Jane Street Boss Says He Was Duped into Funding AK-47s for Coup
60 comments
·June 25, 2025sgt
throwaway89201
Regrettably, the same cannot be said about the comment section [1].
max_
"I was lied to" — Jane Street Boss.
This sounds very suspicious.
So Jane Street, a large commodity derivatives trader has no interest in an oil rich South Sudan?
They just wanted to finance the "human rights"
readthenotes1
" Harvard Fellow and another activist allegedly wanted to buy AK-47s, Stinger missiles and grenades to topple South Sudan’s government."
Reminds me of:
"In every disaster throughout American history, there always seems to be a man from Harvard in the middle of it."
dsq
Aren't they supposed to be the smartest of all quant firms?
QuadmasterXLII
There’s a pretty narrow band of intelligences in quant: any dumber and you can’t make 400k a year playing games for children, any smarter and you start to be able to make 400k a year curing disease or building a reusable rocket or any number of other actually interesting jobs.
graemep
> any smarter and you start to be able to make 400k a year curing disease or building a reusable rocket or any number of other actually interesting jobs.
A co-founder of something like Jane Street must be making a great deal more than $400k/year. Its probably small change for him.
You cannot make that much money doing those "interesting jobs". You might by financing and employing the people doing them.
A smart person going into finance will definitely make a lot more money than that same person going into another field. Going into finance from an "interesting" field has made a lot people rich: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jim_Simons
jghn
I interpreted the comment as saying someone sufficiently smart would really that maximizing income isn't the optimal path in life, and instead would apply their brains towards higher pursuits. But perhaps I'm wrong.
PaulHoule
You might get paid $100M from Meta to not work on LLMs for OpenAI!
raverbashing
Yes, a co-founder. Not your average quant
null
dguest
Which people curing diseases are making 400k a year? If you're talking about academic research I'd expect around 300k to be the high end.
jghn
It's not hard to get above 400k TC in big pharma
throwanem
If we're going to talk about it in terms like these, what does it say about the evolution of this our own field since that was colonized by finance beginning around 2000?
QuadmasterXLII
Facebook, palantir and bitcoin, pretty dire tbh
corimaith
Man can we do sway with the notion that competence in one area translates to another?
Being able to identify market arbitrage has little to do with biology and rocket science, and smart people are already working on such problems with the limitations of current fields well known. Throwing "smart” people at solving cancer isn't going to magically solve cancer.
Barrin92
it's not even about intelligence as much as it is about the background of these people. A lot of them are gifted kids coming out of academic households, prep schools and ivy league colleges and quite a few are on the spectrum.
When people were confused why Sam Bankman Fried behaved as stupidly as he did and thought this was all an act, no they genuinely are like overgrown kids who don't know what guile is, they couldn't survive in a rough neighborhood of New York let alone deal with South Sudanese arms dealers.
lesuorac
I don't think anything hardware related is reliably 400k out of college unless you're self-employed.
QuadmasterXLII
big unless!
cyanydeez
Any smarter and you have moral problems with social cannibalism.
There is a band, but whats termed intelligence.
IIAOPSW
well, normal stupid doesn't get duped into funding AK47s for a coup. It takes brilliance to be this stupid.
JohnFen
Being competent in one specialty does not mean you're competent outside of that specialty.
BoxFour
Smart people can be deceived too. Without devolving the conversation into semantics, Garry Kasparov is also someone we would consider to be “smart” by many definitions.
sam_lowry_
Smart in chess.
But he said and did lots of embarassing things.
I guess that's part of the definition of genius.
oersted
I'm missing something, what's wrong with Kasparov? I've done some searching but didn't find much I'd consider significant...
EDIT: My bad, I didn't realize he was part of the article, didn't take the time to deal with the paywall.
feralsandwich
If you feel you're missing something in a discussion centered around a news article, skimming the news article often helps.
darepublic
IIRC He believes in this quack theory of history: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_chronology_(Fomenko)
vulcan01
> The lawyers accused authorities of selectively prosecuting two Black men, even though support also came from Granieri and Garry Kasparov, the chess champion and prominent Russian dissident. The US hasn’t accused either of them of wrongdoing.
From TFA (emphasis mine)
dismalaf
Read the article, he's involved in this...
Der_Einzige
You're thinking of RenTec.
jackthetab
So I hear. And we all know smart/rich people can never be duped or make a mistake outside their areas of expertise. /s
londons_explore
This sort of behaviour is okay if it's the CIA, but if a private citizen tries the same, direct to prison!
null
mindvirus
Happens to the best of us.
dismalaf
Pretty wild story. And not going to lie, as someone who did an economics degree myself (never worked as an "economist" though) I have a bit of sympathy. No one listens to economists, then blames them for not being able to fix things (since no one listens to them), it's a cycle that makes you cynical enough to want to simply overthrow everyone else and become a dictator lol...
windex
Jane Street was caught manipulating the India derivates market recently.
chollida1
Allegedly. And if you read anything about the case its clearly in a very gray area.
Their actions are what you'd expect any firm to do to hedge their exposure. Its just that they were so large and the Indian stock market is relatively so small that they're hedging moved the market.
So the question is, was their market moving hedging actual market manipulation or was it just the same thing every other quant firm would do in the same situation to hedge out their option exposure?
https://libgen.li/edition.php?id=151275376
Here's a decent description of the issue.
thehappyfellow
Thank you, this makes much more sense and it's a classic issue Matt Levine's readers will be familiar with.
Allegedly being investigated is also quite far from "been manipulating markets", I appreciate the clarification.
Etheryte
Also, the absolutely hilarious fact that Jane Street lawyers were instructed not to say the country's name out loud in court to protect trade secrets, yet they utterly failed to do so on multiple occasions.
coliveira
This and what the article refers to are just two examples of the kind of thing this company considers to be their "business". For another example, Sam Bankman-Fried and his helper Caroline Ellison came from there. They're always looking for schemes to add billions to their accounts, morality be damned.
thehappyfellow
source?
ing33k
SEBI’s investigation into Jane Street is ongoing.
Sources:
https://www.reuters.com/sustainability/boards-policy-regulat...
https://www.business-standard.com/finance/news/explained-jan...
https://www.outlookbusiness.com/markets/jane-street-under-se...
https://www.rediff.com/business/report/why-is-sebi-probing-a...
dbu21
JS is being investigated.
https://www.reuters.com/sustainability/boards-policy-regulat...
ironyman
paywall: https://archive.is/lowX3
cryptodan
These are cheap and arent really known for being accurate. Pretty much spray and pray.
more_corn
I find it strange that one would come to the US to buy AK-47s. There’s only one party in the US that has those in quantity. I think these guys knew they were buying from the US government, they just thought they were buying with permission.
wewewedxfgdf
Pretty sure they are the biggest Ocaml company.
A Jane Street article on HN not mentioning OCaml. A true miracle!