Disgraced FTX founder Sam Bankman-Fried apologized to customers in an interview and said he didn’t try to commit fraud.
Bankman-Fried, who led FTX up until its spectacular collapse this month, appeared in a livestream beamed from the Bahamas into the Dealbook Summit, where he was grilled about his role in FTX’s downfall by CNBC’s Andrew Ross Sorkin.
“I didn’t ever try to commit fraud on anyone,” Bankman-Fried said. “I saw it as a thriving business, and I was shocked by what happened this month.”
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During the much-anticipated interview, which lasted more than an hour, Bankman-Fried was questioned about the close relationship between crypto giant FTX and crypto hedge fund Alameda Research.
“I didn’t knowingly commingle funds,” Bankman-Fried claimed.
“I wasn’t running Alameda,” he says. “I was nervous because of the conflict of interest of being too involved.”
He said he has a lot of regrets in retrospect and insisted that he didn’t realize how big of a problem the company was facing until just this month.
“I’ve had a bad month,” the embattled Bankman-Fried quipped.
At the outset of the interview, Sorkin read a letter from an FTX investor who claimed Bankman-Fried stole his entire life savings.
“I mean, I’m deeply sorry about what happened,” Bankman-Fried said.
FTX was one of the biggest cryptocurrency platforms in the world and had been vaunted at a massive scale by superpowered marketing campaigns featuring the likes of athletes Tom Brady and Steph Curry. This month, that house of cards quickly collapsed.
The fallout has been enormous because of FTX’s size and reach. FTX was valued at $32 billion in a financing round before the collapse this year. It was also the third-largest crypto exchange by volume after Binance and Coinbase.
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The House Financial Services Committee announced that it would hold a hearing in December to probe the cryptocurrency company’s descent into bankruptcy. The committee expects to hear from the companies and people involved, including Bankman-Fried, Alameda Research, Binance, FTX, and others.
“The fall of FTX has posed tremendous harm to over one million users, many of whom were everyday people who invested their hard-earned savings into the FTX cryptocurrency exchange, only to watch it all disappear within a matter of seconds. Unfortunately, this event is just one out of many examples of cryptocurrency platforms that have collapsed just this past year,” said Chairwoman Maxine Waters (D-CA).
