Seth Meyers
Seth Meyers looked into the billion-dollar collapse of crypto exchange FTX on Wednesday evening, following the arrest of founder and CEO Sam Bankman-Fried in the Bahamas on Monday. Bankman-Fried (also known as SBF), “a guy who looks the way Cheeto dust smells”, Meyers joked, is charged with defrauding customers out of billions of dollars in a massive years-long fraud.
“Oh, are billions of dollars missing? Have you checked the fanny pack where his weed dealer keeps all his tips?” Meyers said, referring to SBF’s standard appearance of T-shirt, cargo shorts and unkempt hair.
“I can’t believe this guy thought he could hide out in the Bahamas,” Meyers said. “Usually when you think of international fugitive, you imagine a stylish jewel thief, not a guy in a T-shirt that clearly came out of a cannon at a basketball game. Dude was supposed to be a billionaire but he looks like he was thrown naked into a Goodwill and given 90 seconds to get dressed.”
Meyers marveled at the staggering financial mismanagement of FTX: John Ray III, the man brought in to clean up FTX after its bankruptcy filing, said never in his career had he seen “such a complete failure of corporate controls and such complete absence of trustworthy financial information”.
Ray, who also took over Enron after its collapse in 2001, believed FTX fell apart because a “very small group of grossly inexperienced and unsophisticated individuals” running the company “failed to implement virtually any of the systems or controls” required to handle people’s money.
“You know it’s bad when even the guy who had to clean up the Enron scandal is horrified,” said Meyers. “The only way this could get any worse is if you found out, I don’t know, one of the key proponents of the Iraq war was somehow connected to …oh,” he added over a photo of Bankman-Fried at a conference with Tony Blair.
“Why did it take until now for someone to figure out that this dude was grossly inexperienced and unsophisticated?” he wondered. “Wasn’t it nice when con artists put a little more thought into their outfits?”
Stephen Colbert
On the Late Show, Stephen Colbert examined a new poll which found that in a hypothetical primary, Republican voters preferred Ron DeSantis to Donald Trump, 52% to 38%. “It’s hard to know who to root for here,” he said. “It’s like a poll between gonorrhea and a slightly more racist gonorrhea.
“With the insurrections and the Hitler dinners, only the most conservative are still backing the ex-president, while DeSantis is trouncing him with voters who consider themselves only ‘somewhat’ conservative,” Colbert explained. “Basically, the folks who don’t support gay marriage, but think Andy Cohen does a great job handling those housewives.”
“So to take full command of the GOP, all DeSantis has to do is reel in the coveted conservative demographic of angry conspiracy QAnon all-meat diet tan your testicle boys,” he added. And the Florida governor’s “opening offer” to that crowd was calling for a grand jury investigation of Covid vaccines.
“You stupid mother-Pfizer,” said Colbert. “You want an investigation? Let me save you some time and money: in the US alone, the Covid vaccines have saved more than 3 million lives and helped prevent 18.5 million hospitalizations.”
“And because idiots in your party politicized the vaccine, almost twice as many Republicans died from Covid before the midterms than the Democrats. Y’all killed your own voters!”
Colbert played a montage of footage in which DeSantis encouraged Floridians to get vaccines, testifying to their safety. “That’s evidence right there that it causes genetic side effects,” the host noted. “Because this guy used to promote the vaccine, but once he got it, he turned into a huge dick bag.”
Jimmy Kimmel
And in Los Angeles, Jimmy Kimmel mocked Trump’s latest attempt to salvage an already faltering 2024 presidential campaign. “He got a premature election and now he’s desperate to shift attention away from his waning popularity,” the host explained.
On Wednesday, “rant-a-claus” posted on Truth Social that he would make a “major” announcement the following day. “The tan-of-steel posted ‘AMERICA NEEDS A SUPERHERO’” Kimmel laughed. “What could it be? Maybe he got liposuction? Maybe Eric learned to tie his shoes? Who knows?”
In other news, newly Elon Musk-owned Twitter reportedly hasn’t paid rent on its offices for weeks. “Of all the problems I would’ve guessed the second richest man in the world would have, paying rent wasn’t one of them,” Kimmel said. “Maybe he should change the name from Twitter to Squatter. Maybe he finally read the Art of the Deal and now he’s doing it Trump style.”
