Why Did Sam Bankman-Fried Fail?
The $32B Empire on a Spreadsheet Nobody Kept
📜 What Happened
FTX was crypto's most trusted exchange — Super Bowl ads, stadium names, congressional testimony. Behind it: customer deposits secretly funneled to sister fund Alameda, accounting done partly on QuickBooks, and a company that didn't know how many employees it had. One leaked balance sheet triggered a bank run; $32 billion evaporated in ten days. SBF got 25 years.
☠️ The Fatal Mistake
No board, no CFO, no controls — genius-branding substituted for basic accounting while customer money paid for the empire.
🧠 The Lesson (Free for You)
Competence in one thing (trading) is not competence in everything. When a company's controls are 'trust me,' the correct amount to deposit is zero.
📕 The Antidote Book
Most business books tell you how to do things right; Horowitz tells you what to do after everything has gone wrong. Drawing on nearly losing his company Loudcloud/Opsware multiple times before selling it for $1.6B, he…
📖 OPEN THE FULL INTERACTIVE BREAKDOWN →Searchable, filterable, free to read — they paid billions; your lesson is free.