"At first blush, the story seems simple. A con man cynically convinced a bunch of gullible financiers that he was an eccentric young visionary and a really great guy, and he ran off with the dough. But take a closer look at the mainstream coverage, and you’ll realize there’s far more to this story than a classic financial fraud. In fact, the puff pieces from mainstream outlets about SBF and the causes he was funding—most notably, the pandemic planning industry—even after his empire was revealed to be an outright fraud, are the clearest instance we’ve seen of the modern political machine in all its cynicism. Both the New York Times and the Washington Post ran articles portraying SBF as a more-or-less honest businessman with a big heart who got tangled up in a bad situation. This is, of course, wildly inaccurate. From the very beginning, SBF had no intention of engaging in honest business. He never owned a dime of the assets he said he did. And in an incredible interview with Vox, he essentially admitted that there were never any good intentions behind his “philanthropic” contributions."
