Disgraced FTX founder Sam Bankman-Fried unleashed a tirade against regulators, called “ethics” a “dumb game we woke westerners play,” and insisted his biggest mistake was filing for bankruptcy in a wild, wide-ranging interview.
“I f—ed up. Big. Multiple times,” the fallen 30-year-old cryptocurrency mogul admitted to Vox reporter Kelsey Piper in a Twitter confessional that even she admitted being shocked over.
“You understand what was mabe my biggest single f—up? The one thing everyone told me to do,” he said.
“Chapter 11,” he said, claiming that without bankruptcy “the whole lot can be ~70% at once if I hadn’t” done it.
“As a substitute I filed, and the people answerable for [the company] are attempting to burn all of it to the bottom out of shame,” he complained.
Bankman-Fried — who’s believed to be hiding out within the Bahamas — blamed “messy accounting” for a way his hedge fund, Alameda Research, had borrowed money from FTX’s balance sheet for investments.
“I didn’t realize [the] full size of it until a couple of weeks ago,” he wrote, saying it “was messier and more organic” than simpliy lending out customer funds.
“Each step was in isolation rational and reasonable, after which we finally added it up last week and it wasn’t,” he wrote.
He maintained that he “didn’t wish to do sketchy stuff.”
“And I didn’t mean to. Each individual decision seemed effective and I didn’t realize how big their sum was until the top,” he said.
“It was never the intention” to get away with it, he said, adding: “Sometimes life creeps up on you.”
Meanwhile, Bankman-Fried admitted that his advocacy for higher crypto regulation in Washington was “just PR” — and bluntly dismissed official bodies alleged to protect customers against crooked firms.
“F–k regulators. They make the whole lot worse. They don’t protect customers in any respect,” he wrote.
He admitted the exchange was real, nonetheless, claimed he thought it was an exchange with a friend and never one that will be posted online.
He then added his own clarifications after Vox published the comments — attempting to walk back his crude assessment of regulators.
“It’s really hard to be a regulator. They’ve an unattainable job: to control entire industries that grow faster than their mandate allows them to,” he now wrote, saying some had “deeply impressed me with their knowledge and thoughtfulness.”
“A few of what I said was thoughtless or overly strong — I used to be venting and never intending that to be public,” he tweeted.
This time, he blamed being “overconfident and careless” from being “on the quilt of each magazine, and FTX was the darling of Silicon Valley.”
Now, he said, his “goal — my one goal — is to do right by customers.”
“I’m contributing what I can to doing so. I’m meeting in-person with regulators and dealing with the teams to do what we are able to for patrons. And after that, investors. But first, customers,” he said.
“It sucks. I’m really sorry that things ended up as they did. And as I said — I’m going to do the whole lot I can to make it more right.”
