Former FTX CEO Insists He’s Not a Bad Guy, and Eventually the World Will Judge Me

Last Updated on 12/05/2022 by てんしょく飯

Sam Bankman-Fried, former CEO of crypto asset giant FTX, which filed for bankruptcy protection in November, wants to apologize to people.

I should have been in control of the whole situation.

In his first network interview with ABC News, he told ABC Washington Bureau Chief George Stephanopoulos that he feels guilty for not doing more to prevent FTX’s collapse. Bankman-Fried says, “I sincerely and deeply wish I had taken more responsibility for understanding the details of what was going on. ‘I should have been in control of the whole situation, but I am so sorry and frustrated that I wasn’t. Many people were hurt. It is my fault.”

Bankman-Fried agreed that many people, especially investors who lost billions of dollars (hundreds of billions of yen) in the FTX debacle, would consider him a bad guy. Stephanopoulos told Bankman-Fried, “A lot of people will see you as a Bernie Madoff [famous financial criminal].” Bankman-Fried replied, “I don’t see myself that way at all. But I understand why people would say that. But I understand why people say that, because you all lost money, really, a lot of money.

Bankman-Fried, however, was eager to say that he, too, was a victim. He told ABC that all he has now is an ATM card and a bank account with about $100,000 (about $13.5 million) in cash. He says, “I won’t be left with anything at this point.”

The interview, conducted in the Bahamas, where FTX is headquartered, aired on ABC’s “Good Morning America” on the morning of December 1 US time. Bankman-Fried, referring to rumors of illegal drug use shed by FTX employees and rumors of an internal binge party before it all fell apart, said he never witnessed any drug use and that he personally did not drink at work.

He claimed that the failure was due to mismanagement.

FTX’s spectacular collapse occurred after a rival crypto asset exchange announced it was backing out of its planned acquisition of FTX amid reports that Bankman-Fried’s company had used deposits to pay creditors. Bankman-Fried said that although FTX had an “explicit mechanism” to allow borrowing and lending on its platform, it was poorly monitored.

He said, “We failed to put someone in place to manage that risk, that position, that account. ‘Failure to properly monitor it led to the collapse of the FTX.

There may be some deeper mistake there that I didn’t even try, and it was clearly a mistake not to spend the time and effort to manage the risk at FTX,” he added, “If I had spent an hour a day at FTX thinking about risk management, I don’t think that would have happened. I think it’s a shame,” he continued. It’s a shame,” he continued.

Stephanopoulos asked about two tweets that Bankman-Fried, then CEO, posted on Twitter a few days before FTX filed for Chapter 11: One said, “FTX is fine, no assets are in trouble,” and the other said, “FTX is protecting all customer assets. FTX is able to protect all of its clients’ assets. We do not invest our clients’ assets, even in government bonds. Both have since been removed.

Bankman-Fried believed those things were correct when he posted the tweets, but “not long after that tweet, I started to get quite concerned that FTX was okay.

It remains to be seen how much this interview will convince Bankman-Fried, whom many now believe to be a fraud, that he actually was not. Along the way, Bankman-Fried said that the success and failure of the company affected his social life and “made it quite difficult to have real close friends. Because “it became really difficult to find people around me that I could talk to as a casual, relaxed companion without worrying about anything.”

He says, “I had very few friendships in the true sense of the word.

Bankman-Fried said he is now focused on “making amends to everyone who has been damaged. He says, “Ultimately, it’s not up to me to decide what happens. The world will judge me eventually,” he added.