The Bankman-Frieds' $70M-plus spending spree on pandemics
Was it a scam? That's 'completely reasonable skepticism,' an SBF pandemic adviser told me
The fast rise of Sam Bankman-Fried has given way to a steeper fall, following reports that customer funds at his cryptocurrency exchange, FTX, were being used to prop up a sister trading firm. It’s impossible to miss the angry investors and worried regulators, and SBF’s reported $16 billion fortune has evaporated overnight.
One aspect of SBF’s rise and fall that interested me, as a reporter who’s closely covered the pandemic: SBF’s repeated claim that he would try to stop the next one.
It sparked a flurry of SBF-linked spending on lobbyists, investments in virus research, even donations to media — a seemingly haphazard spending spree. And while SBF bankrolled the efforts, drawing on his FTX network, his younger brother Gabe steered the strategy.
At the Washington Post on Wednesday, I took a look at the Bankman-Frieds’ pandemic-prevention plan — an operation, as far as I can tell, that spent more than $70 million over the past year.
FTX-backed projects ranged from $12 million to champion a California ballot initiative to strengthen public health programs and detect emerging virus threats (amid lackluster support, the measure was punted to 2024), to investing more than $11 million on the unsuccessful congressional primary campaign of an Oregon biosecurity expert, and even a $150,000 grant to help Moncef Slaoui, scientific adviser for the Trump administration’s “Operation Warp Speed” vaccine accelerator, write his memoir.
So many people took money from the Bankman-Frieds or were thinking about doing it. (Teddy Schleifer, an informed reporter at Puck News, suggests the total pandemic spending was even more than I found.)
And with FTX’s explosion, that means the blast radius in public health is big, and widening, as I wrote at The Post:
Most of the brothers’ public health efforts have now come to a screeching halt. A sprawling array of political groups, health researchers and even media organizations that received money from them or their network are reviewing next steps or cutting ties. Many staff declined to speak on the record, concerned that customers whose finances were destroyed by FTX might seek to claw back the brothers’ donations.
You can read more in the piece about the specific pandemic-prevention strategies the brothers pursued.
Compared to the huge sums of money lost in the FTX implosion, $70 million is just a sliver. This is a story that goes well beyond health care, with so many FTX customers asking for refunds that may never come.
But $70 million was a staggering amount of spending for an often-sleepy corner of public health, and it allowed the Bankman-Frieds to buy their way into corridors of power in Washington and beyond: their donations, pricey experts and lobbyists helped broker conversations that led to more conversations on Capitol Hill and in the White House. I spoke with senior officials and outside experts who said they didn’t really know who the Bankman-Frieds were, but suddenly were being pressed to take meetings with them and talk about pandemics. And folks across health care are marveling at the scope of the SBF-funded effort.
“Seventy million dollars is a lot,” Steve Morrison, who leads global health policy at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, texted me after reading the story. “Who knows what impact any of it had or would have had if sustained over time.”
Steve, who previously told me he never took money from SBF nor met with his teams, also pointed out something on the minds of public health experts: “No one will fill the gap left in investing in the hill and other races.”
Pandemic prevention is an expensive issue that requires a variety of investments, and it can be hard to convince people to fight an invisible viral threat that may never come.
(To put it another way: Your local hospital might sponsor a 5K race to fight heart disease. I’ve seen numerous charitable drives for hurricane relief. I can’t think of a bake-off or telethon that people organized to raise money to stop the next pandemic.)
And with people burned out on covid, the momentum to pour more funds into pandemic prevention has begun to ebb in Washington. Even the White House keeps trying, and failing, to get a Democrat-led Congress to allocate more money to the covid response.
So bringing it back to one question: was it all a scam? Even some of SBF’s advisers and partners aren’t sure now, as I wrote in our story.
Even before FTX’s crash, Sam Bankman-Fried also faced persistent questions about whether his pandemic-prevention agenda was a vehicle to win favor on Capitol Hill — which he could then exploit for other goals, such as influencing cryptocurrency regulations.
