Over at the The Stanford Daily, they have a story about Sam Bankman-Fried detailing the complicity of his parents, and other elements in the Stanford University community.
This is not a surprise, but no one else has seemed to cover it:
Crypto magnate Sam Bankman-Fried was scheduled to speak to a Stanford class this winter, The Daily has learned. The topic of the course? Tech ethics. Bankman-Fried wouldn’t have the opportunity to give that lecture, though — instead, before the winter quarter even began, he was placed under house arrest just a stone’s throw away from the lecture hall, confined to a home on campus owned by his parents, Stanford Law School (SLS) professors Joseph Bankman and Barbara Fried.
His stay at Stanford came to an end Friday, when Bankman-Fried’s bail was revoked by Judge Lewis A. Kaplan over alleged attempts at witness interference. Instead of his parents’ $5 million house, Bankman-Fried is now confined to the Metropolitan Detention Center in Brooklyn. But the Stanford community’s ties to his case, already well-reported, are even deeper than previously thought. New court filings allege that Bankman and Fried were themselves improperly enriched, and exclusive Daily reporting shows that Bankman continues to serve in official capacities at the school.
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A recent court filing revealed that an unusual $10 million payment was made by Bankman-Fried to his father in January 2022. “In an email exchange, Bankman-Fried and his father discussed structuring the $10 million gift as a loan from Alameda to Bankman-Fried,” wrote John J. Ray III, a lawyer who has been stewarding the bankruptcy proceedings of FTX since his appointment as CEO in the wake of Bankman-Fried’s resignation. Ray had previously done the same for Enron after its collapse. The filing said that Bankman-Fried had “caused” $10 million to be placed in an FTX account in his name and then immediately transferred the money to his father. Bankman, who has taught on corporations and tax law, then transferred $6.775 million into his personal bank accounts and kept the rest in his FTX account.
But while Bankman-Fried described the money as a loan, debtors of FTX and Alameda Research “have been unable … to identify any promissory note, loan agreement, or other indication that the funds were not simply taken from Alameda by Bankman-Fried to enrich his family.” Forbes and other outlets reported that money from the unexplained transfer to Bankman is being used to fund Bankman-Fried’s legal defense. A spokesperson for Bankman and Fried did not respond to a request for comment.
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Bankman-Fried’s relationship to Stanford goes beyond his parents, of course. One of his lawyers is David Mills, a criminal law professor. His since-revoked bail was guaranteed in part by Stanford affiliates — a fact that was not public until media protests spurred Kaplan to unseal their identities in February. And Caroline Ellison, the CEO of Bankman-Fried’s trading company Alameda Research and a former romantic partner, is a Stanford alum who has now pleaded guilty to fraud, money laundering and conspiracy charges. It was his attempted witness tampering through the release of her personal documents, Kaplan said, that meant Bankman-Fried could no longer remain on house arrest at Stanford and would be taken to jail.
This fraud case is not the only one that has enmeshed Stanford in recent years. Theranos founder Elizabeth Holmes, who dropped out of Stanford to pursue a blood-testing idea she developed at the school, was sentenced to 11 and a half years in prison just months before Bankman-Fried’s unraveling. Several prominent Stanford figures served on the board of Theranos and helped lend it credibility, including the late George Shultz, whose name adorns the Hoover Institution’s newest building. Billionaire venture capitalist Tim Draper ’80 helped Theranos acquire significant funding and was an outspoken defender through at least 2018, three years after fraud was first exposed in the company.
More recently, Stan Cohen, a current professor in the Stanford School of Medicine, paid $29.2 million in damages after a court found he committed “a species of actual fraud and … deceit” in misleading investors for his now-defunct biotech company Nuredis. Cohen also admitted to giving false testimony while under oath. Stanford has repeatedly declined to answer questions about Cohen’s employment or whether he will face any sanctions over the case, which involved intellectual property owned by the University.
I'd be surprised, but the the litany of dishonest ghouls coming from Stanford, Thiel and most of the rest of the PayPal Mafia come to mind, I am not surprised.
Stanford is not just a criminogenic environment, it's a part of their branding.
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