If you made a list of the dozen or so faces most likely to be emblazoned on a dartboard, it might overlap with the lineup of speakers at the DealBook Summit, held this past Wednesday above a high-end mall, in Columbus Circle. So when a picket line formed outside it was impossible to guess who the picketers were there to protest. Maybe Mark Zuckerberg, the C.E.O. of Meta, or Shou Chew, the C.E.O. of TikTok, both well-known harvesters of data and attention? Or could it have been Mike Pence, the former Vice-President and January 6th assassination target, who was in town to promote a new memoir and hint at a possible Presidential run? Or Benjamin Netanyahu, also hawking a book, who recently dodged corruption charges by being re-re-re-re-reëlected as the Prime Minister of Israel? Or—the Occam’s-razor answer—Sam Bankman-Fried, the freshly disgraced crypto bro who may turn out to be the biggest huckster since Bernie Madoff?
None of the above. “Let’s remind ’em: New York is a union town,” Chris Smalls, the president of the Amazon Labor Union, chanted into a bullhorn. They were protesting Andy Jassy, the C.E.O. of Amazon, which has been accused of union-busting.
Jassy sat onstage in a blazer and jeans, five stories above the picket line, looking unruffled. He was being interviewed by Andrew Ross Sorkin, the editor of DealBook, a business vertical owned by the Times, in the acoustically pristine concert hall normally used by Jazz at Lincoln Center. Behind them, visible through a fifty-foot-tall window, was the Trump International Hotel and a digital billboard advertising “CRYPTO REWARDS.” “As a retailer of content to hundreds of millions of customers with a lot of different viewpoints, we have to allow access to those viewpoints,” Jassy said. The viewpoints he was referring to—that the Holocaust was not so bad, that only Black people can be real Jews, and that the fake Jews control the media—are viewpoints presented in a movie, streaming on Amazon, that Kyrie Irving recently shared with the world; Jassy was confirming that he had no intention of taking the movie down, or of marking it with a warning.
Between interviews, the P.A. system piped in looping Muzak with melodramatic taiko drums and a chord progression reminiscent of “The Final Countdown.” Reed Hastings, the co-C.E.O. of Netflix, praised Elon Musk, the new owner of Twitter and one of the few dartboard-shortlisters not in attendance: “I’m amazed that people are so nitpicky on him.” Janet Yellen, the Treasury Secretary, confirmed a story about how she learned to smoke weed (practice, practice, practice). Zuckerberg Zoomed in, and he also appeared in a pre-taped bit in which he and Sorkin put on V.R. headsets and made small talk in the metaverse. “I’m surprised I’m saying this, but it feels more human,” Sorkin said. He and Zuckerberg tried for a fist bump and missed.
Most of the moguls came off as relaxed, even a bit punchy, perhaps because they knew that, whatever gaffes they made, they couldn’t top the elephant in the room. During an interview with Larry Fink, the C.E.O. of the investment firm BlackRock, Sorkin said, “As you know very well, we’re going to talk to Sam Bankman-Fried later. Or so we think.” Bankman-Fried’s cryptocurrency exchange, FTX, was founded in 2019, soared to a thirty-two-billion-dollar valuation, and then, last month, flamed out in spectacular fashion, obliterating more than a billion dollars of its customers’ savings. At one point, Bankman-Fried, who is thirty, had a net worth of twenty-six billion dollars; he is now worth about a hundred thousand (or so he says), and he is presumably about to be in a lot of legal trouble. (Bankman-Fried has not been charged with a crime and has denied committing fraud.) Sorkin pointed out that many major firms, including BlackRock, had invested in FTX without doing enough due diligence. “Twenty-four million dollars,” Fink said, dismissively—couch-cushion money. “Could we have been misled in the small little investment we did? Sure.” Ben Affleck, arguably the speaker with the most star power and the least actual power, was there to promote Artists Equity, his new production company, yet even he couldn’t resist taking a dig at the headliner. “Why are all the Justice Department people here today?” he said. This was a joke—it was a joke, right?—but Sorkin didn’t touch it.
