First up, The Spectator World*, November 17:
Bankrupted crypto billionaire Sam Bankman-Fried is the talk of the town thanks to the implosion of his heavily celebrity- and lawmaker-endorsed digital currency platform, FTX. SBF cleverly disguised his shaky financial schemes behind an awkward personality and philosophy labeled as “Effective Altruism,” meaning giving away massive amounts of wealth in the name of simply doing good.
It’s a popular philosophical fad that has caught on among progressive global elites in the philanthropy arena and seems to be quite popular among media elites as well. Amazon and Washington Post owner Jeff Bezos announced a plan to donate most of his wealth, on the same day that 10,000 jobs were to be eliminated at Amazon.
Bankman-Fried is also drawing attention from the amount of money he donated to Democratic Party causes and politicians. He was Joe Biden’s second largest donor in 2020 and came in right behind George Soros in 2022, having donated roughly $39 million to Democratic candidates and platforms. And SBF bankrolled several corporate media outlets through grant foundations. He started the Building a Stronger Future Foundation, which was created to support journalism and investigative research under the guise of pandemic preparedness and climate.
The media outlets he buoyed with FTX investor money include a list of popular titles that lean to the left when it comes to covering issues like those Bankman-Fried is passionate about: Vox, the Intercept, ProPublica, the Law and Justice Journalism Project and the recently launched Semafor, a much-hyped news outlet cofounded by former BuzzFeed editor-in-chief Ben Smith. Smith has brought several known names from the world of Beltway media onboard, including Politico’s Max Tani and the Washington Post’s Dave Weigel, the latter of whom it’s fair to assume was looking for an exit after being suspended for retweeting a joke earlier this year. Semafor and Vox have disclosed Bankman-Fried as a financial backer in their recent reporting on the FTX collapse, but that’s about it.
Yet since the scandal broke, Bankman-Fried has been treated to two relative puff pieces on his philanthropic efforts in the Washington Post and the New York Times. Both drew severe backlash on social media for seeming to handle him with kid gloves....
The Spectator was established in 1828, and is the best-written and most influential magazine in Britain. In 2018, we launched our monthly global edition of the magazine, bringing to the rest of the world the same insight, original thought the British have enjoyed for 190 years. The overall media landscape was missing something — a publication...
So, tell me about your strong suit, the self-effacing modesty....
And from Vanity Fair, November 18:
“He hadn’t really been talking to anyone,” Peterson-Withorn told me. “Presumably, he was hard at work trying to save FTX and FTX US and Alameda and all this money from his investors and his customer user funds.” Which is why the journalist was surprised to get an email back on this comparatively trivial matter. Bankman-Fried said he couldn’t “confidently dispute” that he was no longer a billionaire, as he was “not totally clear” on his net worth at the moment. This was two days before FTX, once valued at $32 billion, would file for bankruptcy. “He’s talking when other people wouldn’t,” noted Peterson-Withorn.
Indeed, even as he’s now under federal investigation, Bankman-Fried can’t stop talking. A few days later, he was on the phone past midnight with New York Times reporter David Yaffe-Bellany. And a few days after that, he DM’d Vox’s Kelsey Piper, a fellow effective-altruism proponent, to try to explain himself, leaving Piper “appalled by much of what he said.” “Each individual decision seemed fine and I didn’t realize how big their sum was until the end,” Bankman-Fried wrote at one point. (At another: “fuck regulators.” Hours later, he tried to walk some of these comments back.)
Bankman-Fried’s swift rise played out through the media—and now the same is happening with his downfall. A few months ago he graced the cover of Fortune alongside the question, “The Next Warren Buffett?” Jeff John Roberts, who wrote that cover story, noted this past week how “it felt odd” to now be writing about the possibility of his subject going to prison. When later asked on Twitter what he would have changed about his approach, Roberts replied: “Always easier in hindsight but…I would have pushed harder for documents. I asked but didn’t insist on them.”....
....MUCH MORE
Of course it is possible those calling for a Truth & Justice Commission for the media are just doing a bit of market differentiation, buffing their brands so to speak.
Previously on the media angle in these frauds:
How Media Aided and Abetted The Rise of FTX and Bankman-Fried
