👁️ Jane Street Funded a Coup
And the NYTimes hasn't mentioned it. Also Elon Musk, the Mamdani 'leak,' and more.
Welcome back to Dark Markets, I’m David Z. Morris, a longtime tech and finance journalist and PhD sociologist/historian. My book “Stealing the Future: Sam Bankman-Fried, Elite Fraud, and the Cult of Techno-Utopia” is coming in October on November 11th from Repeater Books.
Dark Markets is a newsletter focused on technology, financial fraud, and their intersections. Every week, subscribers get a weekly news commentary/roundup like this one. Most weeks, there’s a second essay - most recently, 🔴👽 Mars Must Be Destroyed, on the use of space colonization as a political misdirect.
Scroll down for some extremely suggestive new links between FTX and the U.S. intelligence community, after some other tantalizing news.
NYT Ran Hacked Mamdani Smear Sourced from White Supremacist
New York City mayoral frontrunner Zohran Mamdani was born in Uganda and lived in South Africa until age 7. On his application to Columbia University, he indicated his ethnicity was both “Asian” (perhaps this was before Columbia added a separate “South Asian” category) and “Black or African American.” The second, totally valid self-identification was apparently coded as simply “Black” in Columbia’s system.
That system was then hacked, and the data wound up in the hands of a white supremacist named Jordan Lasker, who apparently had a pretty high profile on Elon Musk’s X.com The Everything App under the handle Crimieux. More notably, Lasker is a onetime Texas Tech PhD candidate, and in 2019 published an academic paper on intelligence that misused data so badly it got his coauthor, Cleveland State Professor Brian Pesta, fired from a professorship.
Lasker shared the information with the Times, and apparently a background in academic fraud and race science is just the ticket to getting through the door over there, because they ran a story based on the hacked data. The Times’ own columnist, Jamelle Bouie, reportedly commented on Bluesky that “i think you should tell readers if your source is a nazi,” then later deleted the post under apparent pressure from his bosses.
In the inevitable FTX connection, and as a taste of how this old, irrelevant, misrepresented bit of intel is being received by mouth-frothing right-wingers, Sequoia Capital LP Shaun Maguire has been getting absolutely lambasted, from pretty much all corners, for a tweet describing Mamdani as an “Islamist” from a “culture that lies about everything.”
One might say that Sequoia itself has a bit of a track record of “lying about everything,” such as when they tried to disappear their 13,000 word hagiography of megafraudster Sam Bankman-Fried from the internet three days after it became clear he had stolen all of his customers’ money.
Elon Musk’s “New Political Party” Sends Tesla Shares Down 7%
One of the things that’s becoming really clear here is that Tesla does not have a meaningfully independent Board of Directors. Because, right or wrong aside, the CEO’s behavior at this point is pretty obviously actively nuking shareholder value by getting into childish (even by Trump’s standards) fights with the President. God knows, I’m a man more than familiar with sacrificing money for principle, but I try not to do it with other people’s money.
But the real nut here of course is that there’s no substantial principle involved here at all. Given all the (continuing) name-calling in re: Jeffrey Epstein, and that the platform of “The America Party” appears to be the midwit classic “Balanced Budget,” the tantrum seems mostly about personal animus and, let’s just say it, ketamine-melted neurons.
The Jane Street Coup
Rob Granieri, 53 year old cofounder of Sam Bankman-Fried’s former employer Jane Street, is claiming he was deceived into giving $7 million to former child soldier turned reformist Harvard-trained development specialist Peter Ajak for the purchase of AK rifles, grenade launchers, and Stinger missile systems, with the goal of overthrowing the government of his home country, the dysfunctional and corrupt South Sudan. The deal reportedly involved Granieri and Ajak connecting through, of all people, Russian dissident chess grandmaster Garry Kasparov.
Jane Street, aside from the Bankman-Fried connection, is a giant money machine, with more than $20 billion in trading revenue last year - more than Citigroup. Some of Granieri’s meetings with Ajak reportedly took place at the offices of the white-shoe law firm Paul Hastings, and included former State Department PR attache Michael Holtzmann.
Ajak and a collaborator are being prosecuted. Granieri and Kasparov, of course, are not. Ajak is claiming that he was operating with the approval (more tacit than explicit) of the U.S. State Department.
I strongly recommend TrueAnon’s episode on the coup and its complexities. One interesting point they miss, though, is re: Kasparov’s role as chair of the Human Rights Foundation. The HRF does some good work and may have cleaned up its act a bit, but it’s notorious for platforming coup perpetrators as “heroes of human rights” at its Oslo Freedom Forum … as long as they’re trying to overthrow democratic socialist governments like Hugo Chavez’ in Venezuela.
Also notable in the realm of media coverage is the New York Times … who as far as I can tell haven’t covered the story at all. The Times, remember, also put a reporter whose uncle has very close professional ties to Barbara Fried in charge of reporting on her son (and ex-Jane Street employee) Sam’s criminal trial.
As I have written in a speculative mode, an entity like FTX would be extremely useful for funding clandestine military activity. Peter Ajak has reported ties to the National Endowment for Democracy, a CIA front group.
HRF itself has deep intelligence ties, and is funded at least substantially by Jane Street alums, specifically departed cofounder Tim Reynolds. You can see this in their badly-redacted tax documents, which reveal $500,000 in contributions from Reynolds, as well as contributions from Sergey Brin and Susan Wojkicki’s Foundation, and, insanely, one Leonid Nevzlin, a post-Soviet Russian Oligarch accused of ordering attacks on Alexy Navalny’s organization. It’s a good picture of who the HRF aligns with.
The timing of the allegations of arms trafficking seems particularly bad for Granieri: Jane Street has just been banned from operating in India over allegations that it manipulated an index of bank stocks, defrauding Indian traders of $580m. Jane Street has vigorously contested these allegations, claiming they were just doing pretty standard abitrage.
But the double allegations have unleashed a wave of scrutiny in India and around the world, which Granieri likely finds infuriating: the cofounder is apparently so media-shy no photos of him exist in the public domain.
Which ironically, in 2025, is just about as suspicious as having your photo taken next to a table full of rocket launchers.