Good Old SBF is at it again. I want to start covering other stories, but the FTX collapse keeps on generating headline after headline, so I might as well continue.

SBF had a recent interview with Bloomberg, which consisted of 11 hours spent with SBF at his penthouse in the Bahamas. The interview paints a detailed picture of SBF’s demeanour as well as his character and of course, his environment. Sam started by saying the reason he took the interview is because we intends to make this right for everyone affect by the collapse and he cannot do that if he’s busy “covering his ass”. The whole interview is definitely worth a read but a few things stood out the most to me. Most of all SBF’s explanation that he simply “misaccounted” for $8 billion. I get it. It’s a very common mistake to misaccount $8 billion dollars, even among MIT graduates such as himself.

In between fundraising calls and a “rather awkward dinner”, the Bloomberg interviewer continues to prompt SBF to open up more about what really happened to the user funds. Sam seems to be married to the idea that it was his sloppiness all along that caused the FTX collapse. As the topic gets explored in more details, SBF reveals that he still intends to find the missing $8 billion. It is highly unlikely that SBF will ever make everyone whole again, and the interviewer describes him as delusional, or purposefully continuing the narrative that he set up.

Where I think this Interview shines though, is that it offers an insight into SBF’s mind. The way he seems to see himself in his head, at least until the collapse, is as a real life rags-to-riches superhero. He got rich so that he could donate all of his wealth in order to stop world hunger and the impending rise of AI against humanity. I did not make that up. It just happened, that along the way, he lost not only his wealth, but the wealth of millions of other people, who probably weren’t planning on saving the world with their FTX funds.

Even if this chaotic-good alignment were true, this is the mindset of a selfish, delusional megalomaniac, and not a martyr or a hero. If SBF actually gets high on his own supply is another story, however, in a recent interview with Vox, SBF admits that a lot of this save-the-world humanitarian image was mostly just a front.

The interview then continues to explore SBF’s relationship with risk. To no surprise, SBF seems to be comfortable with taking risks that any other person would find absolutely insane. SBF said in another recent interview that he would make bets similar to: “51% you double the earth out somewhere else, 49% it all disappears”. With this kind of leadership, it’s almost a miracle that this company didn’t crumble earlier. In a weird way, it’s almost a good thing that it collapsed when it did. The more FTX would grow, the more catastrophic the collapse. SBF’s high-risk high-reward approach is also shared by Alameda Research CEO Caroline Ellison. SBF and Caroline funded Alameda Research 4 years ago and then eventually used the some of the profit to bootstrap FTX. Caroline also stood out as an avid risktaker commenting on the previous success of Alameda and saying that “the way to really make money is figure out when the market is going to go up and get balls long before that”.

The important thing to remember here is that both FTX and Alameda were built with fast and loose investments. Many of them well outside what a regular trader would consider acceptable risk.

In SBF’s own words:

“FTX was a legitimate, profitable, thriving business. And I fucked up by, like, allowing a margin position to get too big on it. One that endangered the platform. It was a completely unnecessary and unforced error, which like maybe I got super unlucky on, but, like, that was my bad. It fucking sucks, but it wasn’t inherent to what the business was. It was just a fuckup. A huge fuckup.”

The more you unpeel the onion layers that make up SBF, the more it turns out that the former CEO of a multi billion crypto company is not good at math, can’t code, doesn’t really know how to run a business and has gambling problems. The last one could be true but the CEO of a Fintech is unable to do basic maths and write some code? I don’t think so. The media seem to enjoy portraying SBF as some clueless goofball that’s just too stupid to be Machiavellian in any way, but this is where I disagree. I believe SBF is fully aware of how he comes across in the media when he makes these comments. He is building an image for himself — even if that’s the image of a clueless idiot. People generally find it more digestible when a bad situation is the result of incompetence rather than a calculated act.