Jamie Loftus

He's the same kind of person as Elizabeth Holmes.

And he was, again, he's a confidence man.

And this gets us into the Larry David shit because the thing about being a confidence man is that as long as people are convinced their money is safe and most of them don't try to pull it out, then you can keep the con going and you can keep the fake numbers increasing and everyone will think you're richer and you can actually get real money out of this.

So one of the things that he did is he would pour shitloads of money into sponsorship deals and to other ventures to make his company seem legit.

One way he did this.

Yeah.

He spent 17 and a half million through FTX to sponsor the athletic teams at UC Berkeley.

He launched a 20 million dollar ad campaign with Tom Brady and Giselle Bündchen.

He offered NFTs at Coachella.

And he spent $135 million on the naming rights for the Miami Heat's home arena.

And this is all to build confidence, right?

You see it's the same thing Crypto.com did, by the way, with the arena.

Is my money safe in this thing that's a bank but not a bank?

Well, their name is on the arena, so it's probably legit.

In his interview with Vox, Sam basically admits this, albeit in a slightly careful way.

Journalist, so FTX technically wasn't gambling with their money.

FTX had just loaned their money to Alameda, who had gambled with their money and lost it.

And you didn't realize it was a big deal because you didn't realize how much money it was?

Sam responds, and also I thought Alameda had enough collateral to reasonably cover it.

Journalist says, I get how you could have gotten away with it, but I guess that seems sketchy even if you get away with it.