🍪 The best stuff SBF's parents bought with FTX funds

Happy Thursday, friends. This is Bite Sized Beta. We serve up the best stuff in tech in bite sized pieces, plus a surprise or two.

Like the fact that NSYNC is releasing their first song together in 22 years.

90’s kids, line up!

Alright, here’s what we’ve got on deck today:

👩🏽‍⚖️ FTX is suing SBF’s parents
🤖 Tweet of the week: self doubt
🍪 Cookie crumbs: 5 bite-sized headlines
🗳️ Poll of the week: step count
🍫 Chocolate chips: our 4 favorite finds this week
😂 Snickerdoodles: memes for the weekend

FRESHLY BAKED

FTX IS SUING SBF’S PARENTS

The party’s over, and the hangover is setting in for Sam Bankman Fried’s parents.

FTX is now suing Barbara Fried and Joseph Bankman.

Keep in mind these are Stanford ethics professors we’re talking about here.

I mean, just look at these guys:

They look like they could be your local PTA volunteers handing out cookies.

But FTX is saying that they siphoned millions from the company for their own benefit, and listed a bunch of stuff they now want back in order to pay off FTX creditors (customers that lost their funds after the whole thing went bust).

So, here are some early Christmas ideas for your own parents, based on what Barbara and Joseph got!

Tickets to the Formula 1 Grand Prix in France
$10M in cash
$1.2K per night hotels
A $16.4M property in The Bahamas
A $200K salary
At least eight vases, and five rugs, one of which was a Persian hand-knotted rug costing more than $2.5K
$5.5M in donations to Stanford University (aka their employer)

All while FTX teetered on the brink of insolvency.

The most hilarious part of all of this:

SBF's father was unhappy with his salary at FTX US so he emailed SBF asking for more money, and then pulled the "I'm telling your mother" Dad move and looped SBF's mom into the email thread
— Conor (@jconorgrogan)
Sep 19, 2023

Even billionaires can’t escape a mother’s wrath.

Hopefully our parents won’t be too sad about getting a nice sweater for Christmas… Do we get points for not being in jail??

THE BIG PIZOOKIE

TWEET OF THE WEEK

Someone with half your IQ is making 10x as you because they aren't smart enough to doubt themselves.
— Ed Latimore (@EdLatimore)
Jun 30, 2022

Imagine a giant whiteboard with all humans on there (~7B)

Now let’s say I’m top ~1% in the world at writing. So draw a circle around those people.

But maybe I’m also great at “knowledge about air conditioning repair”. Draw a circle around those people.

The overlap = people who are great at copywriting AND know a lot about air conditioning repair. Two niche things.

The overlap is tiny. Maybe 1 in a billion.

Now one last circle: “people who have the guts/self-belief to go build a company around it” and now it’s just like 5 people on the planet.

Pretty wild right?

You’re not competing with the world, you’re competing with those 5 people, and multiple people can win.

COOKIE CRUMBS

BITE SIZED HEADLINES

Elon says he’s gonna start charging all users a “small monthly subscription fee” to use Twitter X. The good days are over. Take our money, Elon.

A tale of two IPOs this week - ARM stock popped 25%, but has steadily declined since, while Instacart ended its first day up 12% but slumped and wiped out all its gains the next day.

Google’s most powerful AI model Gemini is now being opened up to external developers, and the results are promising. Apparently, it’s already generating fewer incorrect answers vs. GPT-4. 👀

In the meantime, Bard can now sift through your emails and Google drive and summarize/find stuff for you.

Forget 10K steps, a new study followed 227K participants over 7 years and found the people that got just 4K steps a day got the benefits of reduced mortality. Each additional 1,000 steps daily correlated with a 15% reduction in overall mortality risk. But the bigger question is - do baby steps around my bed to close my Apple Watch rings count??

FROM THE COOKIE JAR

POLL OF THE WEEK: WHATS YOUR STEP COUNT?

Are we crazy or is 10K steps insanely hard to do in a day? It’s like 5 miles worth of walking. Let us know if we’re the only ones slacking.

What’s your average step count every day?

Sound off👇🏽

CHOCOLATE CHIPS

OUR FAVORITE FINDS

I’m cracking up - someone made this site that slowly and soothingly reads Instagram’s terms of use to put you to sleep. And the best part is that it’s called zzzuckerberg.com
This Google PM is launching a newsletter that tells you one small thing a week you can do to improve your longevity, in normal people words.
A thread with a ton of insider secrets from different industries, by the people who work in those industries. From farming, to recruiting, to teaching, to peanut butter - get your tea here, folks!
How to be an interesting person.

SNICKERDOODLES

THURSDAY MEMES

Kinda messed up that when babies are born they don’t get properly onboarded with a welcome email or lunch with the team
— Matthew Levy (@MattLevy51)
Oct 11, 2022

😂

That's all we got for ya this week, folks. See ya next Thursday!

If you enjoyed this, we'd love it if you'd fwd to a friend! We don't gate keep here - spread some of these sweet treats. 🙏🏾

What'd you think about this email?