‘One of the Most Hated People in the World’: Sam Bankman-Fried’s 250 Pages of Justifications
Summary
“There will probably never be anything I can do to make my lifetime impact net positive.” He added: “And the truth is that I did what I thought was right.” After Mr. Bankman-Fried was arrested, charged with fraud over FTX’s collapse and placed in home detention in December, he wrote hundreds of pages of sometimes rambling self-justifications, ranging from childhood memories to mathematical calculations. In a draft of his unsent posts, which he formatted as a series of tweets spanning roughly 70 typed pages, he criticized some of his closest colleagues, interspersing his arguments with photos from his high school years and stock images of popcorn and a garden maze. The roughly 250 pages of documents, which have not been previously reported, provide a window into Mr. Bankman-Fried’s mind-set during the eight months he spent in home detention before a judge revoked his bail in August. He described her as ill-equipped for the job he gave her as head of Alameda, claiming she had cried during a meeting with him and refused to institute trading strategies that would have protected his businesses from a market crash. In another section, Mr. Bankman-Fried posted a link to a document he wrote in 2019, “Tonight We Are Young,” an account of a conference in Taiwan where he interacted with Changpeng Zhao, known as CZ, the founder of the crypto exchange Binance.