[mikeyouse]

Right. All of these "bigger than Enron" or "bigger than Madoff" claims are so dumb. Much of the money lost on FTX was in the form of magic bean tokens that people pretended were worth billions of dollars - they weren't actually worth billions of dollars.

[skippyboxedhero]

Right, but the money lost was USD deposits.

Madoff was magic beans, he just invented $50bn of money that he said he made for investors. SBF was depositing customer money into his hedge fund directly (FTX didn't even have a bank account).

So this is a relatively big fraud because it was USD value multiple billions, likely near $10bn. This was money stolen directly from customers. The $1bn that SBF took directly out of the company into his personal bank account (which shortly thereafter went into the bank account of the DNC) was a small part of the fraud.

[dragonwriter]

> SBF was depositing customer money into his hedge fund directly (FTX didn't even have a bank account).

Even the CEO running the whole set of related entities in bankruptcy doesn't know which of the FTX-related entities had bank accounts and what accounts they were because they literally didn't keep records of that. Or who their employees were. Or, well, much of anything.

Probably because the whole corporate structure was a paper thin veneer over fraud, amd discussing the individual paper entities as if they were meaningfully distinct in any way is mostly missing the point.