60. The most interesting villain alive
Much like white women and murder documentaries, I can’t stop studying Sam Bankman-Fried.
Hi friends.
The Fourth of July was two days ago, and if you want proof of this country’s specific talent for turning financial crime into a reinvention story, I have one for you. I’ve spent the past few weeks reading a long New York Mag profile of Sam Bankman-Fried’s life in federal prison and telling people about it.
Bankman-Fried (or SBF for short) is lobbying for a presidential pardon: two Republican operatives on retainer, and a father who tweets his talking points for him, since he can’t tweet from prison himself. Four years ago, he was one of the Democratic Party’s biggest donors. Now his revived X account posts things like, “S&P 500 hit another ATH yesterday... +22.8% since @realDonaldTrump’s second inauguration. How about the same point in Biden’s term? +7.0%.”
Prosecutors got hold of a memo he wrote on house arrest, before sentencing, titled, with rare self-awareness, “These are all random probably bad ideas that aren’t vetted; CONFIDENTIAL.” One line item: “come out as a Republican.”
Nobody is fooled. Trump, asked point-blank if he’d pardon him, said, “I don’t know him at all... No, I don’t plan to.” Puck’s William D. Cohan has taken to calling the whole campaign a “pardon striptease.”
The politics are new. The logic underneath them is not.
SBF’s unusual ethics.
Sam Bankman-Fried was raised by two Stanford Law professors. His mother’s academic specialty is consequentialist ethics: the theory that outcomes, not intentions, determine whether an action is right. Sam has said, on the record, that his own relationship to ethics was “mostly a front.” Four years after being convicted of stealing roughly $8 billion, he still maintains he did nothing wrong. Especially because his venture bets on Anthropic, Curser, and Solana would be worth $100B today, with Anthropic alone at $80B, a 160x return. The outcome, in his eyes, outweighs the mechanism used to achieve it (ie. fraud).
This is why he remains one of the more interesting villains currently in circulation. His worldview didn’t break in prison. It didn’t even bend. He spent a year and a half at his first facility without once seeing the sky, and when asked what he regretted, he said letting his own lawyers talk him into stepping down as CEO. “I got gaslit,” he said. “I was really weak in that moment.”
The profile takes you on a journey into the strange world of federal prisons with a floor plan of his first unit, the one in Brooklyn. Drawn by hand in blue ballpoint by Carmine Simpson, a former NYPD officer doing time for soliciting images from minors, and mailed to the reporter from a prison in Virginia. He labeled the bunks. His own. Sam’s. Diddy’s, a few beds down. The reporter notes that Nicolás Maduro reportedly lives there now. It’s a protective-custody unit, reserved for the kind of high-profile or otherwise vulnerable inmate who can’t be safely housed with the general population, and it runs, unusually for a federal facility, without much of a hierarchy. SBF, Carmine, and Diddy, just coexisting.
That level playing field didn’t survive SBF’s transfer to Terminal Island, a low-security prison outside Los Angeles. This facility sorted itself into a more expected hierarchy: race-based social clubs called 'cars,' as in, who you ride with. The Woods. The Sureños. The Paisas. Your car decides who protects you, who you eat with, whose rules you follow. Opt out, and you lose privileges as basic as television, since every TV room belongs to a car.
Sam was placed with the Woods (the white car) by default. He hated it. His bunkmate ate his food and sold his windowpane for drug money, and when a friend asked why he never said anything, Sam shrugged it off: “What’s that compared to the $20 billion the government took from me?” The real falling-out came over pickleball. He’d been playing with some sex offenders and got confronted about it by the Woods. SBF didn’t care for their tone. So he quit the entire system and went independent.
And yet almost everyone who has actually served time with him likes him more than the public ever has. His prison friends cook for him, screen his mail, defend him in interviews, call him a kid in a grown man’s body.
Online, the standard response to anything he posts is some version of “rot in jail forever, dude.”
In prison, he’s a beloved nonconformist.
The people shaping our world.
A different kind of “villain” went viral recently.
A software engineer from San Francisco made a tweet of his observations as a bulleted list titled, “NYC observations after spending last week there.” These observations include things like: “People are actually outside touching grass, or cement,” “Everyone is willing to strike up a conversation, not about AI agents,” and, “Found a way to talk to folks without mentioning AI.” He closed with, “it’s genuinely refreshing to remember there’s a whole world outside the feed.”
Reading it, he sounds like Buddy the Elf wandering into Midtown, marveling that humans exist and talk to each other. He is, instead, one of the people currently building the algorithms that decide what the rest of us see, buy, and believe.
Both SBF and the Silicon Valley bubble are two sides of the same coin: the people architecting our world are wildly out of touch with it.
At Bankman-Fried’s sentencing, the judge said the point of the prison term was, in part, “for the purpose of disabling him.”
Unfortunately, nobody is trying to disable this guy. He just ships.
