So the red wave ended up not happening, being something more of a pink puddle instead. Has America just become too gerrymandered and partisan for there to be “yuge” wave elections like there used to be? Perhaps. Maybe we need to also not run horrible candidates.
Regardless, there are fortunately a few salty letfist tears to sip on after yesterday.
Those would be the tears of one of the biggest Democrat donors, Sam Bankman-Fried. He ran a crypto company called FTX that was first valued in 2021 at $18 billion, then exploded upward to a whopping $40 billion, at which point Bankman-Fried joked about being able to “devour” a legacy banking company like Goldman Sachs.
Now there’s no more laughing or gloating from Bankman-Fried, as he just saw an incredible 94% of his net worth melt away overnight in what Bloomberg termed “the biggest one-day collapse ever among billionaires” in terms of proportional losses.
And, before his fortune disappeared overnight, Bankman-Fried was a whale of a donor for Dems. The Blaze, reporting n his 2020 and 2022 donations to leftist candidates, notes that:
According to Politico, Bankman-Fried was the Democrats’ “newest megadonor” ahead of the 2022 midterm elections. He donated $10 million to then-candidate Joe Biden in 2020.
This past year, he reportedly hired a network of “political operatives” and spent at least $39,826,856 in an effort to help Democrats win their House races.
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The now-former FTX CEO was the second-biggest individual Democratic donor this election cycle, after leftist billionaire George Soros, according to a Fox Business report.
Bankman-Fried told Jacob Goldstein of “What’s Your Problem?” that he might donate “north of $100 million” and up to $1 billion to Democrats in the 2024 presidential elections.
FTX, and Bankman-Fried’s fortune with it, melted away thanks to a liquidity crunch. Egged on by a rival firm that raised concerns about FTX’s liquidity situation, investors pulled about $6 billion from FTX in the days leading up to the election, which led to a cascade of consequences on election night.
Eventually, FTX competitor Binance stepped in with a bailout, wiping out the other FTX investors in the process and crushing Bankman-Fried’s fortune.
Bankman-Fried, after investors were wiped out, the Ontario Teachers’ Pension Plan among them, sent out a letter saying “I’m sorry I didn’t do better, and am going to do what I can to protect customer assets, and your investment.” Not sure if “I’m sorry” makes up for a $400 million loss.
While it’s bad news for those investors, the fortune wipeout is good news for Republicans, as it means he’ll no longer have the resources with which he can donate tens of millions to leftist candidates.
Yaël Ossowski, a cryptocurrency watchdog told the Washington Free Beacon:
“The days of Sam Bankman-Fried being a heavyweight Democratic fundraiser and political influencer to the benefit of his own exchange and his connected companies are basically over.”
So there’s one less problem to worry about as crypto implodes for yet another time this year thanks to price declines and a liquidity crunch. Which one’s next? Hopefully not Coinbase, which took a strong stand against wokeness in the workplace.