Sam Bankman-Fried, who was a well-known name in Silicon Valley and had been close to celebrities like Gisele Bündchen and Tom Brady, is going to be imprisoned for twenty-five years.
He has been prosecuted for embezzlement and stealing billions of dollars from his customers by means of the cryptocurrency exchange FTX.
Bankman-Fried accepted the dream of becoming rich, but just to help others with that, as he was taught utilitarianism in his early years of education. This doctrine teaches that your best moral choice should do “the most good for most people.”
Caroline Ellison, the former CEO of Alameda Research and ex-girlfriend of Bankman-Fried, said, “He would be happy to flip a coin if it came up tails and the world was destroyed. As long as it came up heads the world would be more than twice as good.”
While reporting about Bankman-Fried, an FTX employee said, “He was super disorganised, he was always in cargo shorts, he was always sloppy,” a former FTX employee told the BBC. He would walk around the office on bare feet…. It could be cult-like.” Talking about Bankman-Fried’s charisma, his assistant and public relations dealer, Natalie Tien, said that it felt “”toxic”. We just trusted him 100%. To the degree that we kind of worried [about] speaking up for ourselves.”
The author of Number Go Up: Inside Crypto’s Wild Rise and Staggering Fall, Zeke Faux, when commenting on Bankman-Fried, said, “In a weird way, he seemed kind of like a grown-up in the crypto world.”
While explaining Bankman-Fried’s efforts to increase his wealth, in his writing, it was named FTX’s
SBF Has a Savior Complex, and Maybe You Should Too, the author Adan Fischer wrote, “But the math couldn’t be clearer. To do the most good for the world, SBF needed to find a path on which he’d be a coin toss away from going totally bust.”
In the hotel room in Manhattan, Bankman-Fried tried to persuade the actor, Mr McKenzie, to buy crypto.
Mr McKenzie, while describing it as “probably the strangest hour of my life,” said, “I think he marketed himself to me as a version of his public persona, which at the time was the California wunderkind, billionaire philanthropist. He had trouble just giving me straight answers to basic questions, one of which was, what does cryptocurrency do?”
The prosecutor, Nicolas Roos, while arguing in court, said, “The defendant was gambling with customer money.”
The reason why Bankman-Fried was unable to survive the courtroom was because of the testimony of forced fraud by the members of his inner circle like his ex-girlfriend Ms Ellison, his roommates Adam Yedida, Gary Wang and Nishad Singh.
Ms Ellison said that Bankman-Fried’s messy appearance made him look like a typical trader.
“Better for his image” and gave him authenticity. She said, “He thought there was a 5% chance he would become president someday of the United States.”
A former worker at FTX, Natalie Tien, while thinking the stealing part to be true, doesn’t believe in the usage of private jets by Bankman-Fried. She said, “He did lie, and he took the money. Yes, but I don’t think it’s because he was greedy. Because I actually saw him every day wearing crappy old T-shirts with no shoes and driving a shitty car. It was not an act”.
Bankman-Fried will be known as one of the “greatest fraudsters in US history”. He is going to face a 110 year-long prison sentence while lawyers claim to have recovered the missing $7bn from him.
While talking to the media, Mr McKenzie said, “I think it says more about us than it does about him. He got so far, I think, in many ways because of his lineage, because he is the son of Stanford. professors, because he had gone to MIT, because he worked on Wall Street. The myth of Sam Bankman-Fried grew in relation to the myth of crypto itself, right?”
