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I was wondering why SBF seemingly behaved like an innocent man. Giving interviews, talking to podcasters, remaining at his residence.
Why didn't he make a run for it?
If he did take all those billions as was claimed, why didn't he move to a country that doesn't extradite or just move off the grid for a couple years?
Was he burnt out? complacent? drugs?
Or did he never have that money in the first place?
No, everyone had been telling him he was the smartest guy in the room. He clearly wasn't.
He was an MIT grad in physics and minor in math, his girlfriend was a mathmatician too. Clearly he must be intelligent. Maybe he wasn't the genius everybody hailed him as. However if you are smart enough to understand topology and other math-related topics, I would assume that he would be smart enough to funnel money out to secret untraceable accounts, buy diamonds and stash them at strategic locations in numerous countries, have an exit strategy.
Why couldn't he just have bought a submarine and flee to russia? Or just make a run for it on a regular boat?
I have a lot of trouble believing that if you have all that money, and you have at least as much smarts as the average math student, that you cannot extracate yourself from the situation he was in.
You are making a mistake that a lot of people do. Just because you are intelligent in one particular field doesn't mean that knowledge applies elsewhere. Time and time again we've seen some insane theories from truly talented people. My go to example is Ben Carson is a world renowned doctor who pioneered and succeeded in a surgery no one ever could have thought possible. He also believes the pyramids were used to store grain.
Intelligence and stupidity are not mutually exclusive.
"I can't believe what a bunch of nerds we are... we're looking up money laundering in a dictionary".
People with Ph.Ds will sit down at a keyboard and drool out of the corner of their mouth while contacting tech support.
And then there's also a difference between being intelligent and being smart. If you are intelligent, you might know how to cheat in a videogame. But if you are smart, you know that this a bad idea because of a plethora of reasons.
Excellent point.
It's just very very weird. If I sat on that much money, and had his IQ I would of figured something out.
IQ isn't reliable and hasn't been for a very long time, if ever. People get smart in areas, not overall. The brain is like a video game in that sense. You get skill points and get to spec them into certain areas. Some people spread them around and get middling knowledge in all areas but you won't ever find someone who's a genius universally. It's just not a thing.
Then you've got something else that is extremely important to this discussion. Arrogance. The smarter you are the more arrogant you tend to be. Usually not on purpose. Mostly it's a byproduct of being told you're smart constantly or by everyone else being slower than you and you get frustrated. When you have that arrogance you don't seem to be aware of what you don't know.
Which leads me to a third thing. Actual smart people don't assume they have knowledge. They know they don't know a lot and are really hesitant. Conversely, people who aren't that intelligent are usually convinced they know more than they do. Why? Because they're not smart enough to see gaps in their knowledge. They're looking at what's in front of them but not the overall picture.
All of that leads to this dude just genuinely not being smart. He was a combination of lucky and knowledgeable in a particular field.
I sure as hell wouldn't have committed major financial crimes to float a failing company run by some gal I only occasionally wanted to bang. Dude is a top notch dumbass.
Yes, depending on how hard he worked, properly a bit above average. But really it doesn't say that much.
Why? Those seems more like something a lawyer or economist would know about. As you said he graduated in physics and maths.
But I agree. He should have been smart enough to at least hire someone to help him with that.
And he could have just copied what other rich folks do. He didn't have to reinvent the wheel.
He did do what other rich folk do. Based himself in a tax haven and, initially, tried to challenge extradition.
Not many rich folk end up on trial. But even fewer end up absconding with their cash, never to be seen again. He is the normal kind of rich folk: he assumed he would get away with it because he is a born-rich kid who has never faced a consequence in his life.
There is a difference between rich and powerful,perfectly illustrated by comparing this guy to any number of rich assholes who should be in jail but aren't.
That's true but it's more than fair to say that SBF was powerful. He wasn't donating to the GOP and Dems for shits and giggles, yaknow?
If he was powerful he would have been able to skip out on consequences. That's what power makes possible. Simply donating to politicians is nowhere near enough. You need to have connections, leverage, relationships, etc.
I think there's one major flaw here:
You're thinking about this as an average human.
When you have insane amounts of money, you get what you want.
He likely shopped around high price lawyers, but since he's used to being told he's right and a genius. He would have hired a law firm that agreed with him and said he'd be fine.
They likely knew better, but told him what he wanted to hear and took his money with a smile.
So he fell into the whole "yes-man-trap"... It takes somebody who is intelligent/self::aware to avoid that pitfall
What you are saying is that he had a head for numbers.
That says absolutely nothing about his ability to function in society. He had a personal world view that was extremely self-centred and ignored most US social values. The way he operated his businesses shows that he also had no clue how to responsibly manage a business; he left the wrong tasks to the wrong people and left tasks to others that were his responsibility as CEO. He felt that telling others that something was legal was just as good as actually making sure that the things he wanted to do actually WERE legal.
So… not delusional, just ignorant of pretty much everything outside his own narrow area of expertise, and assuming that his smarts at math automatically made him an expert at everything without actually learning the details of how everything else worked.
Intelligence doesn't preclude stupidity.
He hadn't gotten caught until he did, and even then, he believed he'd had a track record of getting away with anything.
Just FYI diamonds are not a good place to store money
Just FYI it's not about that. It's about them being lightweight and small compared to gold or cash for example