The implosion of Sam Bankman-Fried’s trading empire is currently a matter of more questions than answers. We know that FTX is all but bankrupt, but the real story has yet to surface. Sam Bankman-Fried’s interview with The New York Times’ Andrew Ross Sorkin also yielded few answers.
“I am not a fraud”
Sam Bankman-Fried seems to be living in a true delusional world at the moment. The founder and former CEO of FTX says he was not aware for a moment that he may have committed fraud. The 30-year-old ‘prodigy’ believes that the collapse of FTX is mainly due to the collapse of the market. “I never knowingly tried to commit fraud,” says Sam Bankman-Fried.
That’s not very believable. As soon as you take a risk with users’ credits, you know there’s a chance you’re going to get wet. It can’t be that Sam Bankman-Fried, an intelligent MIT student, couldn’t come up with this simple fact.
Furthermore, Sam Bankman-Fried admitted that he was a little nervous after CoinDesk’s release of Alameda Research’s balance sheet on November 2. Although he was supposedly unaware that this could mean the end of his empire. “I have never knowingly gambled away client funds,” said Sam Bankman-Fried.
“I was suprised”
Even when the conversation takes a turn towards the books of FTX, Sam Bankman-Fried indicates that he is mainly surprised. “There was a substantial discrepancy between the company’s legitimate audited financials and the numbers on the dashboards. I was surprised”, continued Sam Bankman-Fried.
Sam Bankman-Fried also had little to say about the relationship between the employees of FTX and Alameda Research. The fact that FTX employees lived with Alameda Research employees was also not inappropriate, according to Bankman-Fried.
“I looked at it purely from a trading perspective. In 2019, Alameda Research was responsible for 45 percent of the volume on FTX. Later in 2022 that was only 2 percent”, with which Bankman-Fried means that it was all not too bad in the end.