Welcome to Dark Markets, a weekly newsletter about financial frauds, grifts, and deceptions. I’m David Z. Morris, longtime tech and finance reporter, investigator, writer, and producer. This newsletter normally appears on Tuesdays, but was pushed back this week so I could finish my recent dive into Hayden Davis and Mormon Blood Atonement.
·
Jan 5
I’ll be appearing at Codex Books in Manhattan at 7pm on January 15th, in conversation with Adam M. Lowenstein of the American Prospect. We’ll chat, I’ll have books to sign, it’ll be a great time.
I also recently sat down with Dierdre Woollard, host of New Books in Economics, to talk about “Stealing the Future: Sam Bankman-Fried, Elite Fraud, and the Cult of Techno-Utopia.” It was a particularly nuanced and idea-driven conversation.
“I’ve read a couple books about Sam Bankman-Fried, but this one was different,” Dierdre said of the book. “It dives into the thought processes driving not just the behavior of Sam Bankman-Fried, but a lot of other tech elites.”
Subscribe
Yann LeCun, one of a few dozen truly elite machine learning researchers, announced on Monday that he is leaving Meta (Facebook) to found his own research firm, Advanced Machine Intelligence. LeCun has been at the top of Meta’s AI work for years, so this is a big deal.
It was no secret LeCun wasn’t happy being made subordinate to Alexander Wang, the 28 year old who joined Meta with Meta’s investment in his startup ScaleAI. LeCun just a few weeks ago publicly critiqued Wang as “inexperienced” and predicted staff departures from Meta. “You don't tell a researcher what to do," LeCun told the FT. "You certainly don't tell a researcher like me what to do.”
But more interesting is that LeCun is done wasting his time on Large Language Models and chasing AGI through pure compute scaling. “I'm sure there's a lot of people at Meta, including perhaps Alex, who would like me to not tell the world that LLMs basically are a dead end when it comes to superintelligence,” he said. Advanced Machine Intelligence will instead reportedly be focused on “World Models” built using visual data, not merely text groupings.
It’s beyond me to unpack the epochal LeCun-Gary Marcus feud, but this is certainly yet more evidence that expert consensus has converged on the idea that LLM scaling has hit its productive limits. Not just for “superintelligence,” though: it’s increasingly clear that any profitable application at all for even the most recent, high-dollar LLMs is going to be hard to find.
The Harvard Crimson reports that declining hedge fund mogul Bill Ackman has, since 2024, been funding Francesca Gino’s legal battle to rebut allegations of research fraud dating to a 2021 analysis by Harvard Business School professors. That analysis showed evidence of fraudulent data in four studies, three of which have since been retracted by their publishers. Gino was stripped of tenure and effectively fired by Harvard in May of 2025 - a huge time lag that highlights just how delicately such allegations are handled, and how rarely they lead to the ultimate sanction.
The irony is that Gino’s research focused on the social psychology of fraud, making her a fascinating counterpart to Barbara Fried and Joe Bankman, who engineered careers as ethicists and crusaders against tax evasion … then immediately became corrupt tax evaders when the opportunity presented itself.
Ackman - who previously said he “believed” Sam Bankman-Fried’s protestations of innocence - says he will continue funding Gino’s case until it goes to trial, which the Crimson says is scheduled for December of 2026.
You probably know “My Life in the Bush of Ghosts” as the title of a Talking Heads album (if you’re over 30, at least). But that name was taken from a 1954 novel by Nigerian author Amos Tutuola.
But this is nothing like the sort of misty-eyed poetry that you might expect from midcentury African fiction in English: It’s the farthest thing you can imagine from Chinua Achebe, for instance.
Instead, Tutuola is an absurdist, satirist, and surrealist, who uses disjointed, run-on sentences to tell the exact story promised by the title: the protagonist is tossed from one terrible, monstrous “ghost” to another, with as little control or understanding as any Beckett character. The tone may seem childish at first (again not unlike Beckett), but as you sink into it, it becomes one of the most truly otherworldly reading experiences available.
Having left this village to a distance of a mile this ghost magician came to me on the way, he asked me to let both of us share the gifts, but when i refused he changed to a poisonous snake, he wanted to bite me to death, so I myself used my magical power and changed to a long stick at the same moment and started to beat him repeatedly. When he felt much pain and near to die, then he changed from the snake to a great fire and burnt this stick to ashes, after that he started to burn me too. Without hesitation I myself changed to rain, so I quenched him at once.
Amos Tutuola, My Life in the Bush of Ghosts
Documentary filmmaker Valerie Vietch has stolen a march on my plan for a book about the strong lineage from eugenic thought to the goal of creating machine intelligence. Vietch’s documentary, Ghost in the Machine, is debuting at Sundance later this month, and she sat down for an interview about the project with Ariella Steinhorn at Hard Reset.
