.5 million provided by yup – you guessed it, Your Taxes, through federal grants.

Which, while is nothing in relation to the $40 Billion that has been extorted by the governments, out of your hard earned paycheque, to subsidize EV Batteries, with a 20 year ROI of ZERO…is still as big of a loss because…apparently, like the failure in trying to force people into expensive and unpractical EVs or turning plants into meat looking substitutes…

Is this really what people think vegans want to eat? : r/shittyfoodporn

Mmmmmmmmmmmm…

Is also a Huge Failure.

Not enough people are eating Ze Bugs…which has turned out to shutter 2/3rds of the staffing in the workforce, in London, Ontario at the Aspire Cricket Farm.

Massive cricket-processing facility comes online in London, Ont. | CBC News

Now…I’m all for innovation.

It’s what has created the device I’ve used to create this post and share it with all of you. I love some of the items that have leant to making my life easier and reduced efforts for tasks that offer little by way of satisfaction or payoff…

But with this being said…the market will always be the decider on what will or will not take off…and even with the bombardment of fear mongering around climate change and sustainability, bugs as a protein substitute are rapidly proving themselves out of market because…like me, you are not eating Ze Bugs!

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Sanctuary State Told To Cut Spending On Hotel Stays For Migrants As Costs Expected To Hit $1 Billion

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From the Daily Caller News Foundation 

By Jason Hopkins

A state commission is encouraging Massachusetts to cut costs on emergency shelter services for migrants and other families by spending less on expensive hotels.

The emergency shelter system in Massachusetts housing migrant families and others experiencing homelessness is expected to spend over $1 billion in fiscal year 2025, according to a state commission report investigating the matter. The report comes as Massachusetts, a sanctuary state that limits cooperation with federal immigration authorities, is continuing to experience financial hardship over the border crisis and an influx of migrants into their communities.

The draft report proposed spending less on the most expensive accommodations for migrants — which would include hotels and motels. Prior reports have found that housing migrants in hotels or motels in the state can be as costly as $300 per night.

“Since the EA shelter system reached capacity at 7,500 families last year, approximately 50% of families have been in hotels and motels across the state,” the report stated. “The Commission recommends limiting reliance on hotels and motels to best serve families and increase the financial and operational efficiency of the system, while recognizing that hotels and motels may be a last-resort option for surge capacity at times of rapid changes in demand.”

“Data suggests that hotels and motels are the most expensive type of shelter in the EA system,” the report concluded. It also noted that the state’s shelter caseload and system costs have skyrocketed to “unsustainable levels” since 2022.

The immigration crisis taking place under the Biden-Harris administration has hit Massachusetts particularly hard. Roughly 355,000 illegal migrants and other inadmissible foreign nationals live in the state, and approximately 50,000 have arrived since 2021, according to the Center for Immigration Studies.

Democrat Gov. Maura Healey, in her efforts to clamp down on the state’s crisis, has publicly called on illegal immigrants to not go to Massachusetts, offered plane tickets for them to leave, and has asked residents to take in migrant families. The state has also experienced a rising number of deportation cases as illegal migrants continue to flock there.

Despite the growing pains with mass illegal immigration, the governor has remained steadfast in her opposition to President-elect Donald Trump’s plans for an immigration crackdown, and she confirmed that her state’s law enforcement would “absolutely not” help with mass deportation efforts. The entire state of Massachusetts is considered a sanctuary for illegal migrants for its laws limiting cooperation with Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents.

The state legislature appropriated $639 million to the emergency assistance shelter system for fiscal year 2025, according to the report. However, expense projections are expected to hit $1.094 billion – leaving a shortfall of roughly $455 million for the fiscal year.

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