If you missed the last dispatch, I got my wisdom teeth removed:
Rumor has it that Substack is suppressing free content. If you’d like to resist the algorithm pushing paid content only, then liking, sharing, and commenting on this newsletter will help! <3
New York things.
I guess they really did get married at MSG. As the rumors swirled, I refused to believe Taylor Swift would choose a concert venue to get married in. It had to be a distraction tactic. But alas, it appears she really did tie the knot at Madison Square Garden. If you believe the reported guest list, it could make sense from a security standpoint; this has to be one of the largest gatherings of celebrities and rich people outside of the Oscars and Davos (covered stadium = no helicopters hovering above the ceremony trying to get sneaky shots).
The list reads a bit like Taylor told her PR team to invite every rich and famous person in existence who isn’t politically polarizing. I'm struggling to believe she and Travis are close friends with Barbara Corcoran, Tom Hanks, and Adam Sandler (who officiated).
$5K to smoke with Snoop. Feed Me reported on some gossip that Snoop Dogg was offering a $5,000 meet-and-greet to smoke weed with him before his set at Surf Lodge.
Brooklyn Botanic Garden is throwing its first-ever block party on July 30. Thirty years of the Greenest Block in Brooklyn contest gets celebrated with DJ Mamoudou on ‘90s classics, live jazz from BrownstoneJAZZ, lawn games, and an exhibition of re-created winning stoops that runs through October 25.
Gen Z had a Luddite festival in the East Village last weekend, and no, you couldn’t photograph it. Summer of Ludd ran eight days through Tompkins Square Park with zine-making, mending workshops, and offline dating meetups, organized by an anonymous coalition that communicates through a blue puppet named Gowanus. About 300 people showed up for the opening night play alone, not bad for a heat-advisory July weekend with zero online promotion. The one rule, laid down by an actor playing Lord Byron: no phones, no recording, no photos.
Rich people things.
Costco is the top grocery destination for high-income Americans. 11% of wealthier shoppers say it’s their primary store, versus 5% of middle- and lower-income respondents. It’s a gap that makes sense once you factor in the bulk upfront costs, the storage space required, and the lump-sum membership fee.
Ultra-rich people have found a new flex: Snow rooms are apparently popping up in mansions, penthouses, and at least one superyacht, per the Times. Mukesh Ambani put one in his Mumbai high-rise; Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman has one on his 440-foot yacht. Somehow it’s also a thing in Dallas now. The high-end versions drop fake flakes from the ceiling so you can feel like you’re trapped inside a snow globe, by choice, in 100-degree heat.
Culture & brand.
Never in my life did I think Bank of America would make merch people actually wanted. BofA, the official bank of the World Cup, is giving away 2 million “Fan Bands” and people really, really want them. It’s essentially a beaded charm bracelet with 140-plus collectible designs, including host-city landmarks. Fans are waiting in two-plus-hour lines to build and trade them at stadium customization stations. They’re free. People are reselling them on eBay and Poshmark anyway, some for up to $500.
I think I aspire to be a yachtstitute but just don’t have the juice. Trend forecaster Sean Monahan is back with a fresh vocabulary haul from a recent trip to New York, and the standout is “yachtstitute,” a portmanteau you can probably guess, for anyone whose glamour depends entirely on proximity to somebody else’s boat.
Also in the batch: narcglasses (any camera-equipped smart glasses, see Kylie Jenner’s Meta collab), brand victim (fashion victim, updated for Erewhon totes and Labubus), and wordslip, his term for words like “literally” and “nonplussed” that have drifted into meaning their own opposite depending on who’s saying them.
Stassi Schroeder is trying redemption again. House of Stassi, her follow-up to the Vanderpump Villa rehab tour, premieres July 29 on Freeform, with the full season landing on Hulu the next day. The cast includes Katie Maloney, who Schroeder admits she secretly feuded with “for years” and is now patching things up with on camera. Her pitch for the new, post-scandal Stassi: less Bravo chaos, more processing. “No one’s throwing drinks on each other,” she promised.
Erling Haaland breathes fire, speaks Mandarin, and just ended Brazil’s World Cup. The 25-year-old Norwegian scored twice in the final 11 minutes to send Brazil packing 2-1 — their earliest exit since 1990 — tying him with Messi for the tournament’s goal lead. It’s the perfect moment for him to also be the new face of Walovi, a 200-year-old Chinese herbal tea, in an ad so unhinged fans assumed it was AI. It is not. Watch it for the kebab scene alone.
What brand will snap up the climbers first? The Empire State Building climbers were released on supervised release the day after their stunt: Angelina Nikolau and Ivan Kuznetsov scaled the spire on July 1, got engaged roughly 1,450 feet up, and unfurled a banner before security caught them. They’re not exactly amateurs: the pair are the extreme-climbing influencers behind Netflix’s “Skywalkers: A Love Story.” Court date is August 24. Place your bets now.
Ok bye! 🍊
Thanks for reading!