👁️ FTX, Rationalism, and U.S. Intelligence: A Conspiracy Theory

The CIA's favorite law firm, cult brainwashing, world-domination schemes, illicit banking, and strategies of tension: on the spooky undertones of our era's biggest financial fraud.

Welcome to your semi-weekly draft excerpt of “Stealing the Future: Sam Bankman-Fried, Elite Fraud, and the Cult of Techno-Utopia” - the current and hopefully near-final title of my forthcoming book, out in October from Repeater Books.

These excerpts are available to supporting subscribers, whose feedback and comments I welcome. This week’s entry, totaling around 2,300 words, is particularly sensitive, highlighting why I prefer to keep excerpts less than entirely public before they are fully polished and vetted.

To be abundantly clear: what follows is speculative thread-pulling, which may be best taken less as a literal claim that the Central Intelligence Agency played a role in the FTX fraud, than a more general mapping of the lines of force and influence shaped by power’s necessity. It is a foray into one attempted explanation of a complex and frequently confounding web of events, figures, and institutions - quite literally a conspiracy theory, presented strictly as a hypothetical.

Like FTX and Sam Bankman-Fried themselves, none of this is real.

Ryne Miller, former partner at Sullivan & Cromwell and lead counsel for FTX.US.

The Other Intelligence Quotient

There is no direct evidence that FTX’s creation, growth, or collapse were engineered by U.S. intelligence actors. But there are a handful of connective threads through legal and defense allies of the intelligence apparatus, as well as a series of evocative parallels with the historical tactics and priorities of intelligence - particularly including the importance of access to global financial secrecy to fund clandestine operations.

Most strikingly, the Center for Applied Rationality, which received (and has resisted returning) funds stolen from FTX customers by Sam Bankman-Fried and his co-conspirators, bears a striking resemblance to the agendas for both individual brainwashing and large-scale social engineering that drove some of the Central Intelligence Agency’s most disturbing programs.

Now, with the revelation that a group of rogue Rationalists known as the “Zizians” have been tied to a wave of murders across the U.S., it seems justified to explore the possibility that the Rationalist movement is not merely a misguided ethos turned toxic by cult-like insularity. Placed in a broader context, its tenets and practices begin to resemble both the Human Potential Movement centered around institutions like the Esalen Institute; and, in fringe sub-groups that have splintered from Rationalism proper, the illicit human experimentation conducted by the CIA starting in the 1950s under the code name MKUltra.

INFOHAZARD

In addition to his commitment to dismantling the American education system, Peter Thiel is a cofounder of the defense-technology firm Palantir, which builds computer vision systems to help the U.S. identify targets for robotic assassination. Thiel was an early and important funder and ally of Eliezer Yudkowsky’s Rationalist movement - just one of a series of suggestive alignments between the worlds of Rationalism and Effective Altruism in general, FTX specifically, and the U.S. intelligence apparatus and the so-called “deep state.”

Another very direct connection is the deep involvement of the law firm Sullivan & Cromwell in the later stages of the FTX saga. Founded in 1879, S&C’s senior partners have included both future Secretary of State John Foster Dulles and Allen Dulles, CIA director from 1953 to 1961. Via John Foster Dulles, S&C was implicated in affairs including the 1954 coup in Guatemala engineered by the CIA on behalf of S&C’s then-client, the United Fruit Company.

S&C was represented within FTX by Ryne Miller, a former S&C partner who became lead counsel of FTX.US in August of 2021, just over a year before the group’s collapse. Miller was previously co-head of S&C’s Commodities, Futures, and Derivatives line of business, and had worked for Gary Gensler at the CFTC. With Gensler by 2021 head of the SEC, that connection would have been particularly valuable as FTX geared up to influence U.S. cryptocurrency regulation.

If it seems odd that a lawyer would leave a partnership at one of the most prestigious law firms in the world to work at a small subsidiary of a startup, the answer may be that Miller didn’t entirely leave S&C at all. Dan Friedberg, the FTX Group lead counsel installed by Joe Bankman, would later claim in a sworn court filing that Miller “informed me that it was very important for him personally to channel a lot of business to S&C as he wanted to return there as a partner after his stint at [FTX Group].” The specific process by which S&C was selected to run FTX’s bankruptcy and liquidation, which included their appointment of John Ray III, are still fairly opaque, given the fact that FTX Group did not have a functioning Board of Directors to make that decision. Whatever his role in events, Miller did not ultimately return to S&C, instead launching his own firm, focused on cryptocurrency, in 2023.