From GE to FTX, beware the Icarus complex

It is hard to think of two more different firms than GE, a once-exalted symbol of American inventiveness, and FTX, a Bahamas-based fly-by-night crypto exchange. Besides high-pitched voices, it is hard to think of two people with less in common than the late Jack Welch, GE’s legendary former CEO, and Sam Bankman-Fried, FTX’s disgraced founder. The former, son of working-class parents, was fiendishly competitive about profits, had a frat-boy approach to life, and was as much at home on a golf course as he was on the factory floor. The latter, son of Stanford law professors, is scruffy, nerdy, a player of “League of Legends”, and claims to be motivated to make money only so that he can give it away.