What we learned from the first live interview of the former head of FTX after the bankruptcy

For some, Sam Bankman-Fried is the next Bernie Madoff, the pinnacle of one of the largest and most destructive Ponzi schemes in modern history. Or maybe he’s more like Elizabeth Holmes, the disgraced former founder of Theranos convicted of fraud and sentenced to more than 11 years in prison. SBF, as he’s known, swears it’s all a colossal blunder.

Bankman-Fried spoke for the first time Wednesday in a live interview since his cryptocurrency exchange, FTX, declared bankruptcy. He did so via video link from his home base in the Bahamas to the New York Times DealBook Summit, where he was grilled for more than an hour about the details of his financial dealings and mismanagement of client funds and whether he had lied about both in the past and during the interview.

Read more: SBF says it is worth “next to nothing” since the FTX crash

DealBook founder Andrew Ross Sorkin said SBF agreed to the “no-holds-barred” interview, even though he is no longer FTX’s CEO and is currently the focus of multiple investigations.

“What are your lawyers telling you right now? Do they think it’s a good idea to talk?” Sorkin asked at one point.

“No. Many are not,” SBF replied.

Here are some of the most important things we learned from the SBF interview:

He had a “bad month”

In his bid for understatement of the year, the former billionaire acknowledged the impact his mismanagement as CEO of FTX has had on his clients and the crypto industry as a whole. FTX was the second largest crypto exchange in the world until November 2, when details of his financial empire were leaked to CoinDesk.

All told, Alameda Research, SBF’s investment firm, has $8 billion in debt. Even worse, some FTX client funds appear to have been mixed with Alameda’s bad bets.

For its part, Bankman-Fried argued that FTX.US and FTX Japan, two companies that operate in different regulatory frameworks than other FTX subsidiaries, should be able to authorize customer withdrawals. Still, SBF said, that doesn’t diminish the enormous mistakes he made.

“Look, I screwed up. I was the CEO of FTX, that means I was in charge,” he said. “We messed up a lot.”

Bankman-Fried says it costs “next to nothing”, insisting there are no “hidden funds”. “I think I have one credit card left that works, there might be $100,000 or something in that bank account,” he said. “Everything I had, even all the loans I had, those were things I reinvested. I put everything I had into FTX.”

Read more: The Fall of FTX and Sam Bankman-Fried: A Timeline

He denied knowingly committing fraud

Hanging over the entire interview was SBF’s potential criminal liability, much like Madoff and Holmes. He repeated his seemingly well-rehearsed lines that he screwed up and that he was responsible as CEO, but he insisted: “I never tried to deceive anyone.”

He swears he’s telling the truth

Before FTX filed for bankruptcy, Bankman-Fried sent out a tweet trying to reassure customers that everything was fine. When The New York Times’ Sorkin tried to walk SBF through the timeline of what happened, he asked if SBF had lied in that tweet. He also asked if SBF had lied in the interview.

“I don’t know of any cases where I lied,” Bankman-Fried replied, adding that he “was as honest as I know.”

He claimed that political donations were made to both parties

As people tried to figure out what happened to Bankman-Fried, FTX and all that money, one thing people latched onto was his political donations. SBF was the second-largest donor to the Democratic Party during the last election cycle, according to data compiled by OpenSecrets, raising questions about whether it bought influence in Washington, D.C.

In earlier interviews, Bankman-Fried said he donated to both parties, but chose to donate to Republicans through “dark money” organizations that are not required to disclose who funds their activities.

In Wednesday’s interview, he said he donated to “candidates who are strongly in favor of doing things now to prevent the next pandemic.” He said many of his contributions were during the primaries on both sides of the aisle.

“I didn’t look at it as a partisan exercise,” he said. “It wasn’t, you know, it wasn’t a donation to one party to beat the other in the general election here.”