Sam Bankman-Fried, the founder of the now bankrupt FTX, has fallen from the heyday of crypto celebrity, but it’s not going smoothly. In consecutive interviews, he portrayed himself as a clumsy and regretful businessman.
“I think I got a little cocky — I mean, more than a little bit,” he told ABC’s George Stephanopoulos in an interview with Good Morning America.
A key question for Bankman-Fried is whether FTX, his cryptocurrency exchange platform, embezzled customers’ money when it lent billions of dollars to his hedge fund, Alameda.
Bankman-Fried, echoing comments he also made to The New York Times on Wednesday, denied knowing of any improper transfer of customer funds between the exchange and Alameda.
“I really wish I had taken a lot more responsibility for understanding what the details were of what was going on there,” he told Stephanopoulos. “A lot of people got hurt, and that’s my fault.”
Since Bankman-Fried turned almost overnight from crypto celebrity to outcast, commentators have drawn comparisons to Bernie Madoff, the financier convicted of running a multibillion-dollar Ponzi scheme that defrauded thousands of investors.
“I don’t think that’s who I am, but I understand why they’re saying that,” Bankman-Fried told Stephanopoulos. “When you look at the classic Bernie Madoff story, there was no real deal there… FTX – it was a real deal.”
Her ABC interview, taped in the Bahamas last week, aired just hours after Bankman-Fried’s live interview with The New York Times on Wednesday night. In that interview, Bankman-Fried said he “never tried to commit fraud on anyone,” although he admitted he made mistakes as chief executive.
Bankman-Fried resigned as CEO of FTX after it and dozens of affiliated companies declared bankruptcy on Nov. 11, in one of the most stunning corporate implosions of all time.
Almost overnight, customers around the world had to scramble to recover billions of dollars in funds they had deposited on the platform. Bankman-Fried’s multibillion-dollar personal wealth evaporated, and crypto companies with financial exposure to FTX began to buckle.
FTX’s collapse is being investigated by federal prosecutors in the Southern District of New York, according to a person familiar with the matter, and by authorities in the Bahamas, where the companies were headquartered. Several financial regulators also reached out to the company’s new management, led by restructuring experts tasked with steering FTX into bankruptcy.
Bankman-Fried’s attorney did not respond to requests for comment.
Source: CNN Brasil
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