Elizabeth Lopatto rounds out her coverage of the SBF trial with a great final piece on that asshole:
At his sentencing, I sat several rows behind Bankman-Fried, clad in prison khaki and clanking faintly when he walked from the shackles on his feet, while he gave his statement to the court. “I’m sorry about what happened at every stage,” Bankman-Fried said. “I failed everyone I cared about.”
What Bankman-Fried did not say was that he had, in fact, committed crimes and he wouldn’t do it again. Instead, he talked about the “mistakes” he’d made, how he’d assisted the FTX customers in dealing with the bankruptcy estate, that he hadn’t actually engaged in witness tampering, and that, in fact, the FTX estate had “billions” more than necessary to repay the customers, and that has been true the whole time. He didn’t say a word about his lenders, two of which went bankrupt, or the investors, whose money is gone.
It struck me that Bankman-Fried was going with the strategy he’d outlined in a document, submitted as evidence by the prosecution. He was simply going to blame the bankruptcy lawyers, as outlined in points 4, 5, 6, and 9 in his little Google Doc.
SBF reminds me of the great line from Kathleen Edwards’ song In State: “You wouldn’t be yourself if you weren’t telling a lie.” (Another lyric: “Maybe 20 years in state will change your mind” is also apropos, though this particular leopard probably isn’t going to change his spots.)
Another good piece: Mo Tkacik on Boeing’s quest to fire all their good quality inspectors and replace them with rubber stamps:
Few quality managers were as stubborn as Swampy [the Boeing whistleblower who recently “committed suicide]. A Seattle Times story detailed an internal Boeing document boasting that the incidence of manufacturing defects on the 787 had plunged 20 percent in a single year, which inspectors anonymously attributed to the “bullying environment” in which defects had systematically “stopped being documented” by inspectors. They weren’t fooling customers: Qatar Airways had become so disgusted with the state of the planes it received from Charleston that it refused to accept them, and even inspired the Qatar-owned Al Jazeera to produce a withering documentary called Broken Dreams, in which an employee outfitted with a hidden camera chitchatted with mechanics and inspectors about the planes they were producing. “They hire these people off the street, dude … fucking flipping burgers for a living, making sandwiches at Subway,” one mechanic marveled of his colleagues; another regaled the narrator with tales of co-workers who came to work high on “coke and painkillers and weed” because no one had ever had a urine test. Asked if they would fly the 787 Dreamliner; just five of 15 answered yes, and even the positive responses did Boeing no favors: “I probably would, but I have kind of a death wish, too.”
Boeing’s big customers like Emirates are demanding an engineer for the next CEO, but the next guy in line, Larry Culp, is a Harvard MBA. The new head of Boeing commercial, Stephanie Pope, began her career there as a cost accountant and also has an MBA. As the X-rays clearly show, this bone was broken long ago. The MBAs came in and fucked Boeing. The unfuck is going to be long and ugly, and it may not work.