Caroline Ellison, a government witness and former CEO of Alameda Research (the business arm of the Bankman-Fried empire) and Bankman-Fried’s ex-girlfriend, testified in court that she “said she thought her hair had been very valuable.” .” From her first jobs at the Wall Street firm Jane Street, Ms. Ellison testified, “she thought she had gotten higher bonuses because of her hair and that she was an important part of the narrative and image.” of FTX”.
(It is possible to see Ms. Ellison as the Delilah of this particular story. Not only because of her personal relationship with Mr. Bankman-Fried, but because, in her testimony, she may not have cut his hair herself. , but certainly cut it to size.)
Other FTX employees apparently thought his hair was important enough to him, Lewis writes, that when they were working with the architects hired to design the new headquarters in the Bahamas and imagining what he would want, one of three things they were told What happened was that the side of the building “evoked her unruly hair.”
Lewis also writes that Bankman-Fried admitted to having a “general disdain” for the importance of “physical attractiveness.” When she made the Forbes billionaires list, that disdain seemed like a force: it meant she was focused on her big ideas. Later, of course, it seemed like a warning sign: if he was so careless with his own appearance, maybe he was just as careless with his money. But either way, interpretation was in the eye of the beholder.
Is it their fault that we were foolish enough to fall for the look and the windfall we thought it promised? After Elizabeth Holmes and her black turtleneck, we should have known better. However, as said by Anthony Scaramucci, who bought Bankman-Fried a suit when he took him on a fundraising trip to the Middle East weeks before FTX imploded. Business Insider, thought Bankman-Fried “was the Mark Zuckerberg of cryptocurrencies.” And Scaramucci thought that, Insider wrote, because “Meta’s CEO walked around Davos in a hoodie and a T-shirt,” and Bankman-Fried walked around the entire time in rumpled shorts and a T-shirt.
But then came the well-deserved payment and then came the haircut.
Cutting one’s hair has long been a means of punishment for men and women. Hair, and all the ways we manipulate it, is so connected to identity—to sexual attractiveness, health, and self-expression—that it is illegal to discriminate based on hair in 23 statisticis. Precisely for this reason, his court can represent dehumanization, as occurred during World War II when the French shaved the heads of collaborators, and as occurs, in part, in the prison system. In many religions, the sacrifice of hair can be a sign of repentance.
