Sam Bankman-Fried: belief

Transcript context

…Sam, when you say we, who's in the room there at this point? Twenty-ish people who we cobbled together at the last moment. Myself, some high school and college friends of mine, some people from the Effective Altruism Community, some people who are friends of friends of friends. We'd only existed for like a month or two and had been frantically trying to put together something that looked like a team. It's very sort of ad hoc. The scale of it, in theory, if one had infinite capital, one could have made 10% on a few $100 million a day, maybe. I think $20 million was the size of this trade. We did not have a few $100 million of capital at the time, which is very frustrating. We still made like a million dollars a day from it during that period, so it was still a fantastic trade. But in the meantime, we're doing everything we could do to scale up our capital base. What's the APY [...] is a number that doesn't even sound real. I don't even want to say it. You hear that number like, oh, yeah, Ponzi scheme. Unfortunately, we basically scaled up the capital base the day that the arb went away. So we failed to really ever get to the point where we could have gotten with it, but it's still amazing trade for the three or four weeks that both we were active and it was alive. And so we at this point are Alameda Research. This all predates FTX.…

Stored transcript either side of the excerpt. The highlighted words are the published quote; the surrounding text is unedited source, never generated.