Same. Plus I have kids and a mortgage. My company just had a 5% layoff and I survived. Seems like it will be the first of many rounds. It's a really stressful time.
Marc Identified several indicia of fraud:
1) He acknowledged SBF and the CTO, Gary Wang, are worth billions, however the money materialized out of nowhere.
This is highly irregular and a potential indicator of a scam on the backs of retail investors.
2) He noted the chief regulatory officer of FTX, Dan Friedberg, was the general counsel for a poker site that defrauded its players.
A big red flag for anyone thinking of interacting with FTX in any way.
3) SBF has a record of deploying capital poorly (making losing investments and falling for scams) and he provided no good rationale for making these bad bets
A clear sign he isn't a good businessman and it creates even more skepticism that FTX could be viable.
4) He sees through their obvious attempts to paint a rosy picture of SBF and FTX with their very vague but positive marketing, but no ability to explain concretely what is positive about FTX, what their business model is (why the founders are getting so rich!)
These things are "smelly". They are like "code smells". On their own, they don't necessarily indicate anything, but taken together they could be an indication of much deeper problems with the codebase.
Marc was saying that the microscope needed to be put on FTX, SBF, and Gary Wang ASAP, because things stunk to high heaven. He was saying questions needed to be answered and the fact they were seemingly purposely being evaded was a big red flag to him.