It reads like a headline generated by ChatGPT: “Sam Bankman-Fried considered paying Donald Trump $5 billion not to run for president.”
But it's not the product of an overconfident AI’s hallucinations. Rather, it’s an excerpt from a new book on Bankman-Fried, Going Infinite, which claims that he saw a second Trump presidency as “existential threat to humanity”. Bankman-Fried was a major donor to the Democratic Party before his downfall, but he also later claimed he'd made "dark" donations of a similar size to the Republican Party, which has led to further legal troubles.
As bizarre as it seems, the Trump offer story has a certain poetic logic to it — because despite their differences in politics and persona, SBF and Trump share several striking similarities.
Both have endured spectacular falls from grace. Neither can stop themselves from talking to journalists, even when doing so is against their self interest. And partially as a result of that, both have been subject of scandalous exposés since their respective removals from power in books written by famous authors. Going Infinite was penned by Michael Lewis, author of Moneyball and The Big Short.
