Sam Bankman-Fried, the 30-year-old founder of the bankrupt crypto exchange FTX, said he “didn’t ever try to commit fraud on anyone,” while admitting he made mistakes as chief executive.
“There are things I would do anything to do over again,” Bankman-Fried said in a virtual appearance at the New York Times’ DealBook Summit in New York. “I was shocked by what happened this month.”
Earlier in November, Bankman-Fried resigned as CEO of FTX after it and dozens of affiliated companies filed for bankruptcy in one of the most stunning corporate implosions ever. Almost overnight, customers around the world were left scrambling to recover billions of funds that they’d deposited on the platform. Bankman-Fried’s own multibillion-dollar personal wealth evaporated. And crypto firms with financial exposure to FTX began to buckle.
One of the key questions surrounding Bankman-Fried is whether FTX, his crypto exchange platform, misappropriated customer funds when it made loans to his hedge fund, Alameda.
“I didn’t knowingly commingle funds,” he said. “I was frankly surprised by how big Alameda’s position was.”
‘Look, I screwed up’
