The Shearing of Sam Bankman-Fried

Imagine if Sam Bankman-Fried, the founder of the crypto trading firm FTX and defendant in one of the largest financial fraud trials in history, was actually named Samson, rather than Samuel. Like the biblical character, Mr. Bankman-Fried’s symbolic shearing for his courtroom appearance may become a fabled reflection of promise brought low in the tales to come of our digital age.

As Mr. Bankman-Fried took the stand on Friday in federal court in Manhattan to begin testifying in his own defense — to explain his actions as having been made in good faith, even if they had bad results — it was hard not to think that his newly cropped do, created by a fellow jail inmate, according to a person familiar with the situation, and paired with a subdued gray suit, white shirt and purple tie, wasn’t just a dress code choice, but a metaphor. An apologia writ in hair about what happens when a muscular intellect is married to frail corporate governance.

Why not? Everyone (or every juror) can see a hairdo and relate. Cryptocurrency, not so much.

Besides, from the beginning it was by Mr. Bankman-Fried’s hair that so many knew him. The wild halo of dark curls that looked as if it had never met a brush and, according to Michael Lewis in “Going Infinite,” his new book about Mr. Bankman-Fried and FTX, resembled “the hairdo of a lunatic.” The hair that suggested Einstein, electric sockets and some sort of giant brain underneath.

The hair that, along with the wrinkled cargo shorts and T-shirts that were Mr. Bankman-Fried’s everyday uniform, suggested “the ultimate billionaire white boy tech flex: I’m so above convention,” as Scott Galloway, an investor, podcast host and professor of marketing, once told The New York Times.

The hair that played into all of our subconscious associations about tech world geniuses whose move-fast-and-break-things ethos could not be constrained by old rules about personal hygiene and professional wardrobe because … hey! they clearly knew things we do not.