Before Sam Bankman-Fried became the poster child for rapacious speculative folly, he was the anointed emissary from the future of finance—sharing conference stages with world leaders, hobnobbing with celebrities, and donating enormous sums of cash to political parties, think tanks, and charities. You might well say that if Sam Bankman-Fried didn’t already exist, the prophets of digital-age capitalism would have invented him—except that he beat them to the punch, producing a camera-ready image of himself as a tech innovator and philanthropic visionary while erecting a vast fortune out of the great rolling grift known as cryptocurrency.
Bankman-Fried’s sudden fall from grace—which culminated in his mid-December arrest on eight criminal charges stemming from allegedly fraudulent transactions—has obscured much of the cult of personality that sprouted around him as he took his lavishly capitalized cryptocurrency exchange, FTX, into the empyrean of the investment world. Over
— source thenation.com | Timi Iwayemi | Nov 14, 2022