What the fuck is it with the "financial sector" and stimulants anyway? This isn't just in the USA, by the way - it seems to be a worldwide phenomenon.
(I don't think this has anything to do with whether the drugs are generally popular or not - eg. in South Africa in 1972, when the popular street drugs [not counting weed] were hallucinogens and heroin, 2 brokers perpetrated a massive fraud on their clients and colleagues, then lost their own money and gassed themselves to death. These guys were both very heavy users of phendimetrazine[effects similar to amphetamine, formerly used as appetite suppressant], as were the rest of their firm).
Anyone here with some insight into this phenomenon?
It makes you feel bullet proof and you can work ungodly long hours. Amphetamines make staring at a screen for 12 hours straight fun. I actually thought journalists ignored the obvious tweaker signs because aderall is just so common in the tech world it’s like taking vitamins. Journalists are also known to take them when working on tight deadlines.
SBF’s sense of invincibility and rash decision making was 100% due to taking fistfuls of amphetamines. When he was riding the crypto bubble and every number went up he took it as confirmation of his genius, when in fact it was just riding a speculative bubble. This is why he handled to crash like a crazed retard and started stealing.
If they were all popping Adderall like candy, why are they all normal weight or slightly chubby? You'd think they would be skellies.
He's not been using that much speed (what, ~50 mg/day tops?) and uppers are not a magic weight loss drug. Chantal is a cokehead but still fat and I would not snort lines with her.
Sam is a “vegan” which means he eats absolute garbage snack food all day long. The gross food he ate was mentioned pretty regularly in articles as well as old containers of it laying around wherever he was at. He definitely liked his desserts too. I’d bet he compulsively ate when he wasn’t fidgeting.
Caroline is pretty thin, though her clothes were usually baggy. Photos of her recebt court appearance she looks almost skeletal, but that’s probably from stress. The other two co-conspirators I don’t think we’re tweakers, but probably took adderall to keep up with the workload.
That's the concise version, but she also longposted about it on 2015-12-12 and straight up called her post-atheist return to Catholicism a "hypercontrarian Social Conservative for the Signaling phase." Her views are evidently less influenced by the Catholicism of her youth than by
I think the tumblr posts were from the mind of a teenage Caroline rapidly trying on adult world identities and ideas, but not reflective of her as an adult. They reflect a lot of immaturity and confusion.
I agree about her being highly neurotic. I get the idea that she was a highly sheltered teen, one daughter in a family of five living in her parent’s top-tier MIT academic milieu and her church community. Going from that world, to living independently at Stanford would have been a difficult transition to make.
I think you are right about her deepest insecurity being her intellect. I believe even Sam commented on this. Women who don’t engage in the attraction game (regardless of if they are pretty or not) tend to put all their self-worth or value into their intellect or some other facet of their identity like their faith, service, politics, role in family, etc…
A lot of high achieving students face a major crisis when they enter an Ivy League (or highly competitive) university. The precocious genius from in Oklahoma City who was smarter than every student for twelve years without breaking a sweat, suddenly finds they have to work his ass off to just be in the middle of the pack at MIT. It's sort of like the old trope of the prettiest girl/handsome boy in every town in America goes to Hollywood only to discover there are tens of thousands of people just as, or even more attractive, than they are.
Caroline would have been dealt an ego blow when she was suddenly surrounded by all the gifted students in the Stanford mathematics department. The mathematics dept would have been filled with merit students. It's not one of the departments you find legacy students whose parents wealth got them a spot at the school. This might have been why she started to fixate on male superiority and subservience. There would have been a much smaller number of women pursuing a mathematics degree at Stanford and the best and brightest students in the dept would have been male. Being around other smart students at Stanford greatly increased her own personal insecurity, and insecurity about being a woman, to the point she decided being a handmaiden/ concubine was the most appropriate role for a woman.
There was an interview with Caroline in 2020 or so, the weird one with two brown guys, where she says that she really doesn't even need to use higher math at her job. In fact she uses elementary school level math for her job. It's a very weird, self-depreciating statement to make in an interview. Imagine a male hedge fund CEO stating that any 4th grader could handle the math involved in running his hedge fund. This is why she was ideal patsy for Sam to use as CEO. She was willing to accept Sam was the genius and she just an inferior woman who should be grateful to be in his shadow. Sam was keenly aware of how insecure Caroline was, and desperate for any morsel of his attention. He could install her as CEO because she would always bow down to his superiority.
All the co-conspirators actually seem to fit a similar profile to Caroline. The other two were also very bright but also seem fearful and insecure. Sam picked junior executives he could easily streamroll with simple confidence and assertiveness.
The biggest threat to Sam was having anyone with confidence and a spine around him. No doubt the crazy amounts of money and greed in this situation made this a lot easier than it normally would have been. “Money equals better than you” mentality. I'm sure they all felt personally indebted and beholden to Sam thanks to the wealth that had been generated, but their insecurity and cowardice ensured they went down with the ship instead of bailing in March of 2022. Sam Trabucco was the one who had enough of a spine and brains to tell Sam to fuck off, take the money and run. I’ll be curious about the govt coming for him or his money in the future.
