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“Look, I screwed up,” fallen crypto billionaire Sam Bankman-Fried told a conference in New York on Wednesday but he maintained he “didn’t ever try to commit fraud” and was “shocked” by the collapse of his businesses.
Bankman-Fried, with glassy eyes and visibly shaking at times, appeared via video conference from a nondescript room in the Bahamas. He told the New York Times’s DealBook Summit he was “deeply sorry about what happened” but consistently argued he did not have a full picture of what was going on within the various branches of FTX, his now bankrupt cryptocurrency exchange, and its offshoots.
Bankman-Fried resigned as head of the FTX cryptocurrency exchange when it declared bankruptcy earlier this month. The true fallout of the collapse is still emerging. FTX owes $3.1bn (£2.57bn) to its largest creditors, assets have disappeared, law enforcement and regulators are circling and Bankman-Fried’s freehanded largesse to the American political elite is set to cause a firestorm in Washington.
One key question about the collapse is whether FTX’s customers’ funds were misappropriated and given to FTX’s hedge fund, Alameda. Questioned by New York Times columnist Andrew Ross Sorkin, the 30-year-old appeared to be shifting blame to Alameda.
“I didn’t knowingly comingle funds,” he said.
