Jury sees FTX ads with Tom Brady, Larry David in founder's trial
Splashy advertisements featuring football star Tom Brady and comedian Larry David were among the first evidence seen by jurors Wednesday as prosecutors launched a historic fraud case against cryptocurrency maven Sam Bankman-Fried, depicting him as a villain who portrayed himself as the Robin Hood of the crypto world.
Assistant U.S. Attorney Nathan Rehn said in his opening statement in Manhattan federal court that it was only a year ago that Bankman-Fried seemed to be “on top of the world,” operating the multibillion dollar company he founded,
FTX, a seemingly pioneering cryptocurrency trading platform.
Rehn said the 31-yearold lived in a $30 million apartment in the Bahamas, jetted around the world on private planes, socialized with celebrities and spent billions of dollars as he flaunted power and made big political donations to gain influence in Washington over cryptocurrency regulation.
The prosecutor, though, said that the son of two Stanford law professors was not as he seemed.
“Sam Bankman-Fried was committing a massive fraud by taking billions of dollars from thousands of victims,” Rehn said. When his businesses were collapsing, he backdated documents
and tried to cover up his crimes by deleting messages and ordering employees to automatically delete all messages every month, the prosecutor said.
Adam Yedidia, one of the trial's first witnesses, supported the government's claims when he testified that he met Bankman-Fried and they became “longtime friends” when they were both students at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology before they worked and lived together in the Bahamas.
Yedidia said he quit FTX and stopped talking to Bankman-Fried when he learned in early November of last year that BankmanFried had used FTX customer deposits to pay back creditors of Alameda Research, Bankman-Fried's crypto hedge fund.
On the stand, Yedidia confirmed he was testifying under an immunity order that will prevent him from being prosecuted as long as he testifies truthfully. He said the protection seemed necessary because, as an FTX developer, he might have unwittingly written code that contributed to a crime. His testimony will continue Thursday.
Bankman-Fried became a target of investigators when FTX collapsed last November amid a rush of customers seeking to recover their deposits, less than a year after BankmanFried spent millions of dollars on the 2022 Super Bowl with celebrity advertisements promoting FTX as the “safest and easiest way to buy and sell crypto.”
David, along with other celebrities including Brady and basketball star Stephen Curry, have been named in a lawsuit that argued their celebrity status made them culpable for promoting the firm's failed business model.