The image below is going around the internet as an “I told you so” moment for supporters of a liberal arts education — i.e., one that actually values reading books.
On the poster is FTX founder Sam Bankman-Fried, his hair and dress as unruly as his organization’s account books. Surrounding Bankman-Fried is his take on the value of reading: “I’m very sceptical of books. I don’t want to say no book is ever worth reading but I actually do believe something very close to that.” At the bottom of the image reads, “The future of investing is FTX. You in?” (SBF also hated Shakespeare for his predictable plots.)
No one is “in” anymore — not after FTX’s customers lost their savings in the biggest fraud case, post-Covid. On Nov. 2, Bankman-Fried was found guilty on two counts of fraud and five counts of conspiracy by a jury that took only four hours to decide his fate. For a time, Bankman-Fried was the world’s wealthiest individual under 30 until interest rates started rising. As investors tried to pull their money from FTX, they realized their savings had disappeared, either lent to FTX’s sister firm Alameda to cover losses or to fuel a wild shopping spree where multimillion-dollar expenditures were approved via text with emojis.
Bankman-Fried’s fall proves Theodore Roosevelt’s old maxim true: “A man who has never gone to school may steal from a freight car, but if he has a university education, he may steal the whole railroad.”
