What does SBF's tweet after 767 days mean?

Author: shushu, BlockBeats

After two years, SBF has tweeted again, discussing the experience of firing employees. He wrote that firing employees is a very difficult and unpleasant task, but often it is management issues within the company that lead to employees having to be let go; keeping employees in the company without value is, instead, a waste. SBF's extensive discussion on the topic of layoffs inevitably brings to mind the recent frenzied "layoffs" by the U.S. government.

The market has reignited expectations that SBF will be pardoned, with FTT briefly breaking through $2.2, currently quoted at $2.05, a 24-hour increase of 11.8%.

SBF Shifts Political Leanings, Clearly "Aligns" with Trump in Search of a Pardon

This all dates back to Trump's presidency.

On January 22, Trump posted on his social media platform Truth Social that he had pardoned the Silk Road founder, stating, "I just called the mother of Silk Road founder Ross William Ulbricht to tell her that I am honored to have just signed a full and unconditional pardon for her son Ross."

By the end of the month, insiders revealed that SBF's parents, Stanford Law School professors Joseph Bankman and Barbara Fried, had recently met with lawyers and other individuals within Trump's circle, attempting to seek a pardon for SBF, though it remains unclear whether they have contacted the White House.

On February 18, like many in and out of the crypto industry hoping to gain political points during Trump's second term, SBF openly "aligned" himself with Trump in an interview with the New York Post: "I spent a lot of time studying crypto policy and felt very frustrated and disappointed with what I saw from the Biden administration and the Democrats. The Biden administration is extremely destructive and hard to work with; frankly, the Republicans are much more reasonable."

SBF hinted that his rightward shift began in 2022, as he and Trump share a common enemy: Judge Lewis Kaplan, who is overseeing both the FTX fraud case and Trump's federal defamation case.

In 2020, SBF was the second-largest donor to Biden's campaign, but he now states, "I thought I was center-left at the time, but I no longer see myself that way. The tech industry has undergone a shift in atmosphere; outspoken Democrats like Mark Zuckerberg and Marc Andreessen now support Trump."

Aligning with DOGE, What Does SBF Aim to Achieve?

In SBF's comeback tweet, he core expressed that "firing employees is one of the hardest things in the world," which inevitably brings to mind Trump's U.S. Government Efficiency Department (DOGE), whose most notable action upon taking office was firing government officials. Even the prosecutor in the SBF case resigned due to "new official enthusiasm," as the Justice Department required her to pause the corruption investigation into New York City Mayor Eric Adams.

According to the Washington Post, since the beginning of Trump's second term three weeks ago, a series of actions with advisor Musk have sparked widespread controversy. The U.S. Government Efficiency Department led by Musk has intervened in 18 federal agencies, terminated 199 federal contracts, and attempted to fire tens of thousands of federal employees.

On February 16, local time on the 15th, the U.S. Government Efficiency Department (DOGE) sent termination notices to over a dozen staff members of the U.S. Digital Service, which is an IT department of the President's Executive Office, now taken over by the Efficiency Department (DOGE).

Even the SEC has had to make changes. On February 25, according to two insiders, the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) plans to replace senior leadership in regional offices across the country as part of its cost-cutting proposal to the Trump administration.

Insiders stated that the SEC informed the directors of its 10 regional offices on Friday that their positions would be eliminated based on a plan to be submitted next month. The SEC oversees over $100 trillion in U.S. capital markets and is currently under pressure from Trump to cut jobs and reduce costs.

SBF's heartfelt long tweet hits the nail on the head.

Appendix: Full Translation of SBF's Tweet

I have great sympathy for government employees: I myself have not checked my email for several hundred days. And I can confirm that being unemployed is much harder than it seems.

Firing employees is one of the hardest things in the world, and it is a terrible thing for everyone involved.

My experience is:

a) Employees being fired is usually not their fault.

b) But in many cases, firing them is still the right decision.

The more common issue is that the company simply does not have suitable positions for them.

I would tell every person who has been fired: this is also our fault because we did not find a suitable role for them, or we did not find the right person to manage them, or we did not provide them with a suitable work environment.

Perhaps at the time we did not have the right personnel to manage them. Perhaps they performed best while working remotely, but our company primarily communicates face-to-face. Perhaps they wanted to participate in a specific project, but that project just happened not to be what the company needed.

Or the department they were in had problems itself. This situation occurs frequently. We have seen it with competitors who hired an excess of 30,000 employees and ended up completely unsure of how to arrange them—so the entire team just sat there doing nothing every day.

We have also seen this internally; when a manager becomes busy or distracted, half of the people in an entire department can simultaneously lose direction. When this happens, the employees are not at fault. If the employer does not know how to arrange them or does not have the right person to manage them effectively, that is not their fault. If internal politics cause a department to lose direction, that is also not their fault. But keeping them in the company, doing nothing, makes no sense.