In the early days of the FTX collapse, wunderkind founder <a href="https://futurism.com/ftx-sam-bankman-doing-fine-sleep">Sam Bankman-Fried</a> was so stuck in the mud about saving the exchange that people near him were spinning their wheels trying to get him to do the right thing and step down as CEO.
As the <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2022/11/29/technology/sam-bankman-fried-ftx-bankruptcy.html">New York Times reports</a>, a trove of leaked internal messages among FTX's inner sanctum reveal that those around SBF were so frazzled by his reaction to the collapse that — among other schemes — they even reached out to his dad to see if he could help assuage his son's initial post-crash delusion.
In the days after FTX first crashed in early November, Bankman-Fried was, per the messages and sources reviewed by the NYT, convinced he could save the firm and bring it back from the brink — even after <a href="https://futurism.com/the-byte/binance-crypto-crash-good-actually">Changpeng "CZ" Zhao</a>, the owner of rival exchange Binance, told him via text that the company would not be buying FTX in a fire sale because it had "way too many issues."
SBF's Hail Mary was, as the leaked messages reveal, the increasingly far fetched idea of securing additional outside investment amid the crash. He has claimed repeatedly, even after FTX filed for bankruptcy, that he'd been in contact with investors to save the company, and as recently as last week told his former colleagues that "potential interest in billions of dollars of funding came in roughly eight minutes after I signed the Chapter 11 docs."
What's more, he had to be handheld by lawyers through the process of <a href="https://futurism.com/sam-bankman-fried-steps-down-ceo-ftx">stepping down</a>, which he seems to have resisted furiously. The messages reviewed by the NYT showed that lawyers had to check in on him repeatedly while he looked into John Jay Ray III, a corporate turnaround guru who led Enron through its own implosion in 2001 and is now helming the bankrupt FTX.
"This is an excellent pick and I wholeheartedly hope you sign this tonight," Zach Dexter, an FTX executive, wrote to SBF on the night of November 10. "The faster John is in place, the faster the company can resolve issues that require urgent progress."
Bankman-Fried, who had previously seemed to dodge Dexter's questions about stepping down, appeared to only decide to hire Ray after talking to lawyers, and finally made the decision to do so around four the next morning amid a series of dodged and frenzied messages from <a href="https://futurism.com/the-byte/sam-bankman-fried-lawyers-quit-tweeting">his attorneys</a> and advisors.
Shortly thereafter, FTX filed for bankruptcy, the report notes, but SBF nevertheless continued to try to lobby investors even though he was no longer in control of the firm.
Such was the chaos and miscommunication surrounding that moment that, as it turned out, the initial bankruptcy filing erroneously claimed to own firms like Alameda and, curiously, FTX's American arm, when those entities were <a href="https://azafinance.com/aza-finance-issues-correction-to-erroneous-inclusion-in-ftx-chapter-11-bankruptcy-filing/">actually owned by AZA Finance</a>, a company that partnered with the exchange as it ventured into crypto in Africa.
To explain the error, top FTX lawyer Ryne Miller simply told AZA's people that the fault lay elsewhere.
"We had no cooperation of the founders in preparing this week," Miller told AZA execs on Slack. "It was unfortunate."
More on FTX: <a href="https://futurism.com/the-byte/sbf-ftx-message-to-lawyers">SBF Says His Lawyers Can "Go F*ck Themselves" </a>

SBFX

This guy! 

