Wednesday, December 14, 2022

Mind The Very Large Gap

Amazing scenes.
Wearing a baseball cap with FTX’s logo, Mr. Bankman walked onstage to help announce the winners of two $500,000 checks. Behind the scenes, he played the role of FTX diplomat, introducing his son to the head of a Florida nonprofit organization that was helping adults in the area set up bank accounts linked to the crypto exchange’s platform. Two months later, Mr. Bankman-Fried promoted the partnership in testimony to Congress, where he was pushing crypto-friendly legislation.

The couple’s careers have been upended. Ms. Fried, 71, resigned last month as chairwoman of the board of a political donor network, Mind the Gap, which she had helped start to support Democratic campaigns and causes. Mr. Bankman, 67, has postponed a Stanford class he had been scheduled to teach in the winter, and he’s recruited a white-collar criminal defense lawyer to represent him. The family faces huge legal bills, and they have become the subject of gossip on Stanford’s campus.
Oh no. Gossip. The greatest consequence imaginable to that fucking paper (this is a bit unfair, but is that really worth mentioning?). Mind the Gap? Don't remember that one. Ah.
A secretive group led by Stanford University academics has unleashed millions of dollars in political spending from Silicon Valley and is now convincing some of its biggest donors to spend millions more to back Democrats in 2020.

Mind the Gap, a network formed less than two years ago, has been quietly routing millions of dollars to Democratic candidates and groups across the country in the 2018 and 2020 election cycles, emerging as a new power center in the Silicon Valley political scene. It’s just that so far, it has avoided public detection.
Sure at first pass "electing Democrats" is good but that article doesn't even mention Sam, so some other things were a bit "stealth" and money buys broad influence even if it's not precisely targeted.
But Painter said, “These campaign contributions from SBF and PAC money raised by members of his family of course bought an enormous amount of influence in Washington.”