George Santos and Sam Bankman-Fried share a surprising amount in common. They both had meteoric rises to the top by spinning self-aggrandizing narratives, and they both spectacularly fell back to earth when those webs unraveled. While Bankman-Fried is under house arrest awaiting a criminal trial related to the collapse of FTX, Santos is facing newly unsealed charges of fraud and money laundering from the Department of Justice related to his unlikely congressional victory last November.
The two men each seemed to understand that money—and how to spend it—was key to their ascent. According to a report from Puck, Santos received donations from FTX executives as part of an agreement with the crypto lobbyist Michelle Bond, who was also the girlfriend of Ryan Salame, a prodigious Republican donor and the co-CEO of FTX, and ran an unsuccessful bid for a congressional seat in New York. The campaigns of Santos and Bond engaged in a donor swap, where they encouraged each candidate's supporters to contribute maxed-out donations to the other. Records, for example, show Ryan Salame's father contributing the max amount to both Santos and Bond's campaigns.
