Elon Musk on SBF: ‘WSJ Giving Foot Massages to a Criminal’

On Thursday (24 November 2022), Tesla and SpaceX CEO Elon Musk commented on Wall Street Journal’s very kind treatment of Sam Bankerman-Fried (aka “SBF”), the disgraced co-founder and former CEO of bankrupt crypto exchange FTX, in a report published earlier that day.

On 11 November 2022, FTX.com issued the following press release:

And here is how — on the same day — SBF announced the collapse of the FTX empire:

The following video from Wall Street Journal nicely summarizes how FTX went bankrupt:

On 16 November 2022 when American journalist Kelsey Piper, who is “a senior writer at Future Perfect, Vox’s effective-altruism-inspired section on the world’s biggest challenges”, published a highly interesting report on the conversation she had with SBF — via Twitter DMs — on 15 November 2022, which shed much needed light on how SBF thinks and on the goings-on that lead to the collapse of the FTX empire and SBF’s fall from grace.

Yesterday, the Wall Street Journal published an article (titled “Sam Bankman-Fried Said He Would Give Away Billions. Broken Promises Are All That’s Left.”) about SBF’s “ambitious philanthropic endeavors” and how those plans are now in tatters due to the collapse of the FTX empire supposedly wiping out much of his wealth.

This led Musk, who recently bought Twitter, to criticize the Wall Street Journal for its very gentle/kind treatment of SBF:

Of course, the crypto community, which is extremely angry with SBF, was not surprised by such treatment of SBF since many mainstream news outlets have refrained from serious criticism of SBF’s behavior.

For example, CNBC co-anchor Andrew Ross Sorkin said recently that he would be interviewing SBF at the upcoming New York Times DealBook Summit:

Here are a few reactions from the crypto community to mainstream media seemingly fawning over SBF even now that so much information has come out about his thinking and behavior:

Anyway, Musk’s tweet prompted Michael Saylor, the Executive Chairman of MicroStrategy Inc., to say what he thinks about SBF and his grandoise plans: