Former FTX CEO Sam Bankman-Fried (SBF) has expressed deep regret that he filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy last week, citing the decision as his “biggest failure.”
In a wide-ranging interview with Vox and published on November 16, the SBF answered questions on various topics, such as filing for Chapter 11 bankruptcy, its thoughts on regulators, ethical issues, the way FTX and Alameda “played with clients’ money” and the FTX hack.
According to screenshots from an interview conducted via Twitter between Vox reporter Kelsey Piper and SBF, the former FTX CEO said that while he made many mistakes, the biggest was listening to people who told him to file for bankruptcy.
“I screwed up a few times,” Bankman Fried wrote. “But do you know what was my biggest mistake?”
“The only thing *everyone* told me to do […] Chapter 11.”
If it doesn’t file for Chapter 11 bankruptcy, Bankman-Fried said, “everything will be about 70% resolved by now” and “withdrawals will open within a month with customers offered full compensation,” adding:
But instead, I made the request [de falência]and the people responsible for it are trying to burn it out of shame.”
After admitting that FTX was going through a “liquidity crunch” on November 8, Bankman-Fried reportedly tried to raise $8 billion from investors in an emergency funding round to cover the stock’s shortfall, even putting his fortune on display. customers and investors in full.
When asked about his next move, Bankman-Fried said he still has two weeks to get his $8 billion, which is “pretty much all I care about for the rest of my life.”
However, in a statement on November 16, John Ray, FTX’s new CEO and restructuring officer, reminded the public that Bankman-Fried “has no further role in [FTX], at FTX US or at Alameda Research Ltd. He does not speak on behalf of the company.”
Commenting on other issues, Bankman-Fried said his push for regulation was “just PR,” before adding:
“Damn the regulators, they make everything worse, they don’t protect customers at all.”
Hours later, Bankman-Fried appeared to have a change of heart, stating in a Twitter post that:
“It’s very hard to be a regulator. They have an impossible job: to regulate entire industries that are growing faster than their states allow.”
29) Which means that interacting with organizational structures can be really frustrating: *too much* work – a lot of it arbitrary – and relatively little protection for clients.
Damn that. You all deserve frameworks that allow regulators to protect customers while allowing them freedom.
– SBF (SBF_FTX) November 16, 2022
29) Which means that interacting with organizational structures can be really frustrating: a large amount of work – very arbitrary – and relatively little protection for customers.
Damn that. You all deserve frameworks that allow regulators to protect customers while allowing them freedom.
– SBF (SBF_FTX)
Bankman-Fried also confirmed that the money being transferred from FTX to anonymous wallets was indeed a hack, suggesting that it may have been “a former employee or malware on a former employee’s computer” that perpetrated the attack.
The former CEO again defended the claim made in a later-deleted Twitter post that FTX never reinvested clients’ assets, saying the claim was “factually accurate” as Alameda was the company investing the money.
Cointelegraph has reached out to Sam Bankman-Fried for additional comment, but has not received a response at the time of publication of this article.
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