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The former CEO of FTX Trading will soon give his first long public interview since the cryptocurrency exchange collapsed in spectacular fashion earlier this month.
Sam Bankman-Fried is scheduled to speak Wednesday night in Manhattan at this year’s New York Times Dealbook Summit. Bankman-Fried resigned from the company on November 11 the same day FTX filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection. The 30-year-old is also under investigation in the US and abroad for possible securities violations.
Wednesday’s audience will be looking for a more detailed explanation of what caused the FTX crash. Other questions surrounding Bankman-Fried include its activities since the bankruptcy filing and the status of its attempt to raise money to restore customer accounts.
The former CEO has been unusually vocal since his company’s collapse: He recently told Vox that his previous support for crypto regulations was “just PR” and revealed this week to Axios that his bank account was “down to $100,000” .
The FTX bankruptcy took the crypto and financial world by storm. Days after FTX filed for bankruptcy, court documents revealed the company owed at least $3.1 billion to its 50 largest creditors.
“Never in my career have I seen such a complete failure of corporate control and such a complete absence of reliable financial information as has occurred here,” FTX’s new CEO John Ray III — who previously oversaw Enron’s bankruptcy — said in court filings. documents filed earlier this month. Alvarez & Marsal, the accounting firm FTX hired to help it with the bankruptcy, the company said “has historically not kept reliable books and records.”
Overhead of the Bankman-Fried interview are renewed calls from Washington to regulate the crypto industry. Democratic Senator Sherrod Brown of Ohio called on US Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen this week to develop crypto protection legislation because of what happened with FTX.
“As the bankruptcy filings show, FTX has failed to exercise basic corporate control or risk management over its operations,” Brown, the chairman of the Senate Banking Committee, wrote in a letter to Yellen on Wednesday. “Additionally, FTX relied on its own proprietary crypto token, resulting in inflated valuations that further fueled irresponsible risk-taking.”
Bankman-Fried took a handful of media interviews after the FTX bankruptcy. He told Vox Media earlier this month on Twitter that his previous shows of support this year for government oversight of the crypto industry were “PR.” and that regulators “make everything worse.”
Falling like Icarus
Where Bankman-Fried enters Wednesday’s Dealbook event is a far cry from his former glory as the founder of a crypto powerhouse.
Bankman-Fried was born in California to two Stanford University professors. He graduated from MIT with a degree in physics and later moved to Hong Kong to start Alameda, which later became the trading arm of FTX.
After his brief stint in Hong Kong, Bankman-Fried moved to the Bahamas, where he founded FTX in 2019, just as cryptocurrencies began to gain widespread popularity.
After buying a wide array of tokens a few years ago, Bankman-Fried saw his personal wealth bubble. At one point, Bankman-Fried’s personal fortune grew to $26.5 billion, according to Forbes. He became a major political donor, including spending $40 million mainly on Democratic candidates and progressive causes, according to the Wall Street Journal.
Widely known as a vegan who likes to play the video game League of Legends, Bankman-Fried has loaned hundreds of millions of dollars to struggling crypto companies, earning himself the nickname “crypto savior” before the collapse of FTX.
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