FTX crypto clown pins blame on ex
It’s all the ex-girlfriend’s fault! Disgraced crypto mogul Sam Bankman-Fried shifted blame for the collapse of his company FTX to the trading firm run by his ex-girlfriend, Caroline Ellison.
Bankman-Fried is under intense pressure to address his decision to funnel $10 billion in FTX client funds to prop up Alameda Research, where Ellison — a 28-year-old professed “Harry Potter” enthusiast who has tweeted about taking amphetamines — served as CEO.
Of that money, at least $1 billion in customer funds is still missing.
Bankman-Fried insisted in an interview with Vox that his claim FTX didn’t “invest client assets” was “factually accurate” because Alameda Research, not FTX, actually made the investments. Bankman-Fried added that he “also thought Alameda had enough collateral to reasonable [sic] cover it.”
Bankman-Fried sidestepped the fact that his company FTX
Group also owned Alameda Research and that FTX had transferred the funds used to cover Alameda’s purported risky bets.
Bankman-Fried and Ellison were reportedly part of a group of 10 roommates that controlled operations at FTX and Alameda from a penthouse in the Bahamas. The group was said to be romantically entangled, with some online speculation asserting they were a “polycule,” or network of polyamorous relationships.
A Tumblr post reportedly written by Ellison said that her preferred circumstance “is best characterized as something like ‘imperial Chinese harem.’ None of this non-hierarchical bulls--t; everyone should have a ranking of their partners, people should know where they fall on the ranking, and there should be vicious power struggles for the higher ranks.”
FTX faced a liquidity crunch that led to its downfall following a bombshell report that Alameda was the main investor in FTT, a token offered by FTX — suggesting that the only “value” in the company was from itself.
The platform quickly ran out of cash as customers scrambled to offload their holdings.
Nevertheless, Bankman-Fried in the interview unleashed a tirade against regulators, called “ethics” a “dumb game we woke Westerners play,” and insisted his biggest mistake was filing for bankruptcy.
“I f--ked up. Big. Multiple times,” the fallen 30-year-old cryptocurrency mogul admitted to Vox’s Kelsey Piper in a Twitter confessional.
“You know what was maybe my biggest single f--kup? The one thing everyone told me to do. Chapter 11,” he said, claiming that “everything would be ~70% right now if I hadn’t” declared bankruptcy.
“Instead I filed, and the people in charge of [the company] are trying to burn it all to the ground out of shame,” he complained.
Bankman-Fried — who is believed to be hiding out in the Bahamas — blamed “messy accounting” for how his hedge fund, Alameda Research, had borrowed money from FTX’s balance sheet for investments.
“I didn’t realize [the] full size of it until a few weeks ago,” he wrote, saying it “was messier and more organic” than simply lending out customer funds.
“Each step was in isolation rational and reasonable, and then we finally added it up last week and it wasn’t,” he wrote.
He maintained that he “didn’t want to do sketchy stuff.”
“And I didn’t mean to. Each individual decision seemed fine, and I didn’t realize how big their sum was until the end,” he said.
“It was never the intention” to get away with it, he said, adding: “Sometimes life creeps up on you.”
Meanwhile, another old Tumblr post by Ellison said of her business, “I didn’t get into this as a crypto true believer. It’s mostly scams and memes when you get down to it.”