The Tribune

FOR someone in charge of a multi-billion operation, Sam Bankman-Fried seems to not know a lot of things.

The founder of FTX has been talking again about the implosion of the crypto company – after a series of public comments that have left very little doubt about where the blame lies.

Mr Bankman-Fried himself has very publicly said that the situation was his fault, and yesterday he was speaking again about the collapse of the business and the reasons why during an interview at the DealBook Summit in New York City – with him joining in from here in The Bahamas.

He reiterated his responsibility in the matter, saying: “At the end of the day, I was CEO of FTX and that means whatever happened, why ever it happened – I had a duty - to make sure the right things happened at the company and clearly I didn’t do a good job at that.”

He said he went from being “excited about the prospects of FTX a month ago” to being “shocked by what happened”.

He said that he “unknowingly comingled funds” and that he was “frankly surprised by how big Alameda’s position [Mr Bankman-Fried’s cryptocurrency trading firm Alameda Research] was which points to another failure of oversight on my part and failure to appoint someone to be chiefly in charge of that, but I wasn’t trying to co-mingle funds”.

So he didn’t know he was mixing funds, he didn’t know the financial position and he didn’t make sure the right things were happening.

What else? Well, he says of Alameda: “I wasn’t running Alameda. I didn’t know exactly what’s going on. I didn’t know the size of their position. A lot of these are things I’ve learned over the last month as I was sort of frantically digging into this on November 6, November 7, November 8. And, obviously, that’s a pretty big mistake I made.”

Another item on the list of things he doesn’t know is whether there was improper access of assets on the exchange.

Then there’s the house reportedly bought for his parents as a luxury vacation home – to that he says “I don’t know the details of the house for my parents, but I knew that it was not intended to be their long-term property – it was intended to be the company’s property.”

That’s a lot of things he doesn’t know – and that’s from his own mouth.

Well, in a series of messages via Twitter with a reporter from Vox, he criticised regulators while also saying “it looks like people wired $8b to Alameda and, oh, god, we basically forgot about the stub account that corresponded to that and so it was never delivered to FTX”.

Then in an interview with a YouTuber he said he reopened withdrawals despite the presence of a court order from the Supreme Court of The Bahamas. He reportedly said in the interview: “I gave a one-day heads up that we were going to do it. They [the Securities Commission of The Bahamas] didn’t say, yes or no. They didn’t respond and then we did it.”

He added: “You do not want to be in a country with a lot of angry people in it and you do not want your company to be incorporated in a country with a lot of angry people in it.”

How breaking a court order without approval was supposed to make anyone less angry, it is hard to tell.

From his own words, it appears Mr Bankman-Fried was clueless with regard to a number of the aspects of his business.

This is already playing out in the courts, although Mr Bankman-Fried has not been arrested as yet despite his ongoing comments.

For those watching, however, it is remarkable to see such explanations playing out over video interviews to international conferences or calls to citizen journalists on YouTube rather than in court of law.

How long that continues to be the case, we can only wait and see.