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Michael Kives, the human superconnector



The business section of  The New York Times had a fascinating profile of Michael Kines on June 24.

"Michael who?" 

Indeed. A lot of people will react that way. But attention falls on Michael Kines because of the upcoming trial of Sam Bankman-Fried, which I have discussed here. High Profile Trials to Watch for in 2023: Part One (jamesian58.blogspot.com) 

Bankman-Fried is to FTX what Ken Lay was to Enron and what Bernie Madoff was to Madoff Investment Securities. People, including prosecutors, have unsurprisingly become very curious about Bankman-Fried's social/business networking. This brings us back to Kines. 

Kines was a typical southern California schmoozer, show biz adjacent. He parlayed a brief period working for former President Bill Clinton into success as a Hollywood agent (in which capacity he apparently got to know everybody in that world, including Leonardo DiCaprio, Orlando Bloom, Larry David, etc.). From that he moved into another status position -- the co-founder and public face of a venture capital firm, K5 Global. As such, he built connections with power circles beyond the Hollywood set and/or Clintonian power circles: Warren Buffett, Nelson Peltz, got onto his speed dial list.  

He also came to know Bankman-Fried, and they made a deal. Bankman-Fried invested $700 million in K5. In return, K5 steered other people and their money to FTX. Heck, it was Kines who made the introduction of Bankman-Fried to Larry Fink of BlackRock and Yasir al-Rumayyan, of the Public Investment Fund of Saudi Arabia.     

So ... in answer to your question, the profile is of THAT Michael Kines.

What I cannot divine from the profile, though, is whether the reporters believe Kines is in some trouble. Sometimes the enablers of fraudsters walk away scot free. Sometimes they pay a  price. We shall have to follow this one.   

Here is the story:  The Super Connector Who Built Sam Bankman-Fried’s Celebrity World - The New York Times (nytimes.com)


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  1. HenryJuly 4, 2023 at 4:46 AM

    Christopher, your use of "scot free" made me curious about the origin of the term. The Encyclopedia of Word and Phrase Origins states, "A scot or sceot was a municipal tax in 12th-century England and someone who went scot free was one who succeeded in dodging these taxes. Later the term was given wider currency when scot was used to mean the amount that one owed for entertainment, including drinks, in a tavern -- anyone who had a drink on the house went scot-free."

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    1. ChristopherJuly 5, 2023 at 5:00 AM

      Thanks. If forced to guess, I would have hypothesized that the phrase originated in English calumny about the Scots being cheapskates. Glad to learn I would have been wrong.

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