I took an accounting course once. I was hardly a top student (the class was pass-fail, thank God), but I did retain the basics—including what a balance sheet should look like. And I can tell you that the balance sheet FTX was showing investors in its desperate final days resembled something closer to a surrealist poem than a normal financial document.
Published by the Financial Times, the balance sheet triggered disbelief and amazement in financial circles, especially after Bloomberg's Matt Levine highlighted its many bizarre attributes. These include assets in the form of illiquid shitcoins that FTX had conjured out of thin air, including $2.2 billion of "Serum" tokens and over $600 million of "Maps" tokens, as well as $7.3 million of a mysterious illiquid asset called TRUMPLOSE. And then there is a line for $8 billion of liabilities that is described on the spreadsheet as "Hidden, poorly internally labeled 'fiat@' account." Huh? I can't begin to describe how outlandish this is in terms of standard accounting, so I will leave it to the inimitable Levine:
