Inventing the Crypto King – Tablet Magazine
One of the most striking things about the collapse of crypto exchange FTX, once counted among the world s largest, is the extent to which it caught the supposed watchdogs of the tech industry by surprise. How could Sam Bankman-Fried, the brainiac financial visionary, crowned earlier this year the crypto emperor by The New York Times, have steered his armada of crypto firms into the rocks so recklessly? With allegations of an enormous, brazen fraud lingering, the first place to look is at the central role of the media in this fiasco. Through an almost endless churn of fawning coverage, the news media turned an inexperienced and, it seems, ethically deranged trader into the second coming of Warren Buffett.
Over the past two years, Bankman-Fried cultivated the media lavishly, if not carefully. Drawing on what then seemed like an unlimited pool of cash, SBF (as we ll call the mythologized version of the real person) dispersed investments, advertising dollars, sponsorships, and donations to key news outlets including ProPublica, Vox, Semafor, and The Intercept with extraordinary effectiveness.
We’re in what I hope is the awkward phase of decentralization, where everything is still way too centralized. With the Fed, and CBDCs, the WEF and the NYT, the FBI, CIA and NSA, the EU and UKR, ICBMs and HSMs, not to mention HIMARs and all the rest, we may never get past the centralized phase, but if we do, things will be great, and Bitcoin will be part of it.