How FTX staff spent absurd amounts on food
The FTX crowd certainly don’t seem to have restricted themselves to a Swatch lifestyle – at the company headquarters, they were allowed free groceries, “pop-up barbershops and bi-weekly massages” and chartered planes to bring their purchases across because Amazon doesn’t deliver to the Bahamas. Employees in the USA were allowed a budget of $200 a day for DoorDash deliveries – that’s enough to feed seven Morgan Stanley juniors at the going rate for late working allowances.
What were they spending it on? Sam Bankman-Fried himself certainly doesn’t seem to have eaten out much – on December 30, he was posting slightly depressing recipes on social media and he doesn’t drink or eat meat. The Bahamas are a sandy group of islands which import most of their food and consequently have comparatively few vegan options.
But somebody ran up a $55,000 tab at the Margaritaville resort on the island; it’s the second biggest creditor listed in the bankruptcy filing. Looking through the food and drinks menu, cocktails there seem to be priced at about $15 a go and bar meals around $20. So a team of ten, having two drinks each and something to eat, would be charging a little more than $600 a visit, including tip. At that rate, they’d need to be going there every single evening, assuming that the resort wouldn’t let invoices go unsettled for more than ninety days.
Unless there’s another explanation – it’s possible that FTX used the resort as temporary accommodation for staff that weren’t invited to the penthouse – someone has been hitting the expenses like a TradFi banker.
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