Bankman-Fried Takes the Stand in His Biggest Interview Yet

In this issue of the Bloomberg Crypto newsletter, Michael P. Regan assesses Sam Bankman-Fried’s self-defense:

Sam Bankman-Fried has always liked to chat. Whether it be with congressional committees or A-list media figures like Anna Wintour and Michael Lewis, or obscure podcasters and crypto influencers, the co-founder of the FTX cryptocurrency exchange was always willing to give his not-exactly-undivided attention to almost anyone interested in chatting him up while he spent some quality time with one of his favorite videogames.

So it’s no surprise that he’s trying to talk his way out of trouble that could land him in prison for a few decades by testifying in his own defense in his fraud trial stemming from the spectacular blowup of FTX a year ago. He has pleaded not guilty to all charges against him.

We got a first draft of that defense last December, when Andrew Ross Sorkin of the New York Times interviewed SBF in front of a live audience in the wake of FTX’s bankruptcy filing. The main pillar of his defense at that time was that it wasn’t intentional fraud that blew up his crypto empire, but rather failures of oversight on his part. He claimed he was simply too busy running the FTX exchange to pay closer attention to the massive loans piling up at Alameda Research, the trading firm he also controlled, that were funded by assets belonging to FTX customers. “There were oversight failures, transparency failures, reporting, like so many things we should have had in place,” he said, according to a transcript of the event.

Yet there’s an exchange early in the interview that’s quite pertinent now: