How FTX defrauded investors with a small change to its code + Musk dethroned as the world’s richest person
A small change to FTX’s code allowed the company to defraud investors: Fallen crypto exchange FTX saw a tweak in its code in 2020 that allowed a hedge fund owned by former CEO and so-called “crypto king” Sam Bankman-Fried to borrow an unlimited amount of FTX funds, Reuters reports after reviewing the platform’s code base. The code change allowed SBF’s Alameda hedge fund (not to be confused with Alameda Healthcare) to borrow as many funds from FTX as it wants without automatically selling its collateral assets as it does with other customers, giving it a “virtually unlimited line of credit,” the US Securities and Exchange Commission wrote in its complaint. The funds were sourced from bank accounts secretly controlled by Alameda that received over USD 8 bn in deposits from FTX clients, the complaint said.
Alameda’s account had other special features that allowed it to book orders a fraction of a second faster than others, which in a “high-frequency trading sector,” is a significant time advantage, the US Commodity Futures Trading Commission said in its statement (pdf).
Musk is no longer the world’s richest person: Tech b’naire Elon Musk’s spot as the world’s richest person was overtaken by Bernard Arnault, the chief executive of fashion giant LVMH, Bloomberg reported. Musk, whose fortune was once estimated at USD 340 bn, saw his wealth drop by over USD 100 bn since the start of the year to USD 163.1 bn, partly due to his controversial USD 44 bn acquisition of Twitter. Arnault’s fortune is estimated at USD 170.6 bn.
Golden Globe nominations are out: Tragicomedy firm The Banshees of Inisherin led Golden Globe nominations for 2023 with eight nominations with sci-fi fable Everything Everywhere All at Once coming second with six nominations. There were five nods each for Steven Spielberg’s The Fabelmans, Babylon, and Baz Luhrmann’s Elvis. Catch the full list of nominations here. The award show is scheduled to take place on Wednesday, 11 January.
WhatsApp could walk away from the UK over proposed law: WhatsApp is threatening to shut down the messaging app in the UK if the British parliament passes proposed anti-encryption laws, Meta’s head of WhatsApp Will Cathcart told The Telegraph. The proposed law would require “communication providers to take away end-to-end encryption,” a key feature of WhatsApp’s messaging platform, Cathcart said. “The hard reality is we offer a global product. It would be a very hard decision for us to make a change where 100% of our users lower their security.”