👁️ Is Sam Bankman-Fried F*cking Stupid?

The Tucker Carlson interview raises old questions.

Welcome back to your regular Dark Markets preview of my upcoming book, “Stealing the Future.” I finished the first full draft a little over a week ago, and boy are my arms tired … but there will be a few more of these excerpts before other topics begin sneaking in to premium posts.

On which note: Dark Markets has just passed the 2,000 subscriber mark. Congratulations to Sparky, who I hope I’m not doxxing - the lucky 2,000th subscriber, and recipient of a free full year of premium access. Ten other recent subscribers get a free month of premium, and I’ll also be unlocking a number of premium posts for everyone this weekend.

Last week, as part of his probably hopeless efforts to win a pardon from Donald Trump, Sam Bankman-Fried conducted an interview from prison with Tucker Carlson. It turns out, this was not an authorized interview, and SBF was thrown in solitary confinement as punishment, then his crisis PR manager quit.

This continues a long string of Bankman-Fried’s decisions that have led to catastrophic consequences for him. The two previous big ones were leaking Caroline Ellison’s diary, which got his home release revoked, and made him look like an asshole; and insisting on testifying in his own defense, which made him look like a compulsive liar and an idiot - and also literally added years to his sentence because he perjured himself repeatedly.

This latest sally may have been as much a counterproductive waste as the other gambits. Talking to Carlson might superficially seem to advance Bankman-Fried’s goal of earning a pardon from Donald Trump. However, it’s notable that “go on Tucker” was part of a “reputation recovery plan” that SBF wrote just after FTX’s collapse, in late 2022 or early 2023. He may not have noticed that soon after, Tucker was fired from Fox - and it’s doubtful that Donald Trump watches Tucker’s post-Fox Twitter show. Here again, Bankman-Fried acted impulsively, on his own recognizance, and appears to have kind of fucked it up. (Note: Credit to reader Publis, who points out that JD Vance likely does still watch Tucker).

(Correction: I initially misremembered the date of FTX’s collapse - it was 2022, not 2023. It is bizarrely and consistently difficult for me to keep that straight.)

Bankman-Fried also offered that Diddy, a sexual exploiter of the lowest sort, has been “kind” to him, which is the kind of unforced, unsympathetic error that a crisis PR manager might advise you to avoid. The friendly comment toward Diddy is also notable in light of Bankman-Fried’s apparent jailhouse friendship with an alleged pedophile former NYPD officer, who even wrote Sam a character support letter during sentencing.

But the real point here is: the Tucker interview, in a few ways, suggests again that despite his public image as some sort of genius, Bankman-Fried is actually … pretty dumb?

I consider this question in more depth below, in a draft section from Chapter 7 of “Stealing the Future.” That chapter, titled “A Sam-Shaped Hole,” considers why other people were so eager to project onto Sam the features they wanted him to have. Vast intelligence being a big one.

“It would be difficult to imagine a more effective anti-education operation than Rationalism if you were to design one from the ground up.”

Dysgenic Mathematics: Is Sam Bankman-Fried Actually Smart?

“Y'all motherfuckers always fuckin' around and forgettin' somethin' and shit

You some smart dumb ni**as and shit.”

-Ghostface Killah, “Biscuits”

I’ve located the core of my own fascination with Sam Bankman-Fried in his completely unflappable, in some sense clearly sincere and even impassioned belief in his own innocence. The persistence of this delusion is rooted in his too-literal acceptance of the utilitarian ethics of Barbara Fried and the Effective Altruists. These tendencies matter more broadly because they attempt to grant the members of a defined circle of West-coast technologists the license to accumulate massive ethical and financial power under the rubric of future disasters that they claim the privilege of preventing.

But equally fascinating is another contradiction: while his public profile and allure to investors was premised on what was understood to be his staggering intellect, Sam Bankman-Fried appears, in fact, to be a fucking idiot.