On the one hand, Matt Levine writes interesting and insightful articles and I feel I learn from reading them. On the other hand, Levine also had multiple contacts with FTX and SBF including lengthy interviews and he seems to not have detected the FTX fraud early. It also seems like the fraud was, in retrospect, pretty obvious, SBF acknowledged to Levine that he ran a Ponzi scheme in an interview - and that was kind of it. Depositors were depositing their FTX money directly to Alameda's bank account and nobody noticed. In some sense it seems like nobody was actually doing investigative journalism.
Well, I think FTX and Alameda (specifically SBF) certainly realized where the money was coming from. How could anyone, much less a trading firm, be unaware of an extra 8 billion dollars in their accounts?
As for journalists - I'm not sure how exactly they would have known to discover this point. It seems obvious after the fact, but who would think to check "Let me make sure deposits actually go to the business I think they do"? Instead, what I mean here is that there were incredibly obvious signs of wrongdoing and I would expect that a critical and competent investigator would discover at least one such sign, write about it and be motivated to find more. That seems not to have happened which makes me think nobody was actually investigating a new startup with billions of dollars in an area rife with fraud - which seems like a pretty big condemnation for the class of people whose job is to investigate and analyze companies in that industry.
