MARKETING FEATURE
How To Be Seen As A
TRUSTED AUTHORITY
“ The problem with the world is that intelligent people are full of doubts while the stupid ones are full of confidence .” – Charles Bukowski
BY ROBIN ROBINS
Remember FTX ?
At one point , it was considered the third-largest cryptocurrency exchange in the world by volume , valued at $ 32 billion . In a matter of days , it went bankrupt , causing millions of its investors to lose everything .
In a hearing following its demise , the new court-appointed CEO , John Ray , said the company ’ s collapse was the result of a “ complete failure of corporate control .” A case of “ old-fashioned embezzlement ” where investors are highly unlikely to get their money back .
What ’ s stunning is that many of the investors who lost everything were among a list of well-known famous faces ( like my friend Kevin O ’ Leary and star athletes Tom Brady and Steph Curry ), along with many smart and supposedly sophisticated investment firms like Sequoia Capital , Temasek , and Paradigm , to name a few . ALL got taken . Even billionaire oil baron Robert Belfer reportedly lost millions in the FTX collapse . How can this be ?
It ’ s for the same reason people fell for the Home-Stake Oil , Enron , and Madoff scams : Greed plus misplaced TRUST . They cannot argue they did “ due diligence ” before investing . You ’ ve got a video-game-playing child in the Bahamas with ZERO experience in running a company in charge of a billion-dollar , unregulated investment entity with his college roommates , who were reportedly all sleeping with each other , with his openly drug-using girlfriend as the CEO . What could possibly go wrong ?
In an interview , O ’ Leary admitted that he relied too heavily on trusting the company based on who was endorsing it and had already invested , not his own research .
That ’ s important to note because many critical buying decisions are made this way , causing people to bypass their normal skepticism , skip conducting their own due diligence , and even ignore what their gut is telling them when a TRUSTED AUTHORITY tells them to do something .
Sam Bankman-Fried ’ s parents were wealthy , wellconnected professors at Stanford University and , as O ’ Leary pointed out , were compliance lawyers . His mother was a big supporter of the Democratic Party with connections that had to have helped bolster his credibility . Further , Bankman-Fried was a clever con artist , using celebrity endorsements ( like O ’ Leary and Tom Brady ) to build confidence in others to give him millions of dollars .
How Even Smart People Fall Victim To Misplaced Trust
First off , there ’ s nothing new here . This type of scam has been pulled off before and will happen again , despite how much the government attempts to regulate it . That ’ s because the government cannot change human nature .
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