“Everything that’s being done is under the auspices of wanting to improve humanity, but there’s subtext to that whole shtick,” Vietch says, paralleling my own conclusions in Stealing the Future. “The goal really is to rank human beings on a scale and to optimize them and to create technologies that frame and order that.”
Subscribe
An update from Marketwatch describes the heartbreak of prediction market users who bet on a U.S. “invasion” of Venezuela. The platform ruled that the kidnapping of Maduro did not, in itself, constitute an invasion.
This sort of dispute about the meanings of words is inherent to the resolution of prediction markets, and seems to threaten the grander ambition, pushed by defense-industry figures including Effective Altruism ally Robin Hanson, that prediction markets can become sources of insider insight and ‘truth.’
As Marketwatch points out, Donald Trump Jr. now sits on the board of Polymarket - one specific reason the platform can’t be considered ‘objective’ in any sense. The deeper failures of prediction markets of course comes from the disconnect between market actions and traders’ true beliefs, in part thanks to the second-guessing, Keynesian Beauty Contest nature of the platforms. But that’s a topic for another day.
Palantir Neurodivergent Fellow 👊🔻🇵🇸@postcyborg
1:08 PM · Jan 6, 2026 · 80.5K Views
8 Replies · 379 Reposts · 1.77K Likes
Dark Markets is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.
Subscribe
Welcome to Dark Markets, a weekly newsletter about financial frauds, grifts, and deceptions. I’m David Z. Morris, longtime tech and finance reporter, investigator, writer, and producer. This newsletter normally appears on Tuesdays, but was pushed back this week so I could finish my recent dive into Hayden Davis and Mormon Blood Atonement.
·
Jan 5
I’ll be appearing at Codex Books in Manhattan at 7pm on January 15th, in conversation with Adam M. Lowenstein of the American Prospect. We’ll chat, I’ll have books to sign, it’ll be a great time.
I also recently sat down with Dierdre Woollard, host of New Books in Economics, to talk about “Stealing the Future: Sam Bankman-Fried, Elite Fraud, and the Cult of Techno-Utopia.” It was a particularly nuanced and idea-driven conversation.
“I’ve read a couple books about Sam Bankman-Fried, but this one was different,” Dierdre said of the book. “It dives into the thought processes driving not just the behavior of Sam Bankman-Fried, but a lot of other tech elites.”
Subscribe
Yann LeCun, one of a few dozen truly elite machine learning researchers, announced on Monday that he is leaving Meta (Facebook) to found his own research firm, Advanced Machine Intelligence. LeCun has been at the top of Meta’s AI work for years, so this is a big deal.
It was no secret LeCun wasn’t happy being made subordinate to Alexander Wang, the 28 year old who joined Meta with Meta’s investment in his startup ScaleAI. LeCun just a few weeks ago publicly critiqued Wang as “inexperienced” and predicted staff departures from Meta. “You don't tell a researcher what to do," LeCun told the FT. "You certainly don't tell a researcher like me what to do.”
But more interesting is that LeCun is done wasting his time on Large Language Models and chasing AGI through pure compute scaling. “I'm sure there's a lot of people at Meta, including perhaps Alex, who would like me to not tell the world that LLMs basically are a dead end when it comes to superintelligence,” he said. Advanced Machine Intelligence will instead reportedly be focused on “World Models” built using visual data, not merely text groupings.
It’s beyond me to unpack the epochal LeCun-Gary Marcus feud, but this is certainly yet more evidence that expert consensus has converged on the idea that LLM scaling has hit its productive limits. Not just for “superintelligence,” though: it’s increasingly clear that any profitable application at all for even the most recent, high-dollar LLMs is going to be hard to find.
The Harvard Crimson reports that declining hedge fund mogul Bill Ackman has, since 2024, been funding Francesca Gino’s legal battle to rebut allegations of research fraud dating to a 2021 analysis by Harvard Business School professors. That analysis showed evidence of fraudulent data in four studies, three of which have since been retracted by their publishers. Gino was stripped of tenure and effectively fired by Harvard in May of 2025 - a huge time lag that highlights just how delicately such allegations are handled, and how rarely they lead to the ultimate sanction.
The irony is that Gino’s research focused on the social psychology of fraud, making her a fascinating counterpart to Barbara Fried and Joe Bankman, who engineered careers as ethicists and crusaders against tax evasion … then immediately became corrupt tax evaders when the opportunity presented itself.
Ackman - who previously said he “believed” Sam Bankman-Fried’s protestations of innocence - says he will continue funding Gino’s case until it goes to trial, which the Crimson says is scheduled for December of 2026.
You probably know “My Life in the Bush of Ghosts” as the title of a Talking Heads album (if you’re over 30, at least). But that name was taken from a 1954 novel by Nigerian author Amos Tutuola.
