Photograph Illustration by Erin O'Flynn/The Every day Beast/Getty
When Sam Bankman-Fried sat down with George Stephanopoulos for a Good Morning America interview this week in his signature T-shirt, it wasn’t the primary nationwide information look the disgraced former crypto wunderkind had given.
Since dropping tens of billions of dollars in his over-leveraged and shadily funded companies, FTX and Alameda, Bankman-Fried has been on a media tour, displaying up in reporters’ DMs, on Vox, Axios, at TheNew York Occasions’ DealBook Summit, and he's nonetheless scheduled for a Twitter Area and a YouTube interview to spherical out his week.
Someplace, an costly lawyer is pulling his well-coiffed hair out—a distinction with Bankman-Fried, who appears comparatively calm, his unkempt hair and Bahamas abode unchanged within the wake of this gorgeous fall from monetary grace.
You realize who else appears calm? The media figures masking Bankman-Fried.
A GMA promo for Stephanopoulos’ interview calls Bankman-Fried a “crypto supervillain,” however he’s not being handled like one, except you rely the very Lex Luthor vibes of the lavish penthouse the place he’s residing on the lam. As an alternative, Stephanopoulos and Andrew Ross Sorkin, for DealBook, approached Bankman-Fried with a form of gauzy astonishment and more-in-sadness-than-in-anger tone.
The T-shirt uniform has confirmed to work to his benefit on each side of this disaster. The place earlier than it was a signifier of his Gen-Z nonconformity, now it bolsters his kicked-puppy protestations of ignorance and innocence. And his interlocutors appear to be shopping for it to some extent.
Stephanopoulos posits, “I can’t think about what it’s prefer to go from $20 billion to $100,000 dollars,” and “Have you ever gotten calls from any of the celebrities who endorsed you?” and “What's the expertise that you've got that satisfied folks they need to make investments billions of dollars?”
Sorkin’s interview was peppered with “honest to say?” and “what do you make of the argument?” and began with “Let’s discuss among the belongings you would need to have performed otherwise.”
I've seen media figures grill topics and react to them with barely hid revulsion. This can be a far cry from that.
However you don’t must look very far to discover a very totally different response to a different billionaire. Elon Musk used $44 billion of his personal cash in 2022 to buy Twitter—famously the playground and dependancy of the chattering class.
Within the time since that buy, media response has been at occasions apoplectic and hysterical. A Washington Submit headline dubbed Musk’s amnesty for banned accounts as “opening the gates of hell.” From The View co-host Whoopi Goldberg to CBS Information itself, blue-check, verified customers of the media world have left the social media app, citing security and “safety issues,” some even earlier than Musk had made any adjustments to Twitter insurance policies. Goldberg stays gone, however CBS got here again inside days.
The grave disaster precipitated by a dude utilizing his cash to purchase a tech firm led one reporter to ask President Joe Biden himself in certainly one of his few press conferences, “Do you assume Elon Musk is a risk to nationwide safety and may the US... examine his joint acquisition of Twitter?"
His reply: “I feel Elon Musk’s technical relationships with different international locations is worthy of being checked out.”
Simply days in the past, a Reuters reporter requested White Home press secretary Karine Jean Pierre: “A researcher at Stanford says this can be a important second when it comes to guaranteeing that Twitter doesn't turn out to be a vector of misinformation… Who's it on the White Home that's going to be retaining observe of this?”
Jean Pierre assured her they're “maintaining a tally of” it.
Actress and activist Alyssa Milano, in an look on The View, scoffed as many had earlier than her that Musk’s $40 billion, if donated to UNICEF or elsewhere “would change the world, there could be no starvation” to vigorous head nods from the present’s hosts and applause from the viewers.
The place are the protestations on Bankman-Fried’s evaporated and/or swindled $20-32 billion, which definitely may have been used for world starvation? One motive we don’t hear a lot about how Bankman-Fried ought to have invested is as a result of a lot of his wealth was already invested in causes the media and the Biden administration discover as worthy as world starvation—media and Democrats!
Bankman-Fried fastidiously cultivated, with lavish donations and the fitting speaking factors, a membership in the identical membership as those that would possibly now vilify him within the public eye or authorities.
He was an up-and-comer in “efficient altruism,” first drawn to it out of a want to protest manufacturing facility farming, an Environmental and Social Governance adherent, a Democratic tremendous donor, a supporter of presidency regulation (he helped to craft, naturally), and a backer of varied media ventures. The outcome was hagiographic protection earlier than the downfall and kid-glove protection after.
That’s fairly a feat for a man whose “full failure of company management” shocked even John Ray III, who was tasked with choosing via the wreckage of Enron in 2001.
It’s why as an alternative of imprecise threats from the White Home, Sam Bankman-Fried will get a gushy tweet from Democratic Rep. Maxine Waters, present chairwoman of the Home Committee on Monetary Companies, which will likely be investigating his misdeeds:
And Musk?
Nicely, “His political donations over the previous a number of years have trended from majority-blue, to combined, to nearly solely Republicans. He’s promised that if his bid to buy Twitter is profitable, he’ll convey former President Donald Trump again to the platform.”
He's not within the membership anymore. Neither his donations nor his speaking factors earn him safety from those that now vilify him within the public eye and authorities.
The reality is the man stealing billions in different folks’s cash is extra of a supervillain than the man spending his personal, and the protection and authorities response ought to mirror that.