Tom Brady and Gisele Big FTX Losers

14 thoughts on “Tom Brady and Gisele Big FTX Losers”

1. While attending what was at the time called Júnior high school, I realized that the vast majority of players on the school football team were morons. Thusly, I dubbed the sport duhball in honor of, well…DUHHHHH.

   It’s reassuring to see that some things don’t change.

   I was recently amazed that football has become so unpopular with the student body at the government high school I graduated from, that it has had to join with it’s formerly hated cross county rival to field a full roster for games. Back in the day, fist fights broke out at games between the two, team buses were egged, and bus windows broken during football games! I find the situation hilarious, and am glad there will be no more violence between the two.

   • What is a “government high school”

     • I believe his reference to “government high school” means a high school supported by the taxes levied on the whole community. The term usually used in the USA for such schools is “public school”, though that term has a completely different meaning in the UK.

       And if you are not familiar with “high school”, the schools in the USA are usually divided into elementary school, middle school, and high school, where elementary school covers the first 5 or 6 years of education, middle school covers the next 2 or 3 years of education, and high school covers the last 4 years of education.

2. Maybe the $650M was the inflated value of Brady’s holdings at the peak valuation of FTX.

   It’s hard to believe he would have put everything he had prior, probably a couple hundred million, into FTX.

   • It’s the same thing

3. You can give a man hundreds of millions of $$, but you can’t make him any smarter, biologically.

4. It looks like SBF used customer funds to prop up Alameda Research when it made bad bets, just like Jon Corzine at MF Capital in the past decade. This is the reason why Binance walked away from bailing FTX out.

5. This is the other side of the coin.

   It’s a bit of schadenfreude and fashionable to make fun of unwary investors buying into the crypto craze. But there were actual people losing their shirts and having their life in tatters due to these fiascos.

   Personally, and while I still believe cryptos can have a role in our economic future, I’m still wary of the novelty of it all and the lack of safety mechanisms that jump to avert catastrophic collapse. Because the places it all breaks are still unknown, or worse, kept open to benefit some informed parties while hurting the rest (classic Ponzi thinking).

   Safeguards the old style economy has tried to create, with varying degrees of success. But at least they have the benefit of being tested over time.

   • Actual people lost their shirts when the tulip market cratered, too.

     • Yeah, that’s kind of the point of a free market system: allow people to make free choices over their property, even ruinous ones. Nobody forced them to part with their hard earned money and give it to these shady guys with fancy named tulips.

       My point is more in the sense of getting some systemic learnings from the way these things fail, and how they can be adapted to work and be based on actual economic production, to make them less of a fool’s trap.

       But probably is isn’t possible and all these “deregulated economy” dreams are just that. Dreams.

       • Oh, they are definitely that — a “deregulated economy” swings inexorably to monopoly. As soon as one of the competitors gains enough of a competitive advantage to outsell its competitors, then economies of scale create a positive feedback loop which puts everybody else out of business. Then the monopolist’s self-interest dictates that they use their economic power to maintain that state of affairs through tactics like refusing service to potential competitors, dumping (need not even be true dumping if the monopolist’s costs are low enough that others cannot compete even if the profits are small but positive) and even outright buy-out of the most promising competitors.

         That is not to say that the “regulated economy” approach — which is to put the monopoly in the hands of the State — is preferable. The actual ideal would be to have some sort of cultural ideal instilled in the market to abhor monopolies such that people would naturally prefer smaller brands while the difference in quality and price is still small, thus breaking up the feedback in its early stages. This requires a change in mentality opposite the one which has been put forward since the days of Smith and Ricardo, however.

6. Looking for a life lesson here. Maybe it’s something something diversification (Zuckerberg, can you hear me?)

   Or maybe: Don’t invest your money in things you don’t understand.

   Or how about just: Friends don’t let friends buy crypto?*

   *Stick to Powerball or Lotto tickets, you only have to buy one to have a chance to win. Granted, you may win slightly less often, but the exposure is a lot less.

7. Brian, the $120 million you quoted is not for Brady (and it contradicts the previous sentence). It’s the total endorsement income for the Top 10 NFL earners.

   There’s no way he invested $650 million. He doesn’t have $650 million to invest – he’s a star athlete, not a multibillionaire. Scratch this year’s income, and last year’s. He averaged less than $20 million a year over his career. He lost at least half to income taxes and the 3% commission to his player’s agent (standard NFL rate; and Massachusetts has a beefy state income tax – Florida has none). The endorsement income will be subject to an agent’s commission too, maybe higher than the 3% for player contracts.

   He’d have to invest everything he had, assuming he had amazing investments before to get to $650 million. Giselle couldn’t have pitched in more than $100 million for something like this – probably much less, or she’s crazy.

   • I totally agree. Their combined net worth is $650 million and there is no damn way they put every penny into FTX.

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