There was no mistaking the story that the tech world was fixated on this week. Sam Bankman-Fried, co-founder of FTX Trading Ltd., was found guilty on all seven counts in his federal trial on fraud and conspiracy charges.

Industry analysts John Furrier (pictured, left) and Dave Vellante (right) discussed that story and much more on the latest episode of theCUBE Podcast. Bankman-Fried’s downfall represented a “landmark” fraud case, according to Furrier.

“This guy is a total thief. It took literally record time, no deliberation, done, guilty as charged, no defense,” he said. “That’s done, in the books. Finally. He got lucky, too, by the way. The press could have been more on this, but with the Israeli war and all the other distractions, he got away easy by not being totally publicly fleeced on this.”

The tech world will be closely watching to see what Bankman-Fried’s sentencing ends up looking like. Meanwhile, in more heartening tech news, The Beatles released an AI-enhanced song, something Furrier said represented the coolest development of the week.

“It’s just a remarkable story of archeology, around musical archaeology, the creativity, The Beatles, the shared fascination with technology,” he said. “If [Steve] Jobs were alive, he’d be totally stoked because he loved The Beatles. It really marks the completion of the last recording that John, Paul, George and Ringo did together.”

Reflections on earnings

Earnings season is in full swing, and there were some notable developments this year. There were some winners among cloud players, with Shopify Inc. and JFrog Ltd. both up, among others. But what was most notable to Vellante was earnings from Microsoft Corp.

“Other than Nvidia, nobody’s really come out and said, ‘We have generative AI revenue,’” Vellante said. “Microsoft said it was a 300-basis-point tailwind, so 3% point incremental tailwind to Azure revenues.”

Microsoft’s Copilot on Microsoft 365 has been pretty impressive so far, according to Vellante. It is helping when it comes to drafting notes and setting things up in Excel which used to be very complicated.

The personal information space is really important, according to Furrier. Undoubtedly, the technology is going to help people work with documents much more effectively.

“AI-driven personal assistants, it’s going to be a big deal,” he said. “That’s going to be an instant low-hanging fruit. Those chatbots that were lame will become better.”

A rant on the SEC

Another big piece of news out of the technology world this week involved the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission suing SolarWinds Corp. and its Chief Information Security Officer Timothy Brown for fraud, tied to the hack of the company that was first disclosed in December 2020. That move was unbelievable and unprecedented, according to Furrier.

“By the way, why the CISO? Why not the data engineers, why not everybody? And by the way, it was a part of the company,” he said. “They’re not really the government; it’s in the private sector. So, this just creates massive problems.”

There was no fraud involved here, but instead a hack. Maybe a company has operational challenges, but such a move opens a big can of worms, according to Furrier.

“By the way, every company in security has to hire their own ‘militia’ to defend their companies from cyber warfare,” Furrier said. “We’ve been talking about this in the podcast. I’ve been ranting. Everyone who knows me, knows I’ve been ranting, howling at the moon for over a decade. Every company has to defend themselves against foreign adversaries fighting a digital war, cyber war that our government is letting happen.”

What’s even worse now is that the government is now flipping itself on its own people and companies, according to Furrier. It opens a lot of questions, especially considering who the government is targeting.

“It makes no sense to me. If there’s some smoking gun in there, yeah. Maybe he was complicit in it. I don’t know,” he said. “But based on what I know and can see from our reporting, he was just the CISO who didn’t patch it. OK. He missed the patch. All right. He ignored the flaw. But what does that mean? He misled the public. Are you kidding me? Companies go out of business when they get hacked. He misled the public. It’s not his job to be public relations.”

Watch the full podcast below to find out why these industry pros were mentioned:

Sam Bankman-Fried, former CEO of FTX
Joe Biden, 46th president of the United States
Andrew Ng, founder and chairman at Coursera
Dustin Kirkland, experienced engineer, product manager, executive and advisor
Timothy G. Brown, VP of security and CISO of SolarWinds
John Lennon, guitarist for The Beatles
Paul McCartney, bass guitarist for The Beatles
George Harrison, guitarist for The Beatles
Ringo Starr, drummer for The Beatles
Chris Yeh, funding partner at Blitzscaling Ventures
Jeremiah Owyang, general partner at Blitzscaling Ventures
Bob O’Donnell, president, founder and chief analyst at TECHnalysis Research
Rob Strechay, managing analyst at SiliconANGLE Media
Kelsey Hightower, software engineer and developer
Matt Baker, SVP of AI strategy for Dell Technologies
Vikram Joshi, founder, president and CTO of Compute.AI
Sam Burd, president for client solutions group at Dell Technologies
Adam Selipsky, CEO of Amazon Web Services
Reggie Townsend, VP of data ethics at SAS
Stanley Druckenmiller, investor and philanthropist
Janet Yellen, Secretary of the Treasury for the U.S.

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Photo: SiliconANGLE