that makes sense, sounds like it wasn't the concern for at least your group. He does describe it as "The rest of the management team was horrified and quit in a huff, loudly telling the investors that Bankman-Fried was dishonest and reckless", so unless there were multiple waves of management quitting it sounds like the book conflated multiple stories. 

There part where SBF committed to something important in his trading company and then broke the agreement also seems more predictive of fraud than suggested by the phrase "management dispute".

People rarely leave over one thing and different people leave over different reasons. But I expect people hearing "left over ethics disputes" to walk away with a more accurate understanding than "left over a management dispute" (and more details to either sentence would be welcome). 

I think if all he'd said was "My aim was just to introduce the two of them, and let them have a conversation and take it from there", I'd have found that a satisfactory answer. It's also not something I considered to need justification in the first place, although I hadn't looked into it very much. I'm inferring from the fact that Will gave a full paragraph explanation of why this seemed high EV indicates that he thinks that reasoning is important. 

Matt Levine is quoting from Going Infinite. I do not know who Michael Lewis's source is. I've heard confirming bits and pieces privately, which makes me trust this public version more. Of course that doesn't mean that was everyone's motivation: I'd be very interested to hear whatever you're able to share. 

My understanding is that this wasn't a benign management dispute, it was an ethical dispute about whether to disclose to investors that Alameda had misplaced $4m. SBF's refusal to do so sure seems of a piece with FTX's later issues. 

I disagree with that quote but I do think the fact that Will is reporting this story now with a straight face is a bad sign. 

My steelman would be "look if you think two people would have a positive-sum interaction and it's cheap to facilitate that, doing so is a good default". It's not obvious to me that Will spent more than 30 seconds on this. But the defense is "it was cheap and I didn't think about it very hard", not "Sam had ideas for improving twitter".

thanks, I appreciate all this info. 

I'm so glad someone wrote this. EA has real gaps caused by selecting a narrow group of people and demanding they only work on the most important things. Tasks that are unglamorous or just don't make sense as a job duty accumulate like housekeeping when you're sick. People who have the slack to do these without displacing a higher priority task have some highly leveraged actions available to them.

(understanding you are a guy betting $5 on manifold)

re: #3. Does this get blurred if the company made an explicit marketing push about what a great guy their CEO was? I imagine that still wouldn't affect statements on him as a role model^[1] , but might matter if they said many positive statements about him on a platform aimed at the general public. 

1. ^{^}

   legally

Not well. I only have snippets of information, and it's private (Habryka did sign off on that description). 

I don't know if this specifically has come up in regards to Lightcone or Lighthaven, but I know Haybrka has been steadfastly opposed to the kind of slow, cautious, legally-defensive actions coming out of EVF. I expect he would reject funding that demanded that approach (and if he accepted it, I'd be disappointed in him, given his public statements).