The student newspaper The Stanford Daily exposed the rot at the heart of the seat of higher learning that hosts the right-wing Hoover Institution.
After being arrested for his crypto Ponzi scheme FTX, Sam Bankman-Fried had his bail revoked, costing his friends and family millions. Like any member of the elite class, Mr. Bankman-Fried felt that it was not only his right, but his civic duty to intimidate the witness who had flipped for the prosecution, his own former girlfriend.
The mainstream media had that part of the story, but the Stanford Daily had a lot more. It turns out that SBF’s parents, elite law-school professors Joseph Bankman and Barbara Fried were in on the scheme, apparently receiving millions from SBF in the form of a “loan.”
[W]hile Bankman-Fried described the money as a loan, debtors of FTX and Alameda Research “have been unable … to identify any promissory note, loan agreement, or other indication that the funds were not simply taken from Alameda by Bankman-Fried to enrich his family.”
The Daily noted that the FTX scheme had close parallels with Elizabeth Holmes’ company Theranos, also a fraudulent scheme whose collapse has Ms. Holmes serving a long sentence. The common element is that in both cases prominent, respected people helped sell the schemes. The paper did not note any parallels between these and Bernie Madoff’s fraud, but I don’t see a lot of daylight between them.
The Daily also noted other examples of high level fraud at the prestigious school.
Stan Cohen, a current professor in the Stanford School of Medicine, paid $29.2 million in damages after a court found he committed “a species of actual fraud and … deceit” in misleading investors for his now-defunct biotech company Nuredis.
The University’s association with these cases has concerned some in the community, and the recent resignation of President Marc Tessier-Lavigne over falsified research that emerged from his lab has not helped either, some Stanford affiliates said.
If you cut the rich people in, they will help you defraud the common schlubs.
Read the entire article.