Semafor, which was launched by former NYT columnist and Buzzfeed’s chief Ben Smith, accused Musk of taking funds from Bankman-Fried to finance his purchase of Twitter.
The publication insinuated that Musk took $100 million in funding from Bankman-Fried, who is accused of misappropriating funds from his crypto venture FTX to a sister company called Alameda in a Ponzi scheme to rival that of disgraced financier Bernie Madoff’s.
Musk fired back at Semafor after it published the piece titled “Sam Bankman-Fried, Elon Musk, and a secret text,” which was penned by Liz Hoffman. The story accuses Musk, who now owns Twitter, of “gleefully” mocking the “downfall” of FTX.
The article was published after Musk claimed Bankman-Fried set off his “bullsh*t meter” when he offered to invest in Musk’s takeover over the social media platform. The article strongly implies that Musk had taken Bankman-Fried’s money.
Semafor’s lead investor appears to be none other than SBF — a fact that Musk was quick to point out in his public rebuke of the publication, with receipts to prove it.
“Semafor is owned by SBF,” wrote Musk. “This is a massive conflict of interest in your reporting. Journalistic integrity is [garbage bin emoji].”
Archive for 2022
November 24, 2022
I’M SO OLD, I CAN REMEMBER WHEN THE IDEA OF FIGHTING COVID WITH VITAMIN D WAS CONSPIRACY THEORY/MISINFORMATION/FAKE SCIENCE. NOW IT’S IN NATURE: Association between vitamin D supplementation and COVID-19 infection and mortality.
Vitamin D deficiency has long been associated with reduced immune function that can lead to viral infection. Several studies have shown that Vitamin D deficiency is associated with increases the risk of infection with COVID-19. However, it is unknown if treatment with Vitamin D can reduce the associated risk of COVID-19 infection, which is the focus of this study. In the population of US veterans, we show that Vitamin D2 and D3 fills were associated with reductions in COVID-19 infection of 28% and 20%, respectively [(D3 Hazard Ratio (HR) = 0.80, [95% CI 0.77, 0.83]), D2 HR = 0.72, [95% CI 0.65, 0.79]]. Mortality within 30-days of COVID-19 infection was similarly 33% lower with Vitamin D3 and 25% lower with D2 (D3 HR = 0.67, [95% CI 0.59, 0.75]; D2 HR = 0.75, [95% CI 0.55, 1.04]). We also find that after controlling for vitamin D blood levels, veterans receiving higher dosages of Vitamin D obtained greater benefits from supplementation than veterans receiving lower dosages. Veterans with Vitamin D blood levels between 0 and 19 ng/ml exhibited the largest decrease in COVID-19 infection following supplementation. Black veterans received greater associated COVID-19 risk reductions with supplementation than White veterans. As a safe, widely available, and affordable treatment, Vitamin D may help to reduce the severity of the COVID-19 pandemic.
Do tell.
UNEXPECTEDLY: Turkeys Away! Dems Drop Cheney Like WKRP.
It can’t be Thanksgiving without the classic 1978 clip from the TV show WKRP in Cincinnati, in which the radio station hired a helicopter that dropped live turkeys. Chaos ensued when the birds hit the ground below “like sacks of wet cement.” It’s one of the most hilarious clips from 70’s TV — or from any decade, for that matter.
And now, because of some disgruntled Dems, Liz Cheney may meet the same fate as those turkeys: dropped from their favor because of her obsession with Donald Trump. They also suspect her of using the January 6 committee — of which she was one of two Republicans — as a stepping stone to her political future.
Which, of course, is toast anyway, but Liz doesn’t yet believe that.
According to the Washington Post, fifteen anonymous staffers are miffed that the committee may be deep-sixing the information they had brought to the table. Their work, part of the “Blue Team,” focused on law enforcement and how it failed to assess the predicted attack on the Capitol. Other groups, like the Green Team and the Purple Team, examined financing for the January 6 event, along with militia groups and extremism.
But that’s all taking a back seat because of Liz Cheney’s fixation on Trump. Even the name of her group provides a clue: it’s the “Gold Team.”
One former staff member said:
“We all came from prestigious jobs, dropping what we were doing because we were told this would be an important fact-finding investigation that would inform the public. But when [the committee] became a Cheney 2024 campaign, many of us became discouraged.”
