(I suppose you could have used the loan to buy more bitcoin, which I assume is what Naka did -- what else are they gonna spend $165 million on? -- but this seems like a somewhat poor way to go about it.

they/he certainly did, at the exact top of the hubris. So yea... if you leverage yourself at 8% interest and go long on an asset that then drops 50% and stays there, yeah, I mean you're pretty fuuuucke.d