It’s not a good feeling. In July, I sat down with Sam Bankman-Fried for over an hour at a hotel overlooking Central Park, a meeting that would be the basis for a Fortune cover story. I was charmed by his nerdy affect as SBF, unkempt in a T-shirt and bushy hair, as he twirled a fidget spinner and rattled off tidbits about everything from M&A strategy to the macroeconomy to the importance of trust in business deals. It was all bullshit, of course, and I didn’t see through it.
Today, SBF’s name is mud, and his crypto empire—valued at $32 billion only a week ago—is in shambles. FTX customers and investors are out billions of dollars, and, if the worst allegations are true, SBF could go to prison. The question is how almost no one saw this coming. The media missed the story (until CoinDesk’s Ian Allison got hold of a key clue) but so did venerable investment firms like Sequoia Capital and Ontario Teachers’ Pension Plan, which rushed to throw hundreds of millions at SBF’s feet.
