Follow the money when looking at a criminal scam
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It might not seem so obvious, but if you follow the breadcrumbs trail — I did — this is a classic Ponzi scheme, where instead of mailed letters of the yore and the tattle of taxi drivers, FTX found suckers at network scale using YouTubers and Tom Brady. The icing on the cake came from media outlets such as Forbes and Fortune, the latter calling Sam Bankman-Fried the next Warren Buffett. Simply put, FTX is a textbook case of a massively successful content-based marketing strategy in the age of social networks.
“In general, the press goes along with the crowd,” said Andrew Odlzyko, a University of Minnesota professor who has written extensively about manias and bubbles. “Part of it is that journalists are part of the crowd and get caught up in the mass delusion. And part of it is ‘willing suspension of disbelief’ that is accentuated by the need to attract readers, which forces folks to emphasize the spectacular.”
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