Unwoke by Ted Cruz

Author:Ted Cruz
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Regnery Publishing
Published: 2023-11-07T00:00:00+00:00

“All the Right Shibboleths”

This is certainly what happened in the case of FTX, the supposedly groundbreaking cryptocurrency exchange run by Sam Bankman-Fried. Personally, I’m a big believer in Bitcoin and crypto more generally—I personally invest in Bitcoin and am working hard to make Texas an oasis for Bitcoin mining—but FTX turned out to be more of a Bernie Madoff–style Ponzi scheme than a sound financial institution.

For years, the head of this company was hailed in Washington and the financial world as the next Steve Jobs or Elon Musk—an eccentric genius in cargo shorts with messy hair who was worth close to $20 billion. If you believed the hype surrounding Sam Bankman-Fried, you would have thought that he had cracked the code to capitalism itself, figuring out a way to make billions of dollars every year by creating and trading a new form of money that very few people fully understood. For this reason, almost no one asked questions about what the hell was going on at FTX.

The best part?

Sam Bankman-Fried was the poster boy for ESG and the liberal social values it seeks to enforce on American companies—a high-profile, multi-million-dollar donor to Democrats and an evangelist for “funding research and policy initiatives that will have an outsized impact on the climate crisis” and “other climate related special projects.” In July of 2021, his company launched the “FTX Climate Program” and announced that it would “become carbon neutral” that year.28 And Bankman-Fried was richly rewarded for his embrace of ESG. As the Wall Street Journal would report, “ESG ratings company Truvalue Labs even gave FTX a higher score on ‘leadership and governance’ than Exxon/Mobil though the crypto exchange had only three directors on its board. The directors were Mr. Bankman-Fried, another FTX executive and an outside attorney.”29

FTX executives donated more than $44 million to left-leaning PACs and similar organizations in the 2022 election cycle.30 Sam Bankman-Fried personally donated $5.2 million to support the campaign of Joe Biden alone.31

Then, less than three years after the presidential election, FTX appears to have been nothing more than an elaborate system of smoke and mirrors—and, if the initial reports are to be believed, not a terribly well-constructed one. By the time FTX customers noticed that they were missing a collective $8 billion, it was too late; the company had no choice but to declare bankruptcy.

Sitting in the home of his parents in the aftermath of all this financial carnage, Bankman-Fried began a remarkably candid text exchange with a journalist from Vox who asked Bankman-Fried if the “ethics stuff” had “mostly been a front” to cover for the fact that he didn’t really know what he was doing when it came to the business side of things.

His response was, “Yeah, I mean that’s not *all* of it, but it’s a lot.”

Later in the same interview, when he was asked about some of the more technical details about how his company had managed to lose more than $8 billion—an absurd amount of money, even for someone who runs a large financial institution—Bankman-Fried seemed not to care very much.

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