It’ll always be sunny in cell block B, after former Theranos COO Ramesh “Sunny” Balwani was sentenced to 13 years in prison by a California court yesterday. Balwani and founder Elizabeth Holmes ran Theranos, a blood testing hardware company, despite the technology not actually existing. That didn’t stop the pair from lying about it and spending billions of dollars of investor money, and much worse, misdiagnosing hundreds of unsuspecting victims. There is so much to dive into with the story, but if you’re wondering whether Balwani deserves jail time, just give ‘Bad Blood’ a read.

Would you like to sponsor Balance Sheet? We're forging partnerships for 2023 and would love to work with some of the thousands of subscribers we have! Reach out at [email protected]

The lowdown

• 📹 Amazon has launched its latest TikTok competitor, Inspire, a shopping feed that supports both photos and videos.

• ☁️ The Pentagon announced Wednesday that Amazon, Google, Microsoft and Oracle received a cloud-computing contract worth up to $9 billion total through 2028.

• 🛢️China is paying the deepest discounts in months for Russian crude oil, amid weak demand and poor refining margins.

Featured Stories

FTX’s bankruptcy lawyers face the feds

We’ve all had our fill of FTX stories by now, but there appears to be no end in sight to the drama – at least for the company itself. Founder Sam Bankman-Fried could still find himself going somewhere prison-shaped soon. 

Back to the broader picture though, lawyers from the failed crypto exchange – which oversaw $51 billion in lost collateral – have met with Manhattan federal prosecutors, who are investigating the defunct company’s litany of fraud accusations. 

FTX’s string of issues continue to plague the wider crypto market as more and more critics come out to slam SBF and his firm’s failings. The latest of which includes Canadian finance celeb Kevin O’Leary, who labeled FTX “not a good investment”. 

Talk about an understatement. 

Even more outlandish were the rumors which emerged yesterday that SBF pursued a sponsorship deal with 11-time Grammy winner Taylor Swift. The deal would have reportedly cost the business in excess of $100 million – which they do not have, in case that wasn’t obvious yet. 

FTX has caused irreparable damage to the crypto industry as a whole. The implosion has hobbled liquidity at firms with exposure to what was once one of the world's biggest crypto exchanges and prompted investigations by regulators in several countries.

Perhaps it’s a good thing, then, that FTX’s lawyers – which include former SEC enforcement director Steve Peikin and former Manhattan federal prosecutor Nicole Friedlander – are cooperating with the feds. 

After all, any business willing to splash $100 million on Taylor Swift needs to be stopped.

The content we're consuming today

• The Economist: Investing in an era of higher interest rates and scarcer capital ($)

• TechCrunch: Schrödinger’s blue check: according to Twitter, I may or may not be notable

Off-balance sheet items

• Given how we kicked off today’s newsletter – and that you’ll have all weekend to binge it – we’re going to big up one of the best pieces of television this year: The Dropout. This dramatization from Hulu (owned by Disney), provides the compelling performance of Amanda Seyfried as the Theranos founder and scammer, Elizabeth Holmes. If you haven’t seen it yet, make sure to do so.

The bottom line