The elephant, it turned out, wasn’t in the room, or even in the country. Bankman-Fried was in the Bahamas. In the hallways and greenrooms, people chattered about whether he would cancel at the last minute. Hastings, of Netflix, said that it was “legal cringiness” for S.B.F. to keep giving interviews: “His parents must be, like, ‘Oh, my God.’ ” (Bankman-Fried’s parents are both Stanford Law professors; he has said that “my lawyers” have advised him, futilely, to stay quiet.) “He has nothing to gain from this,” Joe Appelbaum said. “If he thinks he can keep bullshitting his way out of trouble at this point, he’s delusional.” Appelbaum is the president of the New York Thoroughbred Horsemen’s Association. “I’m half a professional gambler, half a farmer,” he continued. “I’m pretty tech-forward, but most of the crypto stuff sounds pretty nuts to me.”
The interview with Bankman-Fried was to be the Summit’s big finale. The Summit had hired Freestyle Love Supreme Plus, a troupe of comedic freestyle rappers, to take the stage afterward and sum up the day’s highlights and lowlights in an improvised rap—or, if Bankman-Fried didn’t show, to fill the extra time. “There’s that old saying about how only the jester can speak truth to the king,” Anthony Veneziale, one of the freestylers, said. “Our role is to bring the authenticity, bring the fun.” Veneziale was in a greenroom, wearing a suit and a fedora. He co-founded Freestyle Love Supreme in 2004, with his friend Lin-Manuel Miranda. The group has since performed on hundreds of stages (Broadway, Vegas, corporate workshops with Pfizer and Goldman Sachs), but this seemed like a uniquely tough gig: either vamp indefinitely or wrench the audience’s mood from “Ponzi-scheme Schadenfreude” to “hyped for cocktail hour.”
Also in the greenroom were four other members of the troupe: Aneesa (Young Nees) Folds, Mark (Mandible) Martin, Alan (Scanner) Markley, and Steph (Mos Steph) Rae. They turned to a closed-circuit TV: Pence was taking the stage. Veneziale began impersonating Pence’s pinched, pompous bearing. “Isn’t it incredible how quickly you can tell when someone is working so hard to say nothing?” he said. Onstage, Pence was touting “the accomplishments of the Trump-Pence Administration,” although, he granted, “it obviously didn’t end well.” Guffaws in the greenroom. Pence spent most of the interview equivocating, but when Sorkin asked him about Donald Trump’s recent dinner with the anti-Semitic rapper Kanye West and his Holocaust-denier friend Nick Fuentes, Pence spoke clearly: “President Trump was wrong to give a Holocaust denier, a white nationalist, a seat at the table.”
“I think we’ve got what we need,” Veneziale said, slapping his knees. “Let’s go do warmups?”
They went to a bigger room to loosen up: lip trills, vocal runs. A stage manager came in and informed them, “We’re gonna bring you backstage early, just in case we need you out there on short notice.” Another TV monitor showed the empty stage, where, in a few moments, Sorkin either would or wouldn’t speak to Bankman-Fried. Through the giant window, night had fallen, heightening the drama. The Muzak loop played one last time. The final countdown. “Pin-drop vibes,” Veneziale said.
Against all logic and legal advice, Bankman-Fried didn’t cancel. “I’m deeply sorry about what happened,” he said, in an affectless voice, hanging his head. Sorkin asked if he had used his trading firm, Alameda Research, to gamble away FTX customers’ funds. “I didn’t knowingly commingle funds,” Bankman-Fried mumbled.
“Did he say ‘I did’ or ‘I didn’t’?” Veneziale said.
“He kind of swallowed the ‘didn’t,’ ” Folds said.
Onscreen, Bankman-Fried nervously jiggled his right leg. “Mostly what I’m getting from this is ‘reprimanded schoolchild,’ ” Veneziale said.
“When did the commingling of assets begin?” Sorkin asked.
“Damn, he’s ripping him to shreds,” Nadia Delisfort, one of the group’s producers, said.
The stage manager led the performers to a waiting area behind the stage. “If you want to ask me anything, now’s the time,” she said.
“What’s your favorite color?” Folds said.
Sam Bankman-Fried Made the DealBook Summit Into a Nail-Biter
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