And somewhere on a hard drive, svb_bloodbait.txt remains the perfect tombstone for the first bank killed by a group chat.
By 10:00 AM, the FDIC arrived to seize the bank. The Pastebin post ends with a single line of code from a terminated engineer: system.out.println("Game over. SVB has $0.00 left."); site%3apastebin.com+silicon+valley+bank
An anonymous employee dumps 47 pages of internal Slack logs and risk management dashboards onto Pastebin. The file is named svb_bloodbait.txt . Part 1: The Champagne Era (The Context) And somewhere on a hard drive, svb_bloodbait
The most damaging piece of the Pastebin leak is the . On the morning of March 10, he had a 9:00 AM call with his executive team. SVB has $0
Fast forward to March 8, 2023. The Fed had been raising rates like a sledgehammer. SVB’s bond portfolio—bought when rates were zero—was now worth 20% less than face value. The leak reveals a panicked 2:00 AM internal memo: "We need to sell $21 billion in available-for-sale securities. We will take a $1.8 billion loss. Do not tell the VCs yet."
By 6:00 AM on March 9, CEO Greg Becker was on a call. He told investors, "We have ample liquidity. Don't panic."
Six months earlier, SVB was the cool kid in finance. They held over in deposits. Every VC on Sand Hill Road sent their founders there. The Pastebin logs show a typical Thursday: happy hour tickets on Slack, emoji reactions to "another unicorn IPO," and a risk analyst casually noting, "We are over-concentrated in long-duration treasuries."