FTX Founder Sam Bankman-Fried Admits He Gave Dark Money to the GOP and Has One Credit Card Left

Publish date: 2024-10-17

Facing down more than a million angry customers, an $8 billion funding shortfall, and possible criminal charges, you would have thought now would be a good time for Sam Bankman-Fried to make himself scarce. He hasn’t.

Instead, the 30-year-old founder of the crypto exchange FTX has embarked on a veritable media marathon, conducting interviews with The New York Times, New York Magazine, Good Morning America, and Axios in the last week alone.

All of this comes just days after Bankman-Fried’s previously $32 billion business filed for bankruptcy in one of the most spectacular failures the crypto industry has ever seen. FTX is now facing down investigations from the U.S. Justice Department, Securities and Exchange Commission, Texas State Securities Board, and authorities in the Bahamas, where the company is based.

Asked why he was speaking with so many outlets—against the express advice of his legal team—Bankman-Fried claimed he had a “duty to explain what happened.”

“I think I have a duty to do everything I can to try and do what’s right,” he told the Times’ Andrew Ross Sorkin in a live interview Wednesday. “If there is anything I can do to try and help customers out here. And I don’t see what good is accomplished by me just sitting locked in a room pretending the outside world doesn’t exist.”

Whether SBF’s interview spree did anything for his customers remains to be seen, but it at least provided some solid entertainment. Below are the five most interesting revelations from this ill-advised media field day.

SBF still wants us to believe he’s the good guy.

Bankman-Fried continues to insist that the spectacular crash of his company was an honest mistake, not a nefarious scheme to steal customers’ assets. Though the founder has admitted—repeatedly, and against the advice of his lawyers—that he “fucked up” in his handling of FTX and its sister company, Alameda Research, he told Sorkin that he “didn't ever try to commit fraud on anyone.”

“I was excited about the prospects of FTX a month ago,” he said. “I saw it as a thriving, growing business. I was shocked by what happened this month.”

Bankman-Fried echoed those comments on GMA, where he rejected comparisons to Bernie Madoff and said he felt “really, really bad” about all the customers who were hurt by FTX’s implosion. In both interviews, SBF appeared shaky and nervous, seemingly more like a lost puppy than a devious fraudster.

“I think it might be $100,000 or something like that in that bank account.”

But many have found this explanation hard to believe, given that Bankman-Fried founded both Alameda and FTX, lived in a sprawling Bahamas compound with some of both companies’ employees, and on-and-off dated Alameda’s CEO. And it also resulted in some awkward moments, such as when he appeared to dodge George Stephanopoulos’ questions about whether he knew that FTX customer deposits were being used to pay Alameda creditors. (“Which creditors are you referring to?” he asked. He has previously denied knowing this.)

In the Times interview a day earlier, Sorkin asked SBF whether he had been truthful during their interview. The founder paused before responding: “I was as truthful as I’m knowledgeable to be.”

SBF donated to Republican campaigns.

Aside from his work with FTX, Bankman-Fried is perhaps best known for the $40 million he donated to Democratic candidates in the 2022 election cycle. The spending stuck out, as most political spending from the crypto industry has leaned conservative, and sparked interest from the highest ranks of the Democratic party. (Several recipients of that money, including Sen. Kristen Gillibrand, have since donated it or handed it back.)

But in an interview with crypto writer Tiffany Fong, which she recorded earlier but released this week, Bankman-Fried claimed he had given equal amounts to both Democrats and Republicans in the last election cycle. In order to avoid press scrutiny, he said, “I made all the Republican ones dark.”

“Reporters freak the fuck out if you donate to a Republican,” he said. “They’re all secretly liberal and I didn’t want to have that fight.”

Bankman-Fried claimed he was the Republican’s third-largest donor during the 2022 cycle, though—as Salon pointed out—this might be an exaggeration: If he gave an equal $40 million to Republicans, that would make him only their fifth-biggest donor.

The former billionaire is broke.

Formerly the world’s richest person under 30, Bankman-Fried now claims he’s pretty much penniless. Asked by an Axios reporter what his personal finances were like, he responded by asking: “Am I allowed to say a negative number?”

The former CEO told Axios that most of his wealth—at one point more than $26 billion—was tied up in his company. When that crashed, so did his personal net worth.

“I don’t have any hidden funds,” he told Sorkin on Wednesday. “Everything I have, I’m disclosing… I think I have one working credit card left. I think it might be $100,000 or something like that in that bank account.”

And if Bankman-Fried was thinking he could crash in his company’s Bahamas compound, that seems to be off the table. too: A lawyer for FTX said in a bankruptcy hearing that it planned to sell off most of the $300 million in property it purchased in the country.

SBF still thinks there’s a way for his company to survive.

In perhaps some of his most confusing comments, Bankman-Fried repeatedly asserted in his New York Times interview that FTX’s U.S. outpost was “fully solvent” and that all of its customers could be “made whole,” and that he didn’t know why the company wasn’t “processing customer withdrawals right now.” (The U.S. company filed for bankruptcy along with the international one.)

He also claimed that, even for the international company, there was “billions of dollars worth” of interest in financing the exchange before it filed for bankruptcy. (The one company that did agree to buy FTX—rival exchange Binance—backed out after viewing the company’s books.)

“I can’t promise anyone anything, and it’s not really in my hands to a large extent, but I would think it would make sense to be exploring that,” he said, seeming to suggest an interest in keeping the company going.

He added: “I think there is a chance that customers could end up being made a lot more whole or maybe even fully whole if there was a really strong concerted effort.”

He’s still vegan.

This revelation didn’t actually come from an interview, but from a tweet—which SBF has also been dishing out wildly this week. The former billionaire was well known for his principled stances on ethical issues like animal rights and preventing pandemics, most of which were largely influenced by his ties to a philosophical movement called “effective altruism.” But after a disastrous DM interview with Vox’s Kelsey Piper, in which he agreed that his ethical stances were “mostly a front,” many were left questioning whether he would stay committed to those causes.

Adding to the mystery was a viral photo of what looked like a New York Times headline, declaring that SBF “‘May Not Have Been Vegan’ for at Least Last 17 Months.” (“Emails and text messages reveal the 30-year-old entrepreneur may have ‘accidentally’ eaten as many as 3,000 shrimp,” the purported subhead read.)

Unsurprisingly, this turned out to be a farce.

“The picture going around was a joke,” Bankman-Fried tweeted Thursday. “I’m still vegan.”