TALES OF THE ‘CRYPT’
Exec: SBF ‘insecure’
A top FTX executive who resigned from Sam Bankman-Fried’s doomed cryptocurrency exchange just weeks before it went belly up says the mogul was an “insecure” manager who brooked no dissent.
Brett Harrison, who headed the US affiliate of the now-bankrupt Bahamas-based company, said that Bankman-Fried was consumed by “total insecurity and intransigence when his decisions were questioned” and that he displayed “spitefulness.”
“I realized he wasn’t who I remembered,” Harrison tweeted about BankmanFried, who is under house arrest in Palo Alto, Calif., while awaiting trial on federal fraud and money-laundering charges. BankmanFried, 30, has pleaded not guilty.
Harrison posted a lengthy tweet thread describing his final days at the firm, which went from being worth more than $26 billion at its heights to filing for bankruptcy protection this past November. “My relationship with Sam Bankman-Fried and his deputies had reached a point of total deterioration, after months of disputes over management practices at FTX,” Harrison tweeted Saturday.
FTX’s collapse was triggered by rival Binance’s decision to dump its holdings in FTT, the in-house digital token created by Bankman-Fried’s company.
It was later learned that FTX was using customer deposits to cover risky bets made by BankmanFried’s hedge fund, Alameda Research. After FTX declared bankruptcy, a new CEO was installed to help investors and creditors claw back billions of dollars.
‘Prideful’ boss
Harrison, who spent less than 18 months as president of FTX US, is not facing any criminal charges. He said he quickly noticed signs of trouble during his brief tenure. “From the start, I noticed that while Sam was rarely engaged on the US business, decisions impacting the US would come, without warning, from the Bahamas,” he tweeted.
Harrison said it was in the first six months of his tenure that “cracks began to form in my own relationship with Sam.”
“Standing up to an insecure, prideful manager