As with Elizabeth Holmes and Billy McFarland, the story seemed too good to be true – because it was, says Guardian columnist Emma Brockes
, the founder of the now defunct FTX cryptocurrency exchange, the most surprising, perhaps, is just how thoroughly the world bought in to his rise. Bankman-Fried’s guilt on multiple charges of, among other things, wire fraud, securities fraud, commodities fraud and money laundering has yet to be determined, but the presence of the 31-year-old former wunderkind in court at all, is, of course, part of a long history of feted boy geniuses falling to earth and seeming suddenly ludicrous.
Bankman-Fried fit precisely into the mould beloved of tech and wealth magazines for young men in the unicorn business space. Before he cut his hair and located a suit for this week’s appearance in a Manhattan federal court, he was flamboyantly scruffy, a man worth, on paper at least, billions of dollars who nonetheless wore scabby old trainers and shapeless cargo shorts.
It is curious to hold up the rise and fall of Bankman-Fried against other business gurus whose vast personal wealth was at least partly staked on the cult of personality around them. Adam Neumann, who co-founded WeWork in 2010, who was named by Time magazine as one of the world’s most influential people in 2018, and wasin 2019, is a lot sharper in outline than Bankman-Fried, but luxuriated in, and to some degree monetised, his own eccentricity to a similar degree.
As a rule, not only is the bad or babyish behaviour of startup billionaires indulged by the people around them, this behaviour becomes, in and of itself, celebrated as somehow intrinsic to their success. The dynamics are, in some ways, an extension of basic laws governing celebrity; once a certain bar is cleared and a momentum gathered, an individual becomes surrounded by sycophants and enablers who normalise behaviour that results in the death or massive loss in value of the company.
And so the money disappears and bankruptcy beckons. Or the money doesn’t entirely disappear but the company collapses. The self-belief of the founders, meanwhile, never appears entirely to dissipate. McFarland is. Adam Neumann, who it should be emphasised has never been charged with any crime, is still very wealthy and apparently working on a new company called Flow, which – prepare to smile, nastily – he describes as a “residential consumer-facing real estate company”.
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