Micah's Read of the Week, Vol. 118
Crypto's meltdown, Elon's twitter mess, New Yorker Cartoon of the Week, Substack Appreciation of the Week, Recipe Corner, and more.
Hello, and welcome to Micah’s Read of the Week.
This is a newsletter filled with things Micah Wiener finds interesting. Check out the archive of previous newsletters here.
Hi. We’re back. Publishing on a Monday. Great!
A quick programming note: next week will be our annual Thanksgiving Recipe Extravaganza. Get excited.
Enjoy the read,
M
Sam Bankman-Fried charmed Washington. Then his crypto empire imploded.
He founded a popular crypto exchange, amassing incredible wealth and political clout in just a few years. In one week, everything collapsed.
Crypto is a disaster right now. It’s hilarious. And this joker is the face of the fall.
Sam Bankman-Fried, the 30-year-old wunderkind of cryptocurrency, spent tens of millions of dollars over the past year trying to reshape how Washington and the world think about finance.
The crypto exchange he founded, FTX, had become an industry-dominating business in just three years, valued at $32 billion as recently as January. He amassed political clout in an even bigger hurry, emerging from obscurity to become the second-biggest Democratic donor in the midterm elections.
By Friday, the money and the clout had disappeared: Bankman-Fried resigned from FTX, which then filed for bankruptcy. On Saturday, the company revealed it was investigating “unauthorized transactions” worth more than $400 million and that it had moved all funds into offline storage. And Bankman-Fried was left facing harrowing questions about his role in the most catastrophic collapse the notoriously volatile crypto industry has so far seen.
So who is this guy?
With his disheveled appearance, super-casual manner and earnest insistence that he was trying to use his money to save the world, Bankman-Fried stood apart from the stereotype of crypto brats blowing instant riches on Lamborghinis and yachts. His purported power over the crypto market drew comparisons to Wall Street financier J.P. Morgan, yet he saw himself as using his fortune for good, not greed.
How his career careened off course is a tale of ambition, hubris and ultimately recklessness — the full contours of which have yet to be publicly revealed.
When Bankman-Fried was just 28, he built a platform that offered investors easy access to buying, selling and stashing bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies. The offshore exchange allowed investors to place risky bets not allowed in the United States, though it was easy enough for American users to find workarounds; a U.S. affiliate offered limited services. With a massive marketing push — including a flashy Super Bowl ad and naming rights to the arena that is the home of Miami Heat — he sought to make crypto trading a mainstream pastime.
SBF actively courted regulation for his “industry.” This didn’t sit well with others in the shadowy world of fake currency.
Many crypto die-hards viewed his overtures to Washington as a betrayal of crypto’s founding mission. That set the stage for his most formidable adversary — Changpeng Zhao, chief executive of Binance, a rival crypto exchange — to crush him with stunning and decisive swiftness.
On Sunday, Zhao announced he was selling off his investment in FTX: $580 million of a crypto token FTX had been using to prop up its debts. “We are not against anyone,” Zhao wrote on Twitter. “But we won’t support people who lobby against other industry players behind their backs.”
When Zhao fled, other FTX customers panicked, inundating FTX with withdrawal requests the company could not meet. Bankman-Fried was forced to ask Zhao to buy his company. The Binance chief accepted and then reneged, fueling allegations that Bankman-Fried was using FTX customer deposits to cover risky bets placed by Alameda Research, a sister trading firm. Bankman-Fried has denied the allegations.
Now, the regulators Bankman-Fried had been wooing are circling. His unorthodox management style — maintaining a relatively skeletal staff and presiding over an exchange interconnected with a sister trading firm and a U.S. affiliate — are under scrutiny.
Bankman-Fried keeps tweeting apologies.
“I’m really sorry, again, that we ended up here,” he wrote Friday. But he has yet to offer answers to customers and investors wondering where their money has gone and whether they will recover it.
The saga reflects a head-spinning fall from grace. Just a few months ago, Bankman-Fried was toasted as crypto’s Warren Buffett; now he’s drawing comparisons to convicted fraudster Elizabeth Holmes.
lol.
Of course, FTX is not the first crypto business to collapse in recent months.
The industry has been rocked by a sell-off that wiped out two-thirds of crypto market value, roughly $2 trillion, as the value of bitcoin has fallen from roughly $68,000 a year ago to $17,000 now.
Bankman-Fried spent massively to market FTX as a trustworthy investment platform.
The company paid $135 million for the naming rights to the Miami Heat arena; it signed a deal with Major League Baseball to affix its logo to umpires’ uniforms. It added pop-culture star power by recruiting football legend Tom Brady and wife Gisele Bündchen as spokespeople and airing a Super Bowl ad featuring comedian Larry David.
Ok, so things look bad. But I’m sure this guy’s friends and partners are going to stick with him, right?
Bankman-Fried’s partners are bolting. The Miami Heat and Miami-Dade County announced Friday they are terminating their relationship with the company and looking for a new naming rights partner for the arena. The Crypto Council for Innovation, a leading crypto industry lobbying group, announced they had accepted the resignation of FTX’s U.S. affiliate. And the team behind the FTX Future Fund, one of its philanthropic efforts, said in an open letter they had quit.
We’ve reached a new milestone in history, wherein Miami-Dade County thinks this money is too dirty. Good luck losers.