Leaked Messages Show FTX Insiders Begging SBF to Step Down as Crisis Deepened

Billy McFarland, the colorful personality behind the dumpster fire that was <a href="https://www.bbc.com/news/newsbeat-46904445">2017's Fyre Fest</a>, is officially off house arrest. And boy does he have a new opportunity for the most gullible people out there!
McFarland wants you to meet him for something that's apparently not a festival (despite it featuring a "handful of artists, content creators," and "entrepreneurs") and not an event (despite it being a thing that you can allegedly somehow go to) in a digital landscape that's definitely not the metaverse — despite it being "virtual," "immersive," and "decentralized."
Whatever it is, it's called PYRT — spelled similarly to "fyre" but pronounced like "pirate," because chaos. A "<a href="https://www.tiktok.com/@pyrtbilly/video/7164848260774022446?is_copy_url=1&amp;is_from_webapp=v1">treasure hunt</a>" is somehow involved in the marketing, but that also makes zero sense, other than being on pirate theme.
"PYRT is not a festival. It's not an event. And it's definitely not the metaverse," McFarland explained — if you could call it explaining — in a <a href="https://www.tiktok.com/@pyrtbilly/video/7170004953807719722?is_copy_url=1&amp;is_from_webapp=v1">recent TikTok</a>. "PYRT is a technology I've been working on for the past few years called the VID/R: the virtual immersive decentralized reality."
If you have a headache, we do too. McFarland, who was <a href="https://www.justice.gov/usao-sdny/pr/william-mcfarland-sentenced-6-years-prison-manhattan-federal-court-engaging-multiple">convicted</a> of defrauding over $26 million from investors back in 2018, has been teasing this new project on social media for a few months now. And now this so-called reveal offers a lot more questions than answers.
While he says that PYRT is none of the things — festival, event, metaverse — that it absolutely sounds like, he doesn't actually offer any real evidence of why it's different. After all, if Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg had a dollar for <a href="https://futurism.com/facebook-changes-name-meta">every time he used the words</a> "immersive," "digital" and "reality," he'd probably be able to afford one of his company's <a href="https://futurism.com/the-byte/meta-quest-pro-headset-dead-on-arrival">ludicrously expensive headsets</a>. Sure, McFarland's digital world might not be marketed as the future of work, but it still sounds like a metaverse project to us. (It's unclear how blockchain or decentralization plays at all into the scheme, but it probably tracks that he's drawn to an industry <a href="https://futurism.com/crypto-project-5-percent-returns-ponzi-scheme">notorious for its hype and grift</a>.)
To make things even sketchier, McFarland doesn't offer any proof-of-concept on the tech side. He's just filming himself at home, in front of a physical whiteboard. At least Zucko goes to the effort of <a href="https://futurism.com/the-byte/zuckerberg-metaverse-legs-staged">rendering fake avatar legs</a>, even if they don't actually exist yet. McFarland also takes a moment to point to a "virtual map" of one of his "favorite islands in the Exumas," where he's apparently hoping the event will take place. That virtual map, however, as a number of TikTok commenters pointed out, is just a piece of printed paper taped to the wall.
On that note, his ambition to make it back to the Bahamas represents another major roadblock: the Bahamas don't want him. Fyre Fest was a disaster — for McFarland, for hopeful partygoers, and for the islands themselves, where the doomed event took place. And as for island officials, they haven't exactly minced words.
"The public is advised that no application has been made to the Government of The Bahamas for consideration of any event promoted by Billy McFarland or any entity or parties known to be associated with him," Bahamian officials said in a <a href="http://www.tribune242.com/photos/2022/nov/14/79250/">letter</a> published earlier this month, after the Bucknell University dropout started posting cryptic teaser videos mentioning the Carribean islands. "McFarland was the organizer of the Fyre Festival several years ago, a notorious charade for which McFarland was convicted and sent to prison in the USA. The Government of The Bahamas will not endorse or approve any event in The Bahamas associated with him."
Though McFarland has hinted that his project will hopefully help him "<a href="https://www.tiktok.com/@pyrtbilly/video/7158222620205337899?is_copy_url=1&amp;is_from_webapp=v1">[make] things up to everybody</a>" — "everybody" presumably being those he defrauded — it's unclear how that might actually be accomplished here, other than the fact that $50 from every $249.99 PYRT x Crew Jacket, which are currently available on the PYRT website, will go "directly to recovery" — $25 to defrauded partygoers, $25 to affected Bahamians.
Sounds like he's got a lot of sweatshirts to sell.
READ MORE: <a href="https://www.vice.com/en/article/k7b5k3/convicted-fyre-festival-fraudster-is-planning-another-bahamas-venture-but-the-bahamas-dont-want-him">Convicted Fyre Festival Fraudster Is Planning Another Bahamas Venture, But the Bahamas Don't Want Him</a> [Vice]
More on Nu Fyre Fest: <a href="https://futurism.com/the-byte/fyre-festival-island-colony-for-crypto-millionaires">Developers Are Transforming the Fyre Fest Island into an Exclusive Colony for Crypto Millionaires, Because of Course They Are</a>

Scammers Scam On

"PYRT is a technology I've been working on for the past few years called the VID/R: the virtual immersive decentralized reality."

