The comments here and the entire slant of the story are interesting. None of those messages read without the accompanying article seem particularly damning and they all make sense to some extent. The collapse is terrible, there was mismanagement, etc. but these specific DMs don't really make him seem the monster sociopath other commenters are calling him.
1) He pandered to regulators but doesn't believe regulators (across industries) are able to do any real good
2) He didn't mean to do sketchy stuff, a bunch of small decisions snowballed into a disaster
3) Winning > Ethics when it comes to public perception
4) He didn't have a good handle on what was going on at Alameda and didn't keep the entities separate enough as they grew
5) He lacked visibility into what was going on and missed the complex systems failure mode
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Looking at the "ethics" messages for example, SBF never really says that he thinks it is okay to act unethically.
* He previously said that that people shouldn't do unethical shit because it'll hurt their reputation
* Now (in the DMs) he said: "it's not true really" -> mentions unknown heros and well-known shams -> gives the example of CZ being hated a month ago for being unethical but now CZ is a hero for winning despite being unethical
He never says that being unethical is okay—he says that in the world today, winning influences your public perception more than whether you were ethical or unethical.
1) He pandered to regulators but doesn't believe regulators (across industries) are able to do any real good
2) He didn't mean to do sketchy stuff, a bunch of small decisions snowballed into a disaster
3) Winning > Ethics when it comes to public perception
4) He didn't have a good handle on what was going on at Alameda and didn't keep the entities separate enough as they grew
5) He lacked visibility into what was going on and missed the complex systems failure mode
--
Looking at the "ethics" messages for example, SBF never really says that he thinks it is okay to act unethically.
* He previously said that that people shouldn't do unethical shit because it'll hurt their reputation
* Now (in the DMs) he said: "it's not true really" -> mentions unknown heros and well-known shams -> gives the example of CZ being hated a month ago for being unethical but now CZ is a hero for winning despite being unethical
He never says that being unethical is okay—he says that in the world today, winning influences your public perception more than whether you were ethical or unethical.