Sam Bankman-Fried

I don’t gamble. But in October 2016, I made a bet. It was obvious Trump didn’t just have skeletons in his closet but a walk-in necropolis. As we stumbled toward November, the question wasn’t whether one of these skeletons would break free, but just how bad the October Surprise would be. It was supposed to be a polling-shifting, election-sealing, reputational nuclear bomb. And if you read the press, that’s what the “Pussy-Grabbing Tape” was. But to me, it was just another example of Trump being vulgar. And Trump had always been vulgar. And voters liked that he was vulgar, or didn’t care that he was vulgar, or liked that he was so unlike other politicians that he could be vulgar.

‘It would have been ideal not to have so  much poo in the water,’ said Oxford captain Leonard Jenkins after losing the university boat race to Cambridge last Saturday. Thames Water blamed high groundwater levels after weeks of rain for sewage discharges that are a less unpleasant alternative than ‘letting it back up into people’s homes’. But no one’s listening to the excuses – for the failing utility, that is, not the dark-blue crew. Thames Water is the pariah of post-privatisation capitalism, facing a charge sheet of poor service and financial opportunism of which rising tides of river filth are merely pungent symbols.

In some ways, Larry Fink is an unsurprising villain. Wall Street titans aren’t in the business of being loved, and as the Chairman of BlackRock, the world’s largest asset manager assets, Fink isn’t a Master of the Universe. He’s the guy they work for. Paradoxically, though, it isn’t good, old-fashioned greed that has made Fink a figure of popular contempt, but his quest for political approval. With a foray into win-win talk of responsible capitalism and ethical investing, Fink has turned himself, and his firm, into a punchbag for both the left and the right.  In recent years, Fink has become the face of ESG — the multifarious push to put environmental, social and governance concerns at the heart of investment decisions. At first, Fink leant into the role.

Dealing with the writer, statistician, Twitter warrior and self-described flâneur Nassim Nicholas Taleb is no simple matter. First there was the initial approach, months ago. I ventured to email him and ask for an interview despite his long-held and often-expressed low opinion of journalists. (Heuristic: those who make the biggest deal out of disliking the media care about it the most.) To my surprise, Taleb agreed to it almost immediately even though he “doesn’t do interviews.” Some logistical back and forth ensued. Then a twist: he would only agree to be interviewed if he wasn’t photographed. Why? Because in photos he is “made to look sickly and weak.

In the precarious world economy of 2023, everyone is selling you something — and much of that something doesn’t amount to anything. Companies, of course, sell you products and services; much of their junk amounts to solutions for problems that didn’t previously exist, though at least there’s still some sort of deliverable. Meanwhile, in worlds as essential to human flourishing as personal finance and bodily fitness, an ever-expanding class of so-called “influencers” are selling a whole lot of nothing dressed up as something. Their underlying success, ostensibly tied to their ability to help people become richer or fitter, depends in actuality on their ability to sell advice or investment opportunities that are likely only to enrich themselves. How did this happen?

This time last year, football fans dubbed the Super Bowl the "Crypto Bowl," after eToro, Coinbase, Crypto.com and FTX all paid for airtime. Just twelve months on, Mark Evans, the executive vice president of ad sales for Fox Sports, told the Associated Press there would be "zero representation in that category on the day at all," following the disastrous downfall of FTX, In other sporting news, NFL legend Tom Brady has finally retired, which is nice for him. Anyone who took his investment advice won’t be doing that any time soon. The seven-time Super Bowl champion is currently named in a class action lawsuit that claims he and his now-ex Gisele Bundchen lured fans into a massive fraud.

Sam Bankman-Fried may have been arrested, but he's not the only one with questions to answer following the FTX implosion. ProPublica, the nonprofit investigative news outlet, has finally claimed in an internal email that it will return the $1.6 million it received from Bankman-Fried's family foundation, according to Axios. In a memo, ProPublica president and co-CEO Robin Sparkman and editor-in-chief and co-CEO Stephen Engelberg said the company will be returning the money from Bankman-Fried’s family foundation, called Building a Stronger Future, because "it does not seem appropriate to keep these funds." Go figure.

Why do people in the media keep trying to make a story out of Barstool Sports head honcho Dave Portnoy being exactly the person he claims to be? It just keeps happening. Most recently comes a pathetic attempt at a New York Times exposé that does little more than expose Portnoy for being everything his listeners, readers and fans know him to be: a mouthy, opinionated, over-the-top degenerate gambler and the court jester of a sports and gambling conglomerate that has become a dominating cultural force under his leadership. The Times apparently thinks their readership is unaware of all of this, and deems it noteworthy that he has had to climb out of the pit of gambling-fueled bankruptcy in the past. I'm only surprised that his losses were only $30,000, not ten times that.