• Join Puck

    Directly Supporting Authors

    A new economic model in which writers are also partners in the business.

    Personalized Subscriptions

    Customize your settings to receive the newsletters you want from the authors you follow.

    Stay in the Know

    Connect directly with Puck talent through email and exclusive events.

  • What is puck? Newsletters Authors Podcasts Events Gift Puck Careers

The S.B.F. Chronicles, Part 3: The Big Short

Back when Bankman-Fried was buying arena naming rights and casting Larry David in commercials, the short-seller Marc Cohodes smelled something funky. “Who would give this mop-headed, dyslexic, A.D.D. guy a dime on some crazy strategy?” as he told me. This is the third in a series.

While Sam Bankman-Fried was being fêted by the bulls on Wall Street, the renowned short-seller Marc Cohodes was sounding a five-alarm fire.
While Sam Bankman-Fried was being fêted by the bulls on Wall Street, the renowned short-seller Marc Cohodes was sounding a five-alarm fire. Photo: Gotham/GC Images
William D. Cohan
January 4, 2023

About a year ago, the renowned and often-successful short-seller Marc Cohodes began to get very suspicious about Sam Bankman-Fried, his crypto exchange FTX, and his hedge fund Alameda Research. At the time, S.B.F. was at the height of his prowess. FTX was valued at $32 billion and S.B.F. was worth around $25 billion on paper. He was being compared to Warren Buffett and J.P. Morgan. He was on the covers of Fortune and Forbes, both of which hailed him as the second coming. But for Cohodes, there was “something terribly wrong” about the S.B.F. narrative. “It makes no sense,” he told me a few weeks after FTX filed for bankruptcy, but before S.B.F. was arrested and extradited to the United States.