The Smartest Guys in the Room
By 
A useful reminder that our venture capital overlords dumped $2 billion into the techbro Ponzi scheme that just went bankrupt:
Sam Bankman-Fried’s pitch to investors was not much of a pitch: It was a take-it-or-leave-it offer.
In meetings to raise money for his cryptocurrency exchange FTX over the last year, the entrepreneur left little room for negotiation, two investors said. FTX was his company, Mr. Bankman-Fried told them, and he planned to run it with little oversight. Interested investors should “support him and observe,” one investor who heard the pitch said.
They responded by giving him $500 million early this year, valuing the privately held FTX at $32 billion.
This week, Mr. Bankman-Fried met with investors again — but with a different tone. FTX had collapsed overnight, putting billions of dollars in customer funds in jeopardy, setting off a slew of government investigations and thrusting the crypto markets into chaos. He was sorry, he said. He had messed up. Without a bailout, FTX could fail.
It was a humbling fall for Mr. Bankman-Fried, 30, who had cultivated a reputation as an iconoclastic wunderkind who could multitask effortlessly and slept on a beanbag at the office. Yet more than 80 investors went along with his vision, pouring nearly $2 billion into FTX in just two years.
“Support him and observe” is a good epitaph for all the rich dudes who got lucky once and thinks this means they therefore know everything about everything. It’s also worth noting that judging workers by the amount of time they spend in the office rather than the quality of their work was a core principle of Elizabeth Holmes (and countless other failed bosses who vastly overestimate their own competence.)
…via comments, good stuff from Helaine Olen on this.