“I’ve had a bad month,” said the former CEO of the fallen crypto exchange FTX, speaking at the DealBook Summit.
Sam Bankman-Fried — the 30-year-old dethroned billionaire who fell from grace last month with the bankruptcy of his cryptocurrency exchange, FTX, and revelations of missing customer funds — was notably fidgety, hemmed and hawed over his answers, and seemed at times to martyr himself in much anticipated first public interview since his company, valued to be worth at least $32 billion, simply imploded.
“I’ve had a bad month,” Bankman-Fried said at one point, an understatement that drew a burst of laughter from the audience at the New York Times’s DealBook Summit, an annual elite conclave of global corporate leaders, investors, politicians, and celebrities. The former wunderkind CEO, who had graced magazine covers, mingled with Washington power players, and funded philanthropic causes before the stunning collapse of his exchange, told the New York Times’s Andrew Ross Sorkin that he was down to one last credit card and about $100,000 in a bank account.
He also said that his lawyers didn’t think it was a good idea for him to be speaking. Bankman-Fried said he was being given the “classic advice — don’t say anything. Recede into a hole.”
“I think I have a duty to talk to people,” he said. “I have a duty to explain what happened.”
What happened was the astonishing collapse of the cryptocurrency exchange Bankman-Fried founded, sending shock waves through not only financial and crypto circles but political and philanthropic ones as well. The company, currently in bankruptcy proceedings, is being investigated by the Justice Department and the Securities and Exchange Commission, according to the Wall Street Journal. At least $1 billion in FTX customer funds appears to be missing.
Bankman-Fried, who had been seen as a rare billionaire serious about using his wealth to improve the world following a philosophy known as effective altruism, has now left philanthropic organizations to which he committed money grappling with funding gaps. FTX’s ruin has led to “crypto contagion” in the rest of the industry, ushering in widespread instability: BlockFi, a crypto lending company that FTX bailed out in July, also filed for bankruptcy this week, and the crypto exchange Kraken announced that it will lay off 30 percent of its workforce. (Disclosure: This August, Bankman-Fried’s philanthropic family foundation, Building a Stronger Future, awarded Vox’s Future Perfect a grant for a 2023 reporting project. That project is now on pause.)
Bankman-Fried did not attend Wednesday’s event in person but was interviewed virtually from the Bahamas, where he’s been based since late 2021. When he came into view around 5 pm, his demeanor was subdued, compared with the fast-talking, frenetic energy he is known for during public appearances.
In introducing Bankman-Fried, Sorkin pulled no punches: “The generous view is that you are a young man who made a series of terrible, terrible, very, very bad decisions.
