Movie Poster

Like, I think what matters is what impact I have on the world in the end.

# Review

This free documentary released by Bloomberg shows the rise and fall of popular crypto exchange FTX and its founder Sam Bankman-Fried.

The irony doesn't escape me; Bloomberg caught wind of the FTX insolvency months before the public collapse of FTX and opted to not report it because it might hurt their crypto ad revenue. Ken Auletta wrote a book exploring the intersection of news and business for newspapers which applies to Bloomberg’s situation. Despite this, the documentary gives a good general overview on the events which occurred. The documentary interviews people closely involved with the cryptocurrency ecosystem, mainly journalists, but also figures like Kevin O’Leary, a former FTX crypto shill, Jesse Powell, the founder of Kraken, and Su Zhu, the founder of failed crypto hedge fund Three Arrows Capital. The documentary was unable to get comments from the people directly involved in the case, such as SBF himself as well as SBF’s main competitor Changpeng Zhao. The film covers the main facts of the case without going into technical detail. There are some interesting tidbits about anecdotes of Sam, especially his motivations as an Effective Altruist. I do wish the film would have explored more topics not already being extensively covered by mainstream media. The production value is definitely TV-tier, such as using some weird AI-generated graphics.

# Conclusion

Decent tl;dr for people who haven't been following the story.

# Overall rating: 6.6

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