I thought it was just so they could get due diligence info on their chief competitor and then back out.

The exposed their main competitors lies about solvency without spending anything.

I fully expect CZ to say that the hole was too big and that customers are now suffering due to FTXs recklessness

yeah didn't they precipitate the crash by posting that they were doing thing similar to Luna, and then once the thing is crashing they say they'll buy it, and now they might not even buy it, I'm sure there's a lot of shit going on lol

More than that. Their first move was cutting trading fees, which made FTT worthless (it was useful before for traders to use to reduce their trading fees but with free trading on Binance that became worthless). After Binance made FTT worthless, they then started to sell theirs off (knowing that it's worthless because it's a race to low/free fees). A bank run would have been inevitable anyway as large traders would rationally sell their FTT and move over to Binance for free trading (they pay zero fees and can pocket the money they can get from their FTT). CZ's tweet just accelerated things.

Cutting trading fees did not make FTT worthless

It might have won over some volume but it's not like FTXs volume dropped to zero overnight because of it

As far as I know, Binance is doing just fine (for now). The bailout was an attempt to take over a large competitor for pennies on the dollar.

Binance is almost certainly facing the same situation as FTX, just without the bank run. They're leveraged to the teeth with tether, which they similarly treat as a crypto leverage flywheel.

Binance just has first mover advantage; as a result of inventing this "my coin can just be printed forever" crypto exchange model, they have more use and $$ which gives them a better cushion. But it's still only a cushion.

As far as everyone knew FTX was doing fine until a few days ago. Binance is inevitably going to follow a similar path. If you're using a currency/holding as leverage that can go to $0 overnight, you're far from in a good position.

how does assuming billions in your insolvent competitor's liability protect you? what's the upside?

or they can't survive with them...

I think cz basically has sbf trapped. I don't even think anyone else can come and save them even if they wanted to cause binance has so much ftt. The moment whoever leaked to coindesk that Alameda was propped up entirely by ftt they were screwed