The Fyre Fest Guy Is Off House Arrest and of Course His New Scheme Involves the Metaverse and Crypto

On Monday, NASA's uncrewed Orion spacecraft <a href="https://blogs.nasa.gov/artemis/2022/11/28/artemis-i-flight-day-13-orion-goes-the-max-distance/">reached its farthest distance from Earth</a> at nearly 270,000 miles away as part of the agency's Artemis I mission. It's the farthest a spacecraft capable of carrying human passengers has ever traveled, in fact, at about 20,000 miles clear of the previous record set by the crewed Apollo 13 mission way back in 1970.
At its journey's zenith, the Orion spacecraft took a moment to gaze back towards its home planet, and captured a photo for the ages, showing both the Moon and the Earth, each half shrouded in shadow and perfectly in line with each other, resting in the unyielding black of space, while part of the capsule and its NASA logos are proudly in view ahead of them.
From here, the Moon appears larger than Earth, but neither could be described as large overall. It's the ultimate, space-spanning exercise in perspective, where an entire world is reduced to a mere marble, looking no more significant than a plastic Earth you'd find hanging in a toy solar system over a child's bed at night.
Unlike that plastic imitation, however, there's <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2022/11/15/world/world-population-8-billion.html">about eight billion of us</a> inhabiting the real one. But from Orion's lofty vantage point, you'd never be able to tell. No buildings, no cities, and no, not even the Great Wall — only patches of blue ocean effaced by swirls of cloud.
<blockquote class="twitter-tweet" data-width="500" data-dnt="true">
Flight day 13: Orion reached its maximum distance from Earth during the <a href="https://twitter.com/hashtag/Artemis?src=hash&amp;ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">#Artemis</a> I mission when it was 268,563 miles away from our home planet. Orion has now traveled farther than any other spacecraft built for humans. <a href="https://t.co/sfdPFjf7Og">pic.twitter.com/sfdPFjf7Og</a>
&mdash; Orion Spacecraft (@NASA_Orion) <a href="https://twitter.com/NASA_Orion/status/1597387686926589972?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">November 29, 2022</a></blockquote>
<script async src="https://platform.twitter.com/widgets.js" charset="utf-8"></script>
"The imagery was crazy," said mission lead flight director Rick LaBrode at a NASA news conference, <a href="https://arstechnica.com/science/2022/11/orion-flies-far-beyond-the-moon-returns-an-instantly-iconic-photo/?comments=1&amp;comments-page=1">as quoted by Ars Technica</a>. "It's really hard to articulate what the feeling is. It's really amazing to be here, and see that."
That ineffable mix of emotions, full of awe at the sublime beauty, but also of a humbling insignificance, has been described as the Overview Effect, in which many astronauts have reported similar evocations after seeing the Earth from space in person.
A photo's effect — even this one's — isn't quite the same as actually experiencing an offworld perspective of our planet. It does give us an idea, though.
Famously, William Shatner of "Star Trek" fame experienced the Overview Effect first hand after <a href="https://futurism.com/william-shatner-space-grief">his voyage to space</a> aboard a private Blue Origin flight. In an <a href="https://variety.com/2022/tv/news/william-shatner-space-boldly-go-excerpt-1235395113/">excerpt of his memoir</a>, Shatner wrote of the view: "All I saw was death."
In a way, it's not hard to see why Shatner was filled with "overwhelming sadness." At such a distance, all seems trivial, like how our grievances of the past can seem petty, silly, or even funny with enough time elapsed.
Yet by the same token, there's more reason to be hopeful from the spectacle. For one, the fact that this was taken by a craft designed to carry people implies that one day, humans, too, will be able to travel that far, and perhaps beyond, where the Earth may be no more than, yes, a <a href="https://solarsystem.nasa.gov/resources/536/voyager-1s-pale-blue-dot/">Pale Blue Dot</a>, or not even a dot at all.
It's also evincive of the Artemis mission's success overall, which has been described as "outstanding" by Orion program manager Howard Hu, <a href="https://www.cnn.com/2022/11/28/world/nasa-artemis-1-orion-spacecraft-furthest-distance-moon-scn/index.html">as quoted by CNN</a>. In fact, Orion is performing so well that NASA is already considering an additional seven test objectives before it's set to fly back around the Moon, and finally down to Earth.
A precursor to a <a href="https://www.space.com/artemis-3-moon-landing-mission">future crewed Artemis mission to the Moon</a>, the runaway success here, while not without <a href="https://futurism.com/the-byte/omotenashi-nasa-artemis-dies">its tribulations</a>, bodes well for astronauts planning to set foot and even live on the lunar surface in years to come.
More on NASA: <a href="https://futurism.com/the-byte/nasa-artemis-reaches-moon">Rejoice! NASA's Artemis I Is Now Orbiting the Moon</a>

Putting Things In Perspective

"It's really hard to articulate what the feeling is. It's really amazing to be here, and see that."

Amazing Artemis Photo Shows Every Human, Alive or Dead, Plus the Moon

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