Live look at the leftist autophagy, already in progress:
ANSWERS TO QUESTIONS NO ONE IS ASKING: How To Talk To Family Members About Bitcoin This Thanksgiving.
BLACK FRIDAY DEAL: iRobot Roomba i3+ EVO (3550) Self-Emptying Robot Vacuum. #CommissionEarned
ANNALS OF LEFTIST AUTOPHAGY: Bill Maher Mourns Losing ‘Germophobe’ Howard Stern as a Friend.
Maher and Harris spoke extensively about COVID-19, from various treatments to how Americans settled into distinct camps over the virus.
“I hate the way it’s dividing people,” Maher began. “Climate change never divided people for real in my life.” He segued to the so-called King of All Media, a figure whose pandemic fears proved paralyzing.
“Howard Stern and I … for years there was animosity. We got back together like two lost lovers,” Maher said with a smile. “And we had just repaired this relationship and were having this beautiful friendship. Now, I think I’ll never see him again.”
“I still love him and I hope he still loves me, but he is, in my view, a germophobe. I think he would admit [it], it’s pretty obvious,” Maher continues. “People have the right to be whatever level of scared they are of germs. I can’t live in that world. I don’t want to … I can’t live in your paranoid world.”
Flashback: What Happened to Howard Stern?
Listening to this balderdash, you’d have thought that Clinton had led a saintly life, that she had been constantly set upon by jealous, corrupt inferiors, and that her career had been a spotless series of legislative and diplomatic triumphs. Buying into the notion of Hillary as a lifelong victim of the patriarchy, Stern seemed to be out to make up, in one interview, for every time he’d ever gotten a stripper to remove her top. One illuminating moment came when Stern praised Howard Zinn, the Communist author of A People’s History of the United States, a shoddy work of propaganda that has, alas, become a perennial best-seller and college text. Every Stern fan knows that Howard’s not big on books, so if he’s actually read Zinn’s opus, it’s likely his chief source of information on American history—a scary thought.
It was a stunning listening experience. When Hillary blamed James Comey (along with “the Russians and Wikileaks”) for her election loss, Stern went along with her, even though Comey had done Hillary a service by choosing not to prosecute her for clear violations of the Espionage Act. When she mentioned her emails, Stern didn’t bring up her private server or her destruction of the emails with BleachBit but instead agreed readily with her baffling claim that the emails had been “misinterpret[ed]”; when she criticized Trump’s “trade battles” and tax breaks, said that Trump was in Putin’s “camp,” and accused Trump fans (and not Antifa) of committing acts of violence around the country—and when she even knocked the booming Trump economy—Stern nodded along. He made no mention of Fusion GPS, the Clinton Foundation, her contorted version of the Benghazi episode, her dubious story about coming under fire in Bosnia, or anything else remotely scandalous in her (or her husband’s) past. Both Hillary and Stern took Joe Biden’s side in the Ukraine controversy and agreed that Trump’s famous phone call with the Ukrainian president had amounted to an “abuse of power.”
The entire interview was a case of kowtowing on an epic scale. Howard Stern, who rose to fame, in considerable part, by zapping fraudulent politicians, had now given one of the most sycophantic interviews of all time to a woman regarded by many as the most duplicitous pol of our era. It was a terrible comedown for a guy who’d earned a reputation for fearless honesty.
As Stephen Kruiser wrote at the start of year: Howard Stern Is Now Your Grandmother. “I wasn’t a radio guy but there was a time in the early ’90s when I set my alarm to listen to Howard Stern. He was that good. He was crass. He was insightful. Most importantly — for me — he was funny. He was also beyond edgy. Now he’s a bitchy, housecoat-wearing granny.”
CIVIL RIGHTS UPDATE: Again: Judge Blocks New York’s Private Property Gun Ban.
READER FAVORITE: Apple AirPods Pro (2nd Generation). #CommissionEarned
I’LL TAKE “TO STOP SMALLER COMPETITORS FROM BEING ABLE TO PLAY” FOR $500, ALEX: Why Sam Bankman-Fried wanted crypto regulation.
