Sam Bankman-Fried (SBF) told DealBook’s Andrew Ross Sorkin on Wednesday that he screwed up, but did nothing wrong. “I had a bad month,” and am down to may last $100,000.
Key Details
- SBF admitted that he “screwed up” and made major mistakes as CEO of FTX. There should have been more focus on risk management and protecting customers.
- He should have paid more attention to the interconnectedness between FTX and Alameda Research, which he had major ownership in, over the past year.
- The FTX founder and onetime billionaire says he “didn’t ever try to commit fraud.” He is talking out to try to make right for the investors who lost money.
- SBF told Sorkin that he’s now down to one credit card and $100,000 in the bank. Some reports show that he had been worth $26 billion.
- He says that he spent thousands of hours meeting with regulators about getting approval for FTX—and that he does not think there was under-regulation.
- He believes that some customers, particularly those at FTX U.S., which is distinct from the international arm, could get their money back, but he says: “I can’t promise anyone anything.”
- FTX and associated businesses filed for bankruptcy on November 8. On November 6, he began to see trouble, and on November 7, he says, “I was shocked” at what he saw regarding liquidity evaporation.
- He says that he believes that he would be able to leave the Bahamas, where he has been living and operating FTX since 2019, if he wants to.
why it’s news
Andrew Ross Sorkin interterviewed disgraced FTX founder Sam Bankman-Fried live on Wednesday evening as part of The New York Times’ DealBook summit. At one point, Sorkin asked what SBF’s lawyer had told him about doing the interview. SBF says they thought it was a bad idea and advised him against it.
The fall of FTX has represented the largest bankruptcy in the history of cryptocurrency and its repercussions caused a weeklong collapse in the crypto economy as users attempted to pull billions of dollars out of the market. The longer bankruptcy lawyers dig into the company, the more complex the mismanagement of the firm is revealed to be.
FTX was one of the world’s biggest crypto exchange platforms before it came crashing down earlier in the month.
The failure of the large crypto exchange came as a surprise and brought fear to the sector causing many holders to sell causing many digital coins to drop quickly.
The fall of the platform happened very fast and left many people confused as to what happened and it turns out it was linked to risky bets gone wrong that the CEO called a poor judgment decision.
The fallout hurt many others including—the platform’s investors.
SBF was able to secure many big time investors for the platform that invested millions into the risky company.