Elon’s Twitter Mess
Speaking of epic failures, if you haven’t been paying attention, Twitter is currently a dumpster fire. If it’s all been too much to follow, check out the following tweets.
Make no mistake, Elon Musk owns this mess. 100%. Maybe he’ll clean it up, but I doubt it.
Substack Appreciation of the Week: Good Morning It’s Basketball
From 11 days ago comes this gem from the excellent newsletter from Tom Ziller: Bored with mere basketball, the Nets are now building a superteam of toxicity
Brooklyn appears to be ready to hire Ime Udoka to join its circus of gross sideshows.
The Brooklyn Nets fired Steve Nash. Whatever. It was an odd hiring in the first place, a basketball legend who seemed to be enjoying retirement dipping his toes in various enterprises and claimed to be uninterested in becoming a full-time NBA coach.
Since this post, the Nets did not, in fact, hire Ime Udoka. But that was the prevailing thought at the time. And Ziller’s writing about the possibility of such a move is outstanding.
Udoka has a long history with Sean Marks, the other member of Durant’s reported ultimatum, so this would appear to mean that Marks isn’t hitting the escape pod alongside Nash. My assessment of Marks’ judgment and interest in self-care is at an all-time low. The Nets were already the biggest mess in the NBA, and Marks is adding the second biggest mess into the vat. This is the dumbest merger and acquisition I’ve seen in years. You’ve got KD’s unhappiness, you’ve got Kyrie’s anti-Semitism and now you’ve got Ime Udoka’s problematic workplace relationship. It’s hideous!
The Nets should be ashamed. This is a disgrace.
New Yorker Cartoon of the Week
Recipe Corner
Spicy Paloma
So the paloma is typically considered a summertime cocktail. But this spicy version will work well against the cooling temperatures. Most importantly, Texas grapefruit season kicked off in October, making the citrus a perfect addition to autumnal menus.
This recipe would also work well scaled up as a batched cocktail for your friendsgiving.
1 fresh jalapeño pepper, sliced
1 ounce blanco tequila
1 ounce mezcal
1½ ounces fresh grapefruit juice
¼ ounce fresh lime juice
½ ounce simple syrup
Tajín
sparkling mineral water
lime wheel
In a shaker, muddle two slices of fresh jalapeño. Add ice, tequila, mezcal, grapefruit and lime juices, and simple syrup to the shaker. Shake well. Strain into a glass with ice and a Tajín rim. Top with sparkling mineral water. Garnish with a fresh jalapeño slice and a lime wheel.
Baked Sage Chicken Meatballs with Parmesan Orzo
It’s cold! You deserve some comfort food.
2 oz fresh italian bread, diced
½ cup warm water
2 tbsp butter
1 shallot, minced
4 garlic cloves, minced
1 tsp granulated garlic
¼ tsp crushed red pepper
1 ½ lbs ground chicken thigh
¼ cup grated parmesan cheese
2 tbsp chopped fresh sage
2 tbsp chopped fresh parsley
½ tsp kosher salt
Parmesan Orzo
2 tbsp butter
8 sage leaves
1 shallot, thinly sliced
1 cup orzo
1 cup dry white wine
1 small handful fresh thyme sprigs, tied in kitchen twine
1 ½ cups chicken stock
⅓ cup heavy cream
2 oz fresh spinach (approximately 2 cups)
¼ cup grated parmesan cheese, plus more for serving
freshly cracked black pepper
Preheat the oven to 450°F. Prepare a sheet pan with a piece of parchment paper. Lightly oil the parchment. Place the diced bread in a large mixing bowl and pour the warm water over top. Let soak, submerged, for at least 5 minutes.
Heat a 12” skillet over medium heat. Add the butter. Once melted, add the minced shallot and garlic. Cook for a minute or so until softened. Stir in the granulated garlic and red pepper flakes. Turn off the heat.
Add the ground chicken, parmesan, sage, parsley, salt, and shallot mixture to the bowl of bread. Mix until incorporated. Form the mixture into approximately 15 (2 oz) meatballs, packing them tightly. Place them onto the prepared sheet pan. Drizzle with a little more olive oil and bake on the top rack of the oven for 25-30 minutes, or until golden and cooked through.
For the orzo, wipe out the skillet and place it back over medium heat. Add the butter and let it melt. Add the sage leaves. Let them crisp as the butter begins to brown. Use a slotted spoon to transfer the sage to a paper towel.
Add the shallots to the butter and season with a pinch of salt. Cook for about 2 minutes. Stir in the orzo. Pour in the white wine and add the thyme. Bring to a simmer and cook for 2 minutes. Stir in the chicken stock. Bring to a simmer again, reduce the heat to medium-low, and cook for about 6 more minutes, stirring often.
Add in the heavy cream, spinach, and parmesan. Let the cream simmer while the spinach wilts and parmesan melts, stirring continuously. Season with salt to taste. Remove the thyme sprigs.
Serve the chicken meatballs over the orzo. Garnish with the crispy sage, freshly cracked black pepper, more parmesan, and any extra chopped parsley & thyme leaves.
Did Micah practice yoga this weekend?
Yes. 60 minutes Saturday at Searsana Dripping Springs.
That’s 41 in-person weekend classes in 45 weeks this year. Exactly 7 weekends left.
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