But this is nothing like the sort of misty-eyed poetry that you might expect from midcentury African fiction in English: It’s the farthest thing you can imagine from Chinua Achebe, for instance.
Instead, Tutuola is an absurdist, satirist, and surrealist, who uses disjointed, run-on sentences to tell the exact story promised by the title: the protagonist is tossed from one terrible, monstrous “ghost” to another, with as little control or understanding as any Beckett character. The tone may seem childish at first (again not unlike Beckett), but as you sink into it, it becomes one of the most truly otherworldly reading experiences available.
Having left this village to a distance of a mile this ghost magician came to me on the way, he asked me to let both of us share the gifts, but when i refused he changed to a poisonous snake, he wanted to bite me to death, so I myself used my magical power and changed to a long stick at the same moment and started to beat him repeatedly. When he felt much pain and near to die, then he changed from the snake to a great fire and burnt this stick to ashes, after that he started to burn me too. Without hesitation I myself changed to rain, so I quenched him at once.
Amos Tutuola, My Life in the Bush of Ghosts
Documentary filmmaker Valerie Vietch has stolen a march on my plan for a book about the strong lineage from eugenic thought to the goal of creating machine intelligence. Vietch’s documentary, Ghost in the Machine, is debuting at Sundance later this month, and she sat down for an interview about the project with Ariella Steinhorn at Hard Reset.
“Everything that’s being done is under the auspices of wanting to improve humanity, but there’s subtext to that whole shtick,” Vietch says, paralleling my own conclusions in Stealing the Future. “The goal really is to rank human beings on a scale and to optimize them and to create technologies that frame and order that.”
Subscribe
An update from Marketwatch describes the heartbreak of prediction market users who bet on a U.S. “invasion” of Venezuela. The platform ruled that the kidnapping of Maduro did not, in itself, constitute an invasion.
This sort of dispute about the meanings of words is inherent to the resolution of prediction markets, and seems to threaten the grander ambition, pushed by defense-industry figures including Effective Altruism ally Robin Hanson, that prediction markets can become sources of insider insight and ‘truth.’
As Marketwatch points out, Donald Trump Jr. now sits on the board of Polymarket - one specific reason the platform can’t be considered ‘objective’ in any sense. The deeper failures of prediction markets of course comes from the disconnect between market actions and traders’ true beliefs, in part thanks to the second-guessing, Keynesian Beauty Contest nature of the platforms. But that’s a topic for another day.
Palantir Neurodivergent Fellow 👊🔻🇵🇸@postcyborg
1:08 PM · Jan 6, 2026 · 80.5K Views
8 Replies · 379 Reposts · 1.77K Likes
Dark Markets is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.
Subscribe
Dark Markets👁️ Bullish and EOS: “A Fraud in Plain Sight”
The team behind Bullish brutally rugpulled their earliest investors. They'll do the same to public markets.
Dark Markets👁️ The Metaverse is On Its Last Legs
Say goodbye to the Previous Thing. Also: Salesforce gets f*cked by AI, Tesla's Roadster scam, and more.
Dark MarketsThe Mormon Manson and the $Libra Fraud, Pt. 2: Hayden Davis' Family Murder Cult Was All About Money
The $Libra scammer's great-grandfather built a lasting empire of fraud, extortion, and theft, enforced by murder, brainwashing ... and elite government connections.
Dark Markets👁️ Bullish and EOS: “A Fraud in Plain Sight”
The team behind Bullish brutally rugpulled their earliest investors. They'll do the same to public markets.
Dark Markets👁️ The Metaverse is On Its Last Legs
Say goodbye to the Previous Thing. Also: Salesforce gets f*cked by AI, Tesla's Roadster scam, and more.
Dark MarketsThe Mormon Manson and the $Libra Fraud, Pt. 2: Hayden Davis' Family Murder Cult Was All About Money
The $Libra scammer's great-grandfather built a lasting empire of fraud, extortion, and theft, enforced by murder, brainwashing ... and elite government connections.
Dark Markets is a newsletter about technology fraud - not just financial chicanery, but also ideological manipulation and misleading technical hype. Author David Z. Morris is a longtime financial fraud investigator and crypto pioneer. In 2013 while writing for Fortune, he became one of the first reporters to ever cover cryptocurrency in a mainstream publication.
Dark Markets is a newsletter about technology fraud - not just financial chicanery, but also ideological manipulation and misleading technical hype. Author David Z. Morris is a longtime financial fraud investigator and crypto pioneer. In 2013 while writing for Fortune, he became one of the first reporters to ever cover cryptocurrency in a mainstream publication.
Share Dialog
Share Dialog
Subscribe to Dark Markets
Subscribe to Dark Markets
Dark Markets
Dark Markets
<100 subscribers
<100 subscribers
No activity yet