Sam Bankman-Fried, the former FTX head and, quite likely, the most hated man in crypto, hasn’t shied away from the media spotlight since his all-powerful crypto empire collapsed into a black hole in November.
Most recently, he talked at length with New York Times journalist Andrew Sorkin at the broadsheets’ DealBook Summit on Wednesday, November 30.
SBF’s invitation to the summit was widely criticised, though Sorkin did manage to lob some fairly hardball questions.
In one of the heavier parts of the interview, Sorkin read out a letter from someone who purportedly lost his entire life savings due to the FTX collapse.
“Can you please ask SBF why he decided to steal my life savings and the US$10bn from his customers to give to his hedge fund Alameda? Can you ask him why his hedge fund was leveraging long? Please ask him if he thinks what happened was fraud,” read the letter.
“These are the kinds of letters that I've been getting repeatedly over the past several days. What do you tell this man?” asked Sorkin.
SBF said he was “deeply sorry about what happened”, before launching into a familiarly long-winded spiel about depreciating assets, overleveraged positions, market crashes and “limited access to data”.
Sorkin noted that “there appears to be a genuine commingling of the funds that are FTX customers that were not supposed to be commingled with your separate firm”, to which SBF denied any knowledge of, instead blaming the comingling on “poor oversight”.
Basically, a litany of excuses designed to absolve himself of criminal liability.
If nothing else, his narrative has been consistent.
SBF took the same line of reply in his surprise interview with citizen journalist Tiffany Fong.
When asked by Fong how user funds from FTX ended up being used at Alameda Research, SBF said he “absolutely should have been way more cautious and careful, and I wasn’t”.
While he did express remorse in that interview too, SBF painted a picture of a goofy kid in over his head. Hell, he doesn’t even know to code, let alone develop an illegal backdoor to siphon customer funds out of FTX and into Alameda Research!
Which is not to say he’s being insincere- the courts should probably be the determinator of that, regardless of how slow the judicial system can take.
But his portrayal of the whole debacle has done nothing to appease the thousands of creditors desperate to access their trapped funds.
Nor has it satisfied the bloodlust of the crypto influencers in the Twitter swamp who have tried to position themselves as crypto’s white knights- even if they have a documented history of promoting FTX themselves.
Adding fuel to the fire was a recent piece from the Wall Street Journal which none other than Elon Musk criticised for “giving foot massages to a criminal”.
WSJ giving foot massages to a criminalThat article went with the following byline: “The FTX founder pledged to donate billions. His firm’s swift collapse wiped out his wealth and ambitious philanthropic endeavours.”— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) November 24, 2022
“Sam Bankman-Fried’s plans to save the world went down in flames,” according to the Wall Street Journal.
Another prominent crypto talking head, MicroStrategy founder and bitcoin maximalist Michael Saylor, went on an even harder offensive against the WSJ.
“Sam counterfeited billions in tokens via securities fraud, inflated that by billions more via accounting fraud, seized billions from customers via banking fraud, corrupted the establishment with the dirty money, then panic sold billions in stolen bitcoin to crash the market,” was his take.
“It was never a plan to save the world. It was a plan to steal the world,” stated Saylor.
With a good chance of SBF agreeing to more interviews in the near future, you have to ask: Is there really any point?
Despite not knowing how to code, SBF possesses a genuine knack for saying a lot without saying much at all, regardless of how direct his interrogations are.
His narrative seems to be pretty well rehearsed by now, so extracting anything more from him could end up being a mug’s game.