I am so tired of people lionizing SBF. Every time Anthropic or Cursor raises a new round, the Twitterati joke about taking him out of prison and giving him a venture fund. I hate this. SBF was a villain. FTX and its collateral damage was a massive embarrassment and value destroyer for silicon valley. If not for the huge AI wave kicked off just after his fall, SBF alone could've destroyed the startup industry as we know it. It is clear beyond a reasonable doubt that SBF ran FTX and Alameda as a fraud from pretty much day one, manipulated the market, and stole billions of dollars from his customers. He stole from over a million retail investors, while claiming that he was earning to give everything to charity. This is the absolute gutter of behavior. Along the way, he plowed virtually all the deposits into high-risk assets. He spent $25M buying a studio that made video games he liked. (It's shut down now, of course.) This is not a great venture investor. The challenge of investing is having limited capital, and making trade-offs about how to deploy it. SBF was stealing from a functionally unlimited stream of money and gambling every bit of it. Of course some gambles will come up lucky! You cannot praise them. Worse, SBF almost got away with it all. If market conditions had been slightly different, FTX would've survived 2022, and his lobbying machine would've probably begun succeeding in creating regulatory capture for FTX. With crypto appreciating, he would've been able to secretly backfill the deposits and keep on running his Ponzi to greater and greater scale, and crush his honest competition. The worst-case scenario is that he would've become insanely wealthy and powerful. The best-case is that one day it would've collapsed for hundreds of billions of dollars in collateral damage. SBF was a force of immensely destructive evil. People talking about the SBF comeback can go fuck themselves.