Journalism

The degree to which journalists are just stenographers to every rich guy peddling nonsense...

In magazine profiles and TV interviews, Bankman-Fried professed austerity. He wore beat-up sneakers, lived with roommates and drove a Toyota Corolla—with all of the savings going to charitable causes, he said. “You pretty quickly run out of really effective ways to make yourself happier by spending money,” he told a Bloomberg reporter in early 2022. “I don’t want a yacht.”

In reality, Bankman-Fried and his inner circle spent with such abandon that the office could feel, as the person who worked on the Super Bowl ad describes it, like the Emerald City in The Wizard of Oz. The company bought hundreds of millions of dollars of luxury real estate, including a $30 million penthouse apartment in the fanciest resort in the Bahamas, where Bankman-Fried and his cohorts lived. They chartered private jets for themselves and, because Amazon.com doesn’t consistently service the island, for their online packages. And—as bankruptcy filings would make clear—they even bought a 52-foot yacht. It was purchased by Alameda for Sam Trabucco, the company’s co-CEO at the time, who named it Soak My Deck.

Trump, Musk, ...