Former FTX founder manipulated ESG, woke culture to avoid scrutiny, venture capitalist says

FTX founder Sam Bankman- Fried manipulated ESG and woke culture to help his now-bankrupt coin firm avoid regulatory scrutiny and gain credibility with investors, a venture capitalist told Fox News.

ESG is a framework that investors use to score businesses on factors such as the diversity of employees, how much pollution the firm creates or how many members sit on the board. Sam Bankman- Fried claimed FTX would be carbon neutral by the end of the year and that the firm would help build solar projects for communities in the Amazon, all before his company filed for bankruptcy earlier this month.

In this case, SBF, who ran FTX, knew that if he gave money to causes Democrats cared about, if he became the big donor on the left, he would kind of get that warm virtue-signaling glow, Joe Lonsdale, a venture capitalist and Palantir co-founder, told Fox News.

The power is captured politically and used towards different ends, and in practice, what happens like anything else, is ESG a form of power. FTX, a criptocurrency exchange founded by Bankman- Fried and headquartered in the Bahamas, filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy in the beginning of November after mishandling billions of dollars of customer funds. Bankman- Fried told a Vox reporter that ESG is perverted beyond recognition, and admitted to talking about ethics without following them himself.

The FTX founder wrote that reputations are made of it. This dumb game we woke westerners play where we say all the right shibboleths and so everyone likes us. Lonsdale agrees with Bankman-Fried that ESG is perverted.

The Palantir co-founder said he knew how all these woke people think, and he knew how to manipulate them. He has admitted that he was manipulating people to try to get ahead. FTX scored higher on leadership and governance than ExxonMobil despite only having three board members compared to the 11 board members of the energy giant, according to an ESG score from Truvalue Labs. John Ray III, FTX's new CEO overseeing the bankruptcy proceedings, said he had never seen such a complete failure of corporate controls and a complete absence of trustworthy financial information. Longsdale told Fox News that the whole framework of ESG becomes a joke when it gets distorted in these ways. He said that FTX had terrible governance and was really a Ponzi scheme, but it was rated more highly than companies running our energy sector because the energy sector is disfavored with Democrats and disfavored with the Left. Lonsdale said that ESG needs to be checked. There should be multiple frameworks.