WELL, THIS IS THE 21ST CENTURY, YOU KNOW: DARPA’s flying forward with its jetpack program.
AT AMAZON, Early Black Friday Deals. #CommissionEarned.
NIALL FERGUSON: FTX Kept Your Crypto in a Crypt Not a Vault.
Sam Bankman-Fried doesn’t read books. As he explained in a profile on Sequoia Capital’s website (which will be an assigned text in journalism courses for the rest of time), “I would never read a book.” “I’m very skeptical of books,” he said. “I don’t want to say no book is ever worth reading, but I actually do believe something pretty close to that.”
This error is not irremediable, because Bankman-Fried, founder of the now-defunct crypto exchange FTX, is likely soon to have a lot of time for reading.
* * * * * * * *
There is nothing in this story that would surprise the ghost of John Law, the Scottish financier who blew up the Mississippi Bubble in early 18th-century France. Bubbles are nearly always inflated with cheap credit. When monetary conditions tighten, the most leveraged players go down first, but the result is a cascade of illiquidity, which then turns into insolvency as asset prices plunge.
Another classic feature of the FTX story is the role of shady political influence. Just as Law ingratiated himself with the Duke of Orleans, the regent during the minority of Louis XV, so financial fraudsters through the ages have relied on friends in high places to protect them from legal or regulatory scrutiny.
Take Enron, the energy trading company that filed for bankruptcy in December 2001. Ken Lay, its chief executive, could not have inflated his castle in the air without Fed Chair Alan Greenspan’s monetary policy “put,” but Enron also bought itself protection with roughly $6 million of political donations, a third of which went to Republicans. In addition, the company sought to buy itself popularity by paying the Houston Astros to rename their ballpark Enron Field.
Sound familiar? In 2020, Bankman-Fried gave the Joe Biden campaign at least $10 million. In the 2022 midterm election cycle, he was the second-largest funder of Democrats, after George Soros, giving $39.8 million in federal contributions. The majority of those donations, about $27 million, went to the Protect Our Future PAC, which supported candidates who prioritized pandemic prevention.
Not all bubble-blowers present themselves as philosopher kings. Law did; Lay not so much. As the son of two law school professors, SBF was exceptionally well prepared for self-aggrandizement. The Sequoia profile is full of gems:
Q: You just happen to be alive in the most important time in the history of the future race. The existential point! Really?
SBF: It certainly would not be one’s prior — at least, not naively. But if you want to really needle on that, there are some anthropic considerations by which that might not be as crazy as it sounds.
When a young man sets out make billions of dollars very quickly, there is a common suspicion that he is actuated by greed. By raising him as a doctrinaire utilitarian, professors Bankman and Fried provided their son with the perfect alibi: He was making the money purely in order to engage in “effective altruism,” the get-rich-quick version of utilitarianism. Because you can only do the greatest good for the greatest number if you first make the greatest amount of money.
If, like SBF, you’re not a fan of book learnin’, the Internet’s preeminent online bookseller has you covered: Amazon’s already greenlit an FTX miniseries.
WHEN THEY TELL YOU WHO THEY ARE, BELIEVE THEM: World Economic Forum chair Klaus Schwab declares on Chinese state TV: ‘China is a model for many nations.’
STEPHEN KRUISER: Annoy a Commie—Enjoy Everything About Thanksgiving Day.
LEFTIES ALWAYS TURN ON YOU: Jan 6 staffers turn on Liz Cheney. “What can you say at this point except maybe who did you think these people were?”
BLACK FRIDAY DEAL: Invicta Men’s 8926OB Pro Diver watch. #CommissionEarned
BUT SHE’LL SCREAM “SEXISM!” AND “ASSAULT” IF THEY CHUCK THEM BACK: University employee says she will chuck ‘dodge balls at cis men’s heads.’
Why is higher education such a cesspit of hate and sexism?
SOD OFF, SWAMPY: Astrobiologists concerned about imperialistic consequences of galactic exploration. “Rooted in DEI ideology and an anti-colonialist framework, much of this activism is carried out in the popular press among well-credentialed academics who emphasize the supposed need to rethink the language of their fields and make vocal exhortations to decolonize space.”
Colonize space. Leave the morons on Earth. And to be clear, these people are morons.