Speaking from his bed in Nassau at around 3am on Saturday, Sam Bankman-Fried grappled with one of the questions at the heart of the collapse of his $32bn crypto empire.
The FTX founder insisted that he had walled himself off from trading and risk management at the Alameda Research trading firm, which he majority-owned, for “conflict of interest reasons” related to his role as guardian of customer assets as chief executive of the exchange FTX.
But he also admitted, in an interview with the Financial Times, closer involvement in financial decisions at Alameda than he has previously disclosed.
The conversation, which the 30-year-old requested be held via video call in the small hours of the morning at his Bahamas residence, was part of a contrite media campaign that Bankman-Fired has launched in the past week.
The former mogul has freely admitted in several interviews to what he called “massive oversights”, “huge fuckups” and a lack of “rigorous thinking”.
The media blitz has puzzled many at a time when the circumstances of the collapse of FTX, one of the largest crypto exchanges, are still being scrutinised by at least 1mn creditors, criminal investigators and civil litigation.
Bankman-Fried told the FT he reasoned that keeping quiet could be seen as “tacitly admitting the truth of a lot of theories” that have proliferated online about his alleged…
