Bankman-Fried Learns the Hard Way That Stealing to Make the World Better Is Still Stealing

FTX founder Sam Bankman-Fried’s 25-year prison sentence is deserved. His lawyers argued for leniency because Bankman-Fried believed himself to have been doing good. But as Scott Bessent argued in the Wall Street Journal a few weeks ago, that actually makes Bankman-Fried’s criminal behavior worse, not better.

Bessent wrote that “the dominant theme” of the lawyers’ sentencing memo “is the most damning: Mr. Bankman-Fried thinks he should get off lightly because he wants to make the world a better place.” He continued:

At least 10 times, the lawyers refer to their client’s supposed strategy of “earning to give,” or what Mr. Bankman-Fried termed “effective altruism.” They quote his father as saying that “Sam started FTX as a way to earn to give”; they laud his “commitment to the world” and his “great gifts to offer the world”; they describe him as a man “who can still have a significant, positive impact on this world.”

I could go on, as they do, at great length. But here’s the thing: Mr. Bankman-Fried’s commitment to his utilitarian mission of making the world “better” is what led him into fraud and criminality in the first place. Far from making the case for leniency, his legal brief’s emphasis on his good intentions and larger purpose demonstrates that he has learned nothing, or the wrong lessons, from his convictions for fraud and conspiracy.

Yep. As I wrote for the December 19, 2022, issue of National Review:

We’re all familiar with moral compromises made in the selfish pursuit of money. What FTX’s failure demonstrates is the moral compromises that can take place in the purportedly selfless pursuit of money. It seems that they aren’t so different. If you actually believe you can enhance human reason with artificial intelligence, create an operational plan to feed the world after a nuclear war, and invent an impartial and trustworthy way of doing cost–benefit analysis on everything (all ideas that on its website the FTX Foundation says it is — was — interested in funding), then the only hurdle is raising enough capital to fund it all, and if you can raise that capital by trading virtual assets back and forth and doing a little financial chicanery, it might be iffy, but the world will thank you in the end.

You can read that whole piece here.