“It’s completely reasonable skepticism,” said one of the Bankman-Frieds’ pandemic advisers. “I’m 100 percent sure Gabe cared about pandemics … I don’t know what to think about [Sam].”
I never got a chance to ask SBF any of this directly; I don’t know the guy, and he didn’t respond to my attempts to reach him.
So for the story, I tried to watch or listen to prior interviews where SBF was pressed on his donations and his end goal. And SBF would respond that he understood the scrutiny, like in this NBC interview in September.
Chuck Todd: Why shouldn't folks be a little bit skeptical of your real motives here? …
SBF: It's a good question. And frankly, everyone should always be skeptical of things like this, right? … People aren't taking me at my word, and I understand that.
But he would always return to his claim: this was part of a long-term focus on protecting the world. Even two weeks ago, he was reiterating his pandemic-prevention agenda.
That was what he said then, at least.
In private messages with Vox’s Kelsey Piper this week, SBF appears to have made a Kinsley gaffe: admitting what he really thinks about his approach to ethics and reputations.
"you were really good at talking about ethics, for someone who kind of saw it all as a game with winners and losers,” Piper wrote, according to messages published by Vox.
“it’s what reputations are made of, to some extent,” SBF responded, according to messages published by Vox. “I feel bad for those who get fucked by it… by this dumb game we woke westerners play where we say all the right shiboleths and so everyone likes us.”
Our story at The Post published a few hours before the Vox piece. And it took some heat in corners of Twitter, with folks particularly upset about the original headline — "FTX collapse dooms founder’s pandemic-prevention agenda" — and suggesting the article was somehow running cover for the Bankman-Frieds. (I DMed with one person who said he’d lost money with FTX, and was understandably frustrated with coverage he perceived to be pro-SBF.)
So it’s important to be transparent: Before starting my story late last week, I’d never met or talked to anyone at FTX or in the immediate Bankman-Fried universe, so far as I can tell. I’d never written a crypto story and was only vaguely aware of the curly-haired guy I’d seen in photos with celebrities. The Bankman-Frieds never came up in any conversation at work. No one pushed me to do the story — if anything, I was the one pushing my editors to let me write the article last weekend before heading out on family leave.
As a health reporter, I was hoping to try to answer a few questions: why was this guy spending so much money on pandemics? Was it all a scam? Or to put it another way — how did a guy whose public health spending and political donations put him on par with Bill Gates and George Soros end up getting compared to fraudsters like Bernie Madoff and Elizabeth Holmes?
One of the comms firms representing Gabe Bankman-Fried apparently pitched me on meeting him back in May, in an email called “Intro to pandemic advocacy leader”:
“GAP supports and recommends specific policies concerning pandemic preparedness based on scientific data and expert opinions, so Gabe could be a valuable resource for you in the coming months as policymakers continue to look toward the future of pandemics in the U.S.”
But reporters get these kind of generic pitches all the time, sometimes multiple times per hour.1 I didn’t open the email or even notice it until a few days ago, when I searched my inbox for mentions of “Guarding Against Pandemics.”
From my interviews, it was clear that some are trying to rationalize their experience with SBF. Several people who took money from him for pandemic-prevention initiatives or were thinking about doing it even suggested to me this wasn’t a “Bernie Madoff situation,” arguing that it’s unfair to compare a Wall Street fraudster to an “effective altruist” channeling money to public health.
But that’s easier to say when it’s not your own money being given away. And SBF’s quote to NBC, a few months ago, has new resonance here.
SBF: Frankly, everyone should always be skeptical of things like this, right? … People aren't taking me at my word, and I understand that.
About eight minutes after I started writing this Substack post, I got an email offering an “Interview with New Crypto Pioneer” from some PR person I don’t know, about some '“pioneer” I’ve never met.