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FTX Founder Sam Bankman-Fried criticizes ESG (2022)

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November 22, 2022

Recently, FTX Founder Sam Bankman-Fried discussed ethics, investing, and ESG in a long Twitter thread. The editors of The Wall Street Journal turned SBF’s comments into an editorial:

Crypto dark knight Sam Bankman-Fried may have deceived investors, customers and various journalists and politicians. But now the FTX founder is at least telling the truth about a few things. Lo, he says that environmental, social and governance (ESG) investing is a fraud, and so was his progressive public posturing….

Mr. Bankman-Fried virtue-signaled by committing to make FTX “carbon neutral” and donating generously to fashionable progressive causes such as a foundation working to provide solar energy in the Amazon River basin. “We’re giving millions each year to launch sustainability related initiatives,” he said in an April Forbes magazine interview with—you can’t make this up—Brazilian super-model Gisele Bündchen.

Meanwhile, he was leveraging FTX customer funds to make risky, ill-timed bets. “Problems were brewing. Larger than I realized,” he tweeted. “In the future, I’m going to care less about the dumb, contentless, ‘good actor’ framework,” he added. “What matters is what you do—is *actually* doing good or bad, not just *talking* about doing good or *using ESG language*.”…

“ESG has been perverted beyond recognition,” Mr. Bankman-Fried confessed in an interview this week with Vox in which he also acknowledged that his advocacy for strong crypto regulations was “just PR.”

He said he feels “bad for those who get” harmed by “this dumb game we woke westerners play where we say all the right shiboleths [sic] and so everyone likes us.” Ah, yes, the poor saps who invest in companies because they claim to be sustainable.[1]

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  1. Note: This text is quoted verbatim from the original source. Any inconsistencies are attributable to the original source.