From CNBC, July 21:
- Gabe Bankman-Fried, the younger brother of FTX’s founder, tried to buy the island nation of Nauru, a Delaware lawsuit alleges.
- The allegation was in a suit filed by attorneys from Sullivan & Cromwell, which is seeking to recover billions of dollars from Sam Bankman-Fried after the collapse of FTX.
- Nauru, with a population of about 12,000, is a little over 2,100 miles away from Brisbane, Australia.
Sam Bankman-Fried’s younger brother, who was a top lobbyist for failed crypto exchange FTX, considered purchasing the island nation of Nauru in the Pacific to create a fortified apocalypse bunker state, a lawsuit filed in Delaware bankruptcy court shows.
Gabe Bankman-Fried was looking at buying Nauru in the “event where 50%-99.99% of people die” to protect his philanthropic allies and create a genetically enhanced human species, according to the suit filed Thursday by attorneys from Sullivan & Cromwell, which is seeking to recover billions of dollars following the collapse of FTX.
Bunker life is a well-documented fixation among tech billionaires, particularly those who identify as doomsday preppers. There’s also a fascination with buying large estates in the Pacific and even owning small islands there.
In his years running FTX, the elder Bankman-Fried brother touted a philanthropic lifestyle called effective altruism and established the philanthropic arm with that in mind. Devotees of effective altruism work to maximize their income so they can give away their money in a fashion they see as most beneficial to humankind.
Gabe Bankman-Fried was FTX’s most visible presence in Washington, D.C., and was connected to bipartisan charitable donations that ran into the hundreds of millions. Along with an unnamed philanthropic officer of FTX, he considered buying Nauru, in part to foster “sensible regulation around human genetic enhancement, and build a lab there.”....
....MUCH MORE
I may have confused "genetically enhanced human species" and "lab" for "Spa" in the headline.
Regret the error.
Previously on Gabe:
I blame his mom, Stanford Law Professor Barbara Fried
And on the E.A. crowd:
Leaders of the Effective Altruism movement were repeatedly warned beginning in 2018 that Sam Bankman-Fried was unethical, duplicitous, and negligent in his role as CEO of Alameda Research, the crypto trading firm that went on to play a critical role in what federal prosecutors now say was among the biggest financial frauds in U.S. history. They apparently dismissed those warnings, sources say, before taking tens of millions of dollars from Bankman-Fried’s charitable fund for effective altruist causes.
I like the three-beat: "unethical, duplicitous, and negligent." The only thing better would be having the line delivered by attorney Jackie Chiles:
"It's outrageous, egregious and preposterous."
