We're at that point in the economic cycle when so-called business heroes who built fortunes on mastery of the technological future suddenly seem as clueless as the rest of us, Matt writes.

Why it matters: It underscores the fact that even the tech celebrities who dominate the world economy today owe some of their success to the remarkable supportive market conditions that prevailed over the last decade.

Driving the news: Sam Bankman-Fried, the casually unkempt crypto billionaire, announced yesterday that he had sought a hurried investment from a rival after his crypto exchange, FTX, had for hours been failing to allow users to withdraw assets.

• The saga — outlined by our Axios Crypto colleagues — essentially boils down to the fact FTX didn't seem to have the funds it needed to have, amid a massive wave of withdrawals.
• In the non-crypto financial world, this would seem to basically be a kind of bank run followed by a financial rescue, coming less than a day after Bankman-Fried wrote: "A competitor is trying to go after us with false rumors. FTX is fine."
• Bankman-Fried says that FTX.us, the company's U.S.-regulated arm, has not been affected by these issues.

Yes, but: In the less-than-fully-transparent world of crypto, we'll have to just wait and see if any worrisome aftershocks emerge from Bankman-Fried's struggles.

• "It’s neither a public company nor regulated like a bank or broker, we just don’t know what the risks are,” said Tyler Gellasch, president and CEO of the Healthy Markets Association, an investor trade group, in an interview.

The big picture: SBF, as Bankman-Fried is widely known, is not the only lionized tech billionaire to find himself looking like less than a genius lately.

• Facebook (sorry, Meta!) founder Mark Zuckerberg has presided over the immolation of roughly $800 billion in market value over the last year, thanks in part, to his fixation on building a parallel universe of virtual and augmented reality products no one seems to want.
• Then there's Elon Musk, whose persona as a preternaturally gifted technologist has taken a hit after he massively overpaid for Twitter, failed to get out of the deal, laid off half its staff, and all while floundering around for ideas about what to do, and watching advertisers flee. (Tesla's market value has shrunk by roughly $600 billion in 2022.)

💭 Our thought bubble: In our culture — and the business press — it's always fun to tell stories about boyish tech billionaires who break the rules, disrupt industries and rocket to untold riches. But there's something much more boring going on in the background that explains a lot of their financial success in recent years: interest rates.

• As we write about often, low-interest rates tend to make so-called growth companies, typically speculative technology or biotech firms, look especially attractive.

The bottom line: The return of inflation and the rapidly rising interest rates are changing the storyline, exposing the fact that when market conditions change it can make even the savviest tech billionaire look bad.

⬇️ TikTok slashes global revenue targets by at least $2 billion. (FT)

🇪🇺 EU says U.S. Inflation Reduction Act violates international trade rules. (CNBC)

🚘 Musk sells $3.95 billion of Tesla shares. (Axios)

Crypto Winter has another victim. FTX's exchange token, FTT, is now worth almost nothing, Axios' Kate Marino writes.

Why it matters: A surge of withdrawals of the coin exposed FTX's liquidity problems — and in the blink of an eye, FTX was being rescued by its larger rival, Binance.

How it works: Think of FTT as FTX's "house brand" coin, created to facilitate trading on the exchange. FTT holders got discounts on trading and an opportunity to share in the exchange's revenue.

• FTT's price was over $80 last September, but more recently had been steady in the mid-$20 area.

What happened: The selling rush was triggered at least in part by Binance CEO Changpeng Zhao's statement on Sunday that Binance would unload its holdings of the coin.

• That came after a CoinDesk report suggested that the solvency of FTX's sister firm, Alameda Research, was over-reliant on FTT, as Axios Crypto wrote yesterday.

💭 Our thought bubble, via Axios' Felix Salmon: It's still too early to tell whether the downfall of FTX looks more like LTCM or Enron or Bear Stearns or WaMu or MF Global. Probably it contains a little bit of all of them.

• What it doesn't look like is Madoff. There's no shortage of Ponzis in the crypto world, but there's zero evidence that FTX was one of them.

The intrigue: FTX founder and CEO, Sam Bankman-Fried (SBF for short), was until this week known as the lender of last resort for failing crypto companies — think BlockFi, Celsius and Voyager Digital.

• Now: SBF got SBF'd, as Bloomberg's Matt Levine put it.

What's next: Binance says it'll acquire FTX ... subject to due diligence. So, who really knows?

Subscribe to Axios Crypto for more on this later today.

Binance and FTX were, until yesterday, the two giants of the crypto-exchange world, just as Walter Isaacson and Michael Lewis are the reigning giants when it comes to chronicling the business world, Axios' Felix Salmon writes.

The intrigue: Isaacson, whose next book will be on Elon Musk, looked as though he had managed to nab the best possible subject. But Lewis might have just done him one better — he's been following SBF, and we just witnessed a third-act twist that surely guarantees him bestseller status.

• You tell us: Which book do you think will sell more copies? Isaacson on Musk, or Lewis on SBF and FTX?

It'll take more time before we learn all the details on Sam Bankman-Fried's losses, but early estimates put them at, well, massive.

Bloomberg is assuming both FTX and Alameda will be "wiped out" by Binance's bailout.

• "That leaves SBF’s net worth at about $1 billion, down from $15.6 billion heading into Tuesday," Bloomberg estimates. "The 94% loss is the biggest one-day collapse ever among billionaires tracked by Bloomberg."