Old lady wins as kid genius billionaire fails
THERE are any number of ways to become rich. You can be thrifty and industrious. You can be lucky. You can be a visionary. Or you can be a headline-chasing, myth-selling fraud.
Angela* chose the thrifty and industrious path. She arrived in Australia from a tiny Greek village in the 1950s and with her husband opened a fish and chip shop.
Then followed another shop and a small house. In the 1970s, Angela and her husband scraped together enough cash to put a deposit on a modest investment property in outer-suburban Sydney.
Then they went back to work. All they did was work, in between raising a family, going to church and enjoying the companionship of friends and neighbours.
Last month Angela, whose husband died some years ago, sold her investment property. She’s now worth more than $2m, and will see out her days in considerable and deeply deserved comfort.
Let’s contrast Angela with another study in wealth creation.
Sam Bankman-Fried chose an altogether different path.
The son of elite academics, Bankman-Fried was probably worth more when he was born in California 30 years ago than Angela is today.
Yet he wanted more. Lots more.
But he didn’t want to work particularly hard for it, which is usually an impediment to amassing riches. Bankman-Fried, however, found a way. In 2017, he founded cryptocurrency-trading firm
Alameda Research. Two years later he launched FTX, a “cryptocurrency derivatives exchange”.
I don’t pretend to know what the hell that is – and possibly neither did many of FTX’s investors.
But it somehow enabled Bankman-Fried to quickly accrue a peak personal fortune of nearly $40bn while playing video games. He also accrued a legion of admiring journalists who were enchanted by Bankman-Fried’s claimed altruism.
“The guy you see next to me is the most generous billionaire in the world,” YouTuber Nuseir Yassin gushed during a January 2022 interview with the FTX founder.
“Sam has crazy hair! Sam is vegan! Sam sleeps five hours a night! Sam lives in the Bahamas with 10 roommates. Sam is 29 years old only! But Sam has $US22bn. And he wants to donate all of it to charity.”
Bankman-Fried – widely known by his initials, SBF – wasn’t your average billionaire, Yassin continued, because he “believes in the concept of ‘earn to give’, which means his goal as a human is to make as much money as possible just to give it away”.
To the extent that he did give money away, much of it was to US President Joe Biden and his Democrats, who don’t exactly qualify as charities. SBF donated $15m to Biden’s 2020 election bid and this year ploughed $60m into the Democrats’ midterm campaign.
No wonder, then, that left-inclined journalists loved him.
Few people are fond of SBF now, especially his investors. Billions of dollars are gone amid FTX’s sudden collapse. Charges are likely.
SBF, Jennifer Sey summarised for The Spectator, “stole billions of dollars from employees and investors. And still, right now, he’s listed as a featured speaker for the New York Times’s Dealbook
Summit, presenting him as one of the most ‘vital minds’ in the world today”.
Not even the man himself would these days agree with that view.
“A month ago I was one of the world’s greatest fundraisers,” selfpitying SBF said in that Vox interview. “Now I’m the fallen wreckage of one.”
He sure is. SBF’s total wealth on November 7 was estimated to be about $24bn. Nine days later, just about every cent was lost.
Worse may be to come. SBF may well follow the path of busted biotech fraudster Elizabeth Holmes, the former $13bn Theranos founder who was last week sentenced by a US court to an 11-year prison term.
There’s a lot to be said for playing a long, cautious game. Unlike
Holmes and SBF, Angela never appeared in magazines, spoke at major events, met world leaders or was hailed as a financial genius.
But here she is today, worth $2m more than both of them combined. And she did it all by quietly cooking fish and chips for generations of grateful customers.
“Some of this decade’s greatest heroes will never be known,” SBF told Vox in a rare moment of insight, “and some of its most beloved people are basically shams.”
Put Angela in the first category. Put SBF, Holmes and their slimy, showboating kind in the second.
*Not her real name. Other details have also been changed to protect Angela’s identity.