After Sam Bankman-Fried got blasted in court for using FTX as his own “personal fiefdom,” the embattled crypto bro issued an apology of sorts to employees. While Bankman-Fried regrets some of the decisions he made leading to the exchange’s embarrassing billion dollar crash, he spent most of the mea culpa pointing fingers elsewhere.
Specifically, Bankman-Fried railed against the new management’s rush to file for bankruptcy, which he previously complained about in a series of frank and potentially incriminating, surreal direct messages to reporters following his ouster.
Via The Guardian:
“We likely could have raised significant funding,” he wrote. “Potential interest in billions of dollars of funding came in roughly eight minutes after I signed the chapter 11 docs. Between those funds, the billions of dollars of collateral the company still held, and the interest we’d received from other parties, I think that we probably could have returned large value to customers and saved the business.
“An extreme amount of coordinated pressure came, out of desperation, to file for bankruptcy for all of FTX – even entities that were solvent – and despite other jurisdictions’ claims … I reluctantly gave in to that pressure, even though I should have known better; I wish I had listened to those of you who saw and still see value in the platform, which was and is my belief as well.”
Bankman-Fried blamed an $8 billion liability that he just kinda forgot about it because it was old. What Bankman-Fried didn’t mention in the apology is that the $8 billion hole was a result of FTX’s hedge fund Alameda Research, where The Guardian reports “deep-rooted mismanagement resulted in billions of dollars of cash being waylaid.”
If you haven’t picked up on it by now, “mismanagement” has been a recurring theme since the FTX crash, which could have potentially devastating impact on the crypto market. When new FTX CEO John J. Ray III took over the company after Bankman-Fried was removed, he didn’t hold back describing the chaos he found.
“Never in my career have I seen such a complete failure of corporate controls and such a complete absence of trustworthy financial information as occurred here,” Ray said in legal fillings. “From compromised systems integrity and faulty regulatory oversight abroad, to the concentration of control in the hands of a very small group of inexperienced, unsophisticated and potentially compromised individuals, this situation is unprecedented.”
(Via The Guardian)