A BUNCH OF BOYS ON ADDERALL HAVING A SLEEPING OVER PARTY
By: Suri Davis
Just watching the Sam Bankman-Fried interview by the NY Times/Dealbook. Almost an hour into the interview the interviewer had an epiphany, “It sounds like you were a bunch of boys on Adderall (the Add/Adhd medicine, which highly ambitious personalities (ab)use regularly to hype their focus to be able to do more in a day), having a sleep over party.” You mean you didn’t get that impression, when looking at CEOs Mark Zuckerberg of Facebook/Meta, Adam Neumann of Wework, Elon Musk of Tesla (profitable), Elon Musk for Twitter (bust), Steve Jobs of Apple took control of their companies, some companies are thriving, while others are diving. Cest Lavie, welcome to Wall Street.
In the United States democracy is strongly tied to capitalism, “the freedom to…”, the American dream of rags to riches. On the one hand, many of us know that we trust our financial advisors and brokers to bring expertise to our investment accounts, especially our retirement accounts. And yet, while we know, we want to trust them, many of them score no better than throwing darts at the Wall Street Journal stock page. Think of this, we all knew bad times were coming, no one should have known better than money managers. Once it was clear, the managers should have all converted investments into cash or liquid investments, some of them might have, which would have brought the markets down lower, while others felt that in the long run, the market always returns, so best to ride the down crest, while waiting for the bulls to return.
The blue-chip, high-grade stocks crest and fall, but do not fail with each recession, the young start up CEOs are more of a risk, for they lack the skills for managing growth and weathering economic downturns. They have no experience coordinating explosive start-up growth, and they do not know the best practices for doing what they see more experienced companies doing, e.g., lobbying. Like with any rookie or intern, these young CEOs learn on the job, and with millions of dollars thrown at them. Those who lost in the FTX debacle, FTX is an exchange for virtual currency like Bitcoin, were not only betting on a young CEO, but also on a highly speculative investment. They had the ability to make their investment returns in the thousands of percentages, or, as happened, go bust, losing valuation within hours, it’s commonly known as the risk reward ratio.
Beware of investing and be wary. As you get close to retirement or cashing out on your investment, ensure that investments are transferred to more conservative investments, which decreases the volatility of your portfolio to ensure that you have the resources you need for retirement or for your savings goal.
As to the comment by the interviewer, most young companies these days attract talent by infantilizing the company space with ping pong tables, big screen TV’s, video games, snacks, beer, meals, all for the purpose of attracting young talent who want to just simply have fun. I don’t think there needs to be a criminal investigation, I’ve seen prior interviews of Mr. Bankman-Fried, who was always candid with anyone who asked or listened, that FTX is in a very volatile business. Yes, they are boys, on Adderall, having a sleep over party, buyer beware.