FTX Stole from Ukraine Gave to Democrats
FTX launched crypto donation platform Aid for Ukraine in March, setting itself up as the central clearing house for all cryptocurrency donations to Kiev’s war effort. While the exchange was supposed to route those donations to the National Bank of Ukraine, the report suggests it funneled at least some of the money back to the US through political donations.
Sam Bankman-Fried was the second-largest donor to the Democratic Party for the midterms, pouring some $38 million into candidates’ coffers in 2022 alone.
The Ukrainian government had already received only $60 million in crypto donations as of March. FTX did not publish the amounts subsequently taken in, but other fundraising campaigns on Kiev’s behalf have been hugely successful - Star Wars actor Mark Hammill raised enough funds to buy 500 drones in a single month, for example.
Samuel Bankman-Fried, the founder of failed cryptocurrency exchange FTX, allegedly laundered billions of dollars through Ukraine by setting up his company as the central clearinghouse for all crypto donations to Kiev’s war effort, according to the Gateway Pundit. Democratic politicians sending aid to Ukraine would see their money come back in the form of donations through FTX, the outlet claimed.
Whatever funds the exchange had under management have presumably evaporated with the rest of its assets due to an alleged hack last week, and the exchange filed for bankruptcy on Friday. The resulting chaos has sent crypto markets spiraling.
In addition to bankrolling political campaigns, Bankman-Fried spent millions lobbying to shape cryptocurrency regulations. Democrats responsible for overseeing the Commodity Futures Trading Commission were particular targets for his largesse, and he is now under investigation by that same agency for moving $10 billion in client assets off FTX to his hedge fund Alameda Research.
While Bankman-Fried’s private jet has been tracked to Argentina, the disgraced billionaire insisted on Saturday that he was still in the Bahamas.
SpaceX: The Road to 10 Gigawatts
SpaceX did not add an AI business. A company whose processes run on compute built its own computing plant, then built the power to run it. The 10-Q reports 1.4 gigawatts of nameplate compute at 30 June 2026, four leases worth about $41 billion a year and $100 billion of cash. The target is closer to 10 gigawatts than 5 by the end of 2027. This piece sets out the build sequence, the four layers of power in Memphis, and why Terafab is the act after 2027, not the road to it.
Thoughts on Thinking: Take an Art Break
The best way I know to keep complex work in perspective is to stop at intervals and look at something that took the same order of sustained attention under real constraints. The studies now show what that does: a museum visit restored attention where an urban walk did not, judging the beauty of an object raised abstract thinking almost 14 per cent, and artistic film raised originality even in people who felt worse for it. Five works, Leonardo to Holbein, and the non-default decision in each.
The Evil Legacy of the French Revolution
The French Revolution is still sold as the birthday of the modern world. The ledger does not match the posters. It seized the Church's land and floated its paper money on the seizure, hunted the priests who would not swear, defined the nobility as a moral enemy, and put in their place a political class accountable chiefly to itself. Four knowledge-graph exhibits trace who put the king and queen on the scaffold, and how the template left France.
Careful of the Prompts You Give Yourself
A prompt is not only what you type into a model. It is any sentence that gets inside you and starts issuing orders. Most of what we call goals were written by comparison, media, competition and now the model, and they arrive dressed as ambition. Shayne Heffernan maps how an imported sentence becomes a week, why a want should carry its source the way a Round Table claim does, and how to strip, lock and guard the objective that is actually yours.
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