Sam Bankman-Fried Wants Out of Prison Right Now, Pretty Please

Hey, warden, you’re gonna wanna hear this one—this prisoner says he shouldn’t be here! Sam Bankman-Fried, the FTX cryptocurrency exchange founder about three years into a 25-year prison sentence for around $11 billion in fraud against FTX customers, investors, and lenders, presumably thinks the amount of time he’s served so far should just about square the bill. In a prison interview with The Economist’s Money Talks podcast, Bankman-Fried continued to insist on his innocence even as his lawyers argue the $11 billion forfeiture in the case (an amount basically equal to what he stole) should be thrown out on constitutional grounds. FTX was “a legitimate and successful business,” but had a “run on the bank, which is a thing that happens with margin businesses,” Bankman-Fried said. He said his key mistake was failing to resist the takeover of FTX by shadowy, insidious forces working against it: “Parties adverse to the company and stakeholders took control. When I needed to fight that, I was weak instead.” (Is this beginning to remind anyone of anything?) Bankman-Fried’s lawyers are pursuing a petition before the Supreme Court and are also seeking a presidential pardon from Donald Trump, who uses pardons as patronage and is happy to hand them out to other powerful men who claim to be victims of partisan lawfare. Last year, Bankman-Fried began praising Trump’s wisdom on pardons on X, writing that “President Trump knows that, when you weaponize the DOJ, you start putting innocent people in prison.” Multiple media outlets reported earlier this year that Bankman-Fried had applied to the Justice Department for a pardon. Getting a pardon is “an uphill battle,” Bankman-Fried told Money Talks. “All I can do is put forward, you know, the truth as I see it, and hope that parties are more reflective, and that there’s less visceral reaction than there was before.” The visceral reaction Bankman-Fried is referring to, perhaps, is that unopposed U.S. Senate resolution to Trump urging the president not to pardon him. For the record, Bankman-Fried’s transfer of $8 billion from FTX to his crypto trading firm, Alameda Research, was fraud. It was not normal margin trading, and his lawyers have already lost one appeal predicated on a similar argument. The supposed “run” came after FTX was already insolvent and Bankman-Fried had padded Alameda’s balance sheet with FTT, a token FTX cooked up itself. Nor were “parties adverse to the company and stakeholders” staging any kind of hostile takeover. FTX ran without any effective corporate controls in place, with Bankman-Fried running it as if clients’ money belonged to him. Bankman-Fried is probably referring to his November 2022 decision to put a restructuring expert in charge who then filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy—these being necessary steps because Bankman-Fried had already stolen and lost billions of dollars. About the only thing this interview is effective evidence for is the thesis that money poisoning causes permanent brain damage. During the interview, Bankman-Fried also praised AI firm Anthropic for taking “seriously the duty to have a positive impact with their business” and, as one of its early backers, said that if the company helps make AI safer, it “would at least break up the solid wall of negativity a bit.” It wouldn’t “change the fact that I have a lot of regrets,” he told Money Talks.