“Ruin: Money, Ego and Deception at FTX — The Sam Bankman-Fried Story” Documentary and Trailer
~ Saturday, October 14, 2023 Blog Post ~
I will watch “Ruin: Money, Ego and Deception at FTX — The Sam Bankman-Fried Story” which streams on Wednesday, October 25, 2023. It is available for viewing on Bloomberg Television at 6PM Eastern Time and Bloomberg Originals at 8PM Eastern Time.
“Ruin” is a feature documentary about the disgraced FTX founder and the stunning collapse of his multi-billion-dollar cryptocurrency exchange. Bloomberg journalists and some of the central players in the digital asset exchange’s rise narrated this Bloomberg Originals film.
As a freelance finance writer who has covered financial topics including cryptocurrencies, I discovered Bankman-Fried as a cryptocurrency investor who introduced himself as an effective altruistic philanthropist. But years later, this crypto-asset investing proponent fell from grace following what he claimed as missteps in running his empire as chief executive officer. I’m interested to gather more details about Bankman-Fried and FTX’s collapse.
When Bankman-Fried was starting FTX, I already had qualms about his operations. After all, besides being a financially savvy conservative investor, I have always been a hardline cryptocurrency skeptic. Virtual currencies are promising novel financial assets. These alternative investment assets have the potential to revolutionize the way we use money. I get it.
Nonetheless, considering cryptocurrencies’ fledgling status in the financial and investing world, I find it really hard to put my trust and invest in them, much more place my confidence in an exchange operator in his early thirties and without extensive experience in the financial markets.
Additionally, I have written and learned about the 2022 cryptocurrency winter, the implosion of Terraform Labs, Celsius, and other virtual currency entities, and the subsequent arrest of their founders. These events are sufficient for me to continue questioning cryptocurrencies’ integrity as investment assets.
Ruja Ignatova, one of the Federal Bureau of Investigation’s Most Wanted fugitives who is behind the large-scale OneCoin fraud, is another reason I refuse to put my trust in crypto-asset investing.
“Ruin” has a Youtube trailer I am sharing below. This cinematic preview of the Bloomberg documentary about Bankman-Fried and FTX reminds me of the Credit Suisse film produced by The Financial Times which also tackles today’s sophisticated financial crimes.
References:
https://www.bloomberg.com/features/2023-ruin-ftx-documentary/
https://www.fbi.gov/wanted/topten/ruja-ignatova/download.pdf
