Brett Harrison: evaluation

Transcript context

…There's an exclusive here. So I guess to steal man, his point, he did get a lot of good PR at the time, right? Potentially. Well, not potentially, actually too much. In a way that really created at the time sort of like the king of crypto sort of image. Was he right about the impact of the PR at the time? Yes. Let me ask a question a different way. How did he create this image? I mean, people were saying that he's the JP. Morgan of crypto. He could do no wrong. Even things that in retrospect seem like clear mistakes, like only having a few developers on the team universally praised huge empire run by a few developers. How was this image created? I think that media was primed for the archetype that was Sam, this sort of young, upstart prodigy in the realm of fintech. We have a lot of these characters in the world of big tech, and I think that he had a particular role to play in the world of finance. And by making himself so accessible all the time, he gave people a drug that they were addicted to, which was like, that constant access. I feel like any time of day or night, someone could text Sam and get him on the phone with them if they were in media, and they loved it. It was like getting access to a direct expert who was also this famous person, who was also this billionaire, who was also this extremely well connected person, who was also this very insightful person, who knew a lot was going on in the industry and can give them insight and tips. And I think there was some amount of what I like to call like, reputation laundering going on here, where it was like, okay, so you get the famous celebrity to endorse Sam, which makes this politician think highly of Sam, because they also like that celebrity. And then also the investors are writing really great positive things online about it, but also the media is enforcing how cool it is that Sam is doing all these other things. And it all sort of fed into this flywheel of building up Sam's image over time in a way that didn't necessarily need to match the underlying reality of who he was with the company. And what was the reaction of other employees at FTX of this sort of not only the media hypetrain, but also the amount of time Sam was spending with the media.…

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