when authorities show up to the FTX Bahamas office
I'm writing a long one on FTX for my newsletter tomorrow...if you want to see how many tweets one person can bookmark, subscribe here: getrevue.co/profile/trungt…
Bernie Madoff's ponzi scheme was shockingly un-sophisticated.
He essentially kept money in a single Chase checking account and paid out redemptions from it.
Before blowing up, the checking (checking!) account held $5.5B.
PS. Subscribe here if you want to read my deep dive on FTX’s blowup that drops tomorrow: trungphan.substack.com
PPS. Back to Madoff, this is what a Ponzi scheme looks like: “equity like” returns with “bond-like” volatility.
Madoff details are wild:
◻️ His "fund" owned $200k total of securities (Lehman, Morgan Stanley, Fidelity Investments, Bear Stearns, M&T Bank)
◻️ At one point, Madoff was NASDAQ's largest market maker
◻️ The DOJ has returned $14B+ of $18B investor losses
Every new piece has to fit with every piece ever made. So the most variability between pieces that Lego allows is 0.0005” (half a thousandths of an inch).
Here are some other details:
The Lego factories run have dozen of machines running 24/7 and each machine has a different mold (for different pieces)
Below is a retired Lego mold that produced 120 million pieces.
Here’s the value via Reddit: “At 8 bricks per run, 120m bricks would take 15m runs to complete. 120m bricks at $0.25 would produce $30m worth of 2x3 Lego bricks. All from one mold.”
I actually use Twitter Blue (Top Articles, Edit are useful). And Twitter gives me so much pleasure (bathroom trips are 1000x better), happy to pay more… especially with more creator features.