Disgraced FTX founder and Democrat super donor Sam Bankman-Fried has finally begun detailing his version of the events surrounding the downfall of the cryptocurrency exchange, at one point telling a journalist via Twitter DM’s that his “effective altruism” ethos was largely an act.
In a recent report from Vox, journalist Kelsey Piper outlines her recent interactions with FTX founder and former CEO Sam Bankman-Fried. Breitbart News has previously reported on the downfall of the cryptocurrency exchange and panic from investors. Now Bankman-Fried is facing investigations from both the Securities and Exchange Commission and the Department of Justice.
Despite all this, Bankman-Fried was quick to respond to Piper’s Twitter DM’s about the current situation and what led to the downfall of FTX. Piper writes:
Bankman-Fried, though, apparently wanted to talk. About how FTX and his hedge fund Alameda Research had gambled with customer money without, he claims, realizing that’s what they were doing. About who gets lauded as a hero and who’s the fall guy. About regulators. (“Fuck regulators.”) About what he regrets (“Chapter 11,” the decision to declare bankruptcy) and about what he would have done differently with FTX and Alameda (“more careful accounting + offboard Alameda from FTX once FTX could live on its own”).
Piper says she spoke to Bankman-Fried via Twitter DM’s for over an hour and posted screenshots of some of the conversation to Twitter. Piper says that she was attempting to make sense of the Bankman-Fried actually believes and his personal ethics when it comes to business and finance.
During the conversation, Bankman-Fried dismissed previous comments he made that some regulation of the crypto market could be good, saying that it was just “PR.”
Piper asked Bankman-Fried about a question she had asked in an earlier interview about the ethics of running a cryptocurrency company while claiming to want to help the world. Piper likened this to a tobacco company making billions of dollars claiming that it is to fund philanthropic efforts, many would still consider this a negative thing for the world and whether there was a “line” that he would not cross.
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At the time, Bankman-Fried responded: “There is some line. The answer can’t be there is no line. Or else, you know, you could end up doing massively more damage than good. And I think more generally, you could say, okay, fine, but just, like, subtract that out. But I don’t think it’s that simple, either. Because there are a lot of complicated but important second-order harms that come if your core business is bad for the world, in terms of your ability to work with partners and your ability to work with partners in your philanthropic efforts.”
“You could imagine that if the Philip Morris Foundation had really good ideas about how to improve the world, they probably would still have a really hard time working with the Gates Foundation. So I do think it’s more complicated than that. And you have to seriously contend with what the impact is of your direct work.”
Returning to this idea, Piper reiterated Bankman-Fried’s answer and asked if his opinion remained the same, to which Bankman-Fried said “man all the dumb shit I said, it’s not true, not really.”
Bankman-Fried has continued to claim that FTX did not invest the despots of crypto account holders on the exchange but that Alameda Research — the investment firm he owns — had borrowed more money from FTX than he realized.
Read more at Vox here.
