New setting, same SBF

Hey, it’s Mark in New York. Sam Bankman-Fried retold some familiar stories, this time in a very different setting. But first...Three things [View in browser]( [Bloomberg]( Hey, it’s Mark in New York. Sam Bankman-Fried retold some familiar stories, this time in a very different setting. But first... Three things you need to know today: • X sees YouTube and LinkedIn [as future rivals]( • Apple plans to [show speedier Macs]( • Tesla has a new [Chinese autonomous EV rival]( Context is everything During his short reign as crypto's most famous billionaire, Sam Bankman-Fried regaled audiences at conferences, in television interviews and on podcasts with the same stories of a charmed upbringing and his discoveries of incredible financial opportunities. He trotted them out again, and perhaps for one last time, for a jury that’ll decide whether he’ll go to prison. On the [witness stand]( in a Manhattan federal court, Bankman-Fried played the hits in a surreal performance. He talked about his schooling at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, his stint at the Wall Street trading firm Jane Street and his discovery in Bitcoin’s earlier days of “really, really large arbitrage opportunities,” a way to buy and sell the currency on different exchanges to turn a profit. “It was so large I wasn’t sure I even believed it,” he said. This is the kind of stuff that made Bankman-Fried come off like a visionary on his way up. But now, instead of sitting onstage with Bill Clinton and Tony Blair, he’s surrounded by US marshals. In that context, it all sounds like a sad mixture of name-dropping and myth-making. The approach came off as particularly cynical in light of testimonies earlier in the trial. Caroline Ellison, a former deputy and ex-girlfriend, said Bankman-Fried carefully manicured his public image, from the hair on his head (unruly) to the car he drove (a modest Toyota Corolla). Bankman-Fried benefited early on from the reputations of his parents, both [renowned professors]( in law and ethics at Stanford University. His case is often compared with that of Elizabeth Holmes, the Stanford-connected Theranos founder who was convicted of fraud. But Holmes’ entrepreneurial profile had one thing working against her: She’s a woman. Bankman-Fried was almost like a specimen created in a lab to be a model Silicon Valley founder. Retracing his story from his birth at the Stanford hospital to the witness stand at his own fraud trial, Bankman-Fried seems to be offering an indictment of the role that privilege plays in the technology business. It's notable that Sequoia Capital, the most prestigious firm in venture capital, picked him over all the other people pitching big ideas about crypto at the time, given his connections to elite institutions and his profile as an eccentric, 20-something, White man. Bankman-Fried's pedigree seems doubly important given that his pitch, as recounted in a [since-deleted article]( on Sequoia's website, sounds so ridiculous in hindsight. “I want FTX to be a place where you can do anything you want with your next dollar. You can buy Bitcoin,” he said. “You can buy a banana.” Bankman-Fried’s crypto exchange FTX used money and prestige from investors like Sequoia to raise more money and buy more prestige. There were celebrity endorsements, business investments, the naming rights to a professional basketball arena. Each sign of acceptance from important places gave the business more credibility, making millions of people comfortable enough to put their money into a vessel that didn’t exist three years earlier. I’ve watched and listened to Bankman-Fried tell some of the same tales over and over as part of our reporting on his companies and for the podcast [Spellcaster: The Fall of Sam Bankman-Fried](. It comes off very differently now that it’s apparent there’s far less to his business — and his fitness as a business leader — than he has suggested. (After all, his defense has hinged on how little he was even paying attention to essential aspects of his enterprise.) His performance in court really showed how much the impact of a story can change based on where you’re telling it. —[Mark Milian](mailto:mmilian@bloomberg.net) The big story The CEO of a small property technology startup gained billions of dollars in paper wealth, only to see it [disappear as the stock plunged](. Get fully charged Citi will grant access to generative AI to a [majority of its coders]( as Wall Street embraces AI. Charter lost 100,000 customers from [the Disney dispute]( this summer. A top Google executive worried about TikTok and Amazon [enticing users away from the search engine](. More from Bloomberg Get Bloomberg Tech weeklies in your inbox: - [Cyber Bulletin]( for coverage of the shadow world of hackers and cyber-espionage - [Game On]( for reporting on the video game business - [Power On]( for Apple scoops, consumer tech news and more - [Screentime]( for a front-row seat to the collision of Hollywood and Silicon Valley - [Soundbite]( for reporting on podcasting, the music industry and audio trends - [Q&AI]( for answers to all your questions about AI Follow Us Like getting this newsletter? [Subscribe to Bloomberg.com]( for unlimited access to trusted, data-driven journalism and subscriber-only insights. Want to sponsor this newsletter? [Get in touch here](. 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