Sam Bankman Fried and Schlubby Style

The mythical figure who is the billionaire tech genius in the nowhere-man-tee may finally be on the verge of meeting his long-awaited end. The arrest of Sam Bankman-Fried, the founder of the FTX cryptocurrency trading platform, on Monday in the Bahamas on fraud charges could mark not only the next stage in his downfall, but also a change in the global perception of Silicon Valley.

After all, no one conceived the idea that a life of the boundless mind was reflected in a life freed from petty cares such as clothes beyond Mr. Bankman-Fried (or SBF, as he is often called). Not the physical cage of a suit and tie for him. Instead, the T-shirt, shorts and sneakers, often worn with white running socks shrunk to the ankle.

And not just any T-shirt and shorts, but what appears to be the bagiest, most stretched out, most slept-in, most deliberately unflattering T-shirts and shorts; the most unkempt bedhead. While the look has evolved naturally, it became a signature as it rose to prominence, a look he realized was just as effective at pushing the Pavlovian buttons of the watching public (and the investing community) as the Savile Row suits and Charvet ties from Wall Street.

“It’s as deliberate as recording in the Bahamas, where there’s little to no regulatory oversight,” said Scott Galloway, an investor, podcasting host, and professor of marketing, referring to the fact that FTX’s headquarters are in the Caribbean. area instead of California. “It is the ultimate tech of a billionaire, a white boy: I am so beyond convention. I am so special that I am not subject to the same rules and decency as everyone else.”

It’s an image that originated less in Mr. Bankman-Fried’s childhood in a family that embraced utilitarianism than in the unbrushed garland of Albert Einstein, who became as much a symbol of the physicist’s genius as E. = mc2. In jeans and a black turtleneck by Steve Jobs, and kitschy shirts by Steve Wozniak, long, wiry hair and beard (which took three hours to recreate for the biopic ‘Jobs’). In, of course, Mark Zuckerberg’s Adidas flip flops, hoodies and gray T-shirts, which gave rise to the current favorite tech uniform.

It’s a uniform that telegraphs someone to the watching world who doesn’t have time to worry about what they’re wearing because they’re thinking such big, world-changing thoughts. Thoughts that no one else can understand because they are so present and potentially revolutionary. It plays on our general uncertainty around science and the tech world; the whole idea of ​​a language, made in code, impenetrable, that magically shrinks all sorts of possibilities and puts them in the palm of your hand.

“On a macro level, it’s human to worship things,” said Mr. Galloway. “Tech with its mysteries is easy to worship. It is the idolatry of innovators.”

Innovators who don’t just step over long-established lines with their whole being, but ignore them completely. How do we recognize them if we don’t even understand what they are converting about? To paraphrase former Supreme Court Justice Potter Stewart on obscenity, we know them when we see them. Of course they are not like us. Of course they don’t dress like us.

We’ve, said Joseph Rosenfeld, an image consultant and stylist in Silicon Valley, swallowed the costume theory hook, like and sinker. “When ‘tech bros’ like SBF have a meteoric rise in fame and wealth building, the public is willing to give them a pass because the look is de rigueur” said Mr. Rosenfeld. That costume has been reinforced by Hollywood, and the simple fact that any time “a VC hands over a huge investment to a sloppily dressed person (presenting men almost 100 percent of the time), that’s a passive form of approval.”

And a self-sustaining one, that is, if, as Mr. Galloway also said, you’re white, male, and young. “If a person of color or a woman or a 50-year-old showed up like that, security probably wouldn’t let them into the building,” he noted. In many ways, the dress code is yet another example of the prevailing double standard in Silicon Valley (or those companies we associate with Silicon Valley, even if, like FTX, they were headquartered elsewhere) – the one Sheryl Sandberg saw on her Facebook with sleeveless power sheaths in a room of hoodies.

Or at least it was. Suddenly, however, Mr. Bankman-Fried has put the whole look in a different light. His shoddy attire seems less a reflection of a higher calling or a decision to devote his own finances to “effective altruism” than a red flag about sloppy handling of other people’s money. An indication that someone who doesn’t care about showering or style might be someone who doesn’t care about audits and mixing funds.

That, in Mr. Bankman-Fried’s overwhelming embrace of the clothed mystique—a colleague, Andy Croghan, told The New York Times, “Sam and I would purposely not wear pants to meetings”—he actually missed the point, which is that it the details are and what you don’t see that matters. For example, Mr. Jobs’ black turtlenecks were by Japanese designer Issey Miyake; Mr. Zuckerberg’s gray T-shirts come from Italian designer Brunello Cucinelli. They just seemed unstudied.

Mr. Bankman-Fried missed the fact that, as Mr. Rosenfeld said, “some of the best-dressed individuals in the technology sector prefer a very low profile and do not prefer to draw attention to themselves”, which means they actually look more business casual than casual casual. (When asked who those individuals might be, Mr. Rosenfeld checked the names of Kevin Systrom, formerly of Instagram, and Evan Spiegel of Snapchat.)

And he missed that someone who might go to jail isn’t someone whose looks someone else would really want to emulate.

Coincidentally, Mr. Bankman-Fried was scheduled to testify before Congress the day after his arrest. Whether he would have donned a suit for the occasion (he did when he testified in December 2021, although he was famous for his brown lace-up boots that were so tied) a weird knot that they became a meme for themselves) we’ll never know. Presumably, when his case actually goes to court, he will swap the shorts and T-shirt for a conservative jacket and maybe even a tie, but whether it will make any difference at that point is doubtful.

His track record of schlubbiness – still on display during his mea culpa self-exoneration media tour before his arrest – is now here to help paint a picture, as Mr Galloway said, of a “man who has no respect for other people’s money , just as he had no respect for decorum.”

And if it has indeed been used that way, it is quite likely that the sartorial style will go out of style. At least for a while. Perhaps instead the trappings of the man who stepped into Mr. Bankman-Fried’s shoes as FTX chief executive to oversee the bankruptcy, John J. Ray III, who sat before the House Financial Services Committee on Tuesday in a navy blue pinstripe suit, light blue shirt and dusty pink tie with discreet print.

And yet, said Mr. Galloway, “the waving of the middle finger, the ‘I’m special, I’m unconventional, I’m above all that boring rule-playing'”—that ethos that Mr. Bankman-Fried once symbolized?

“That will always be in style,” he said. Even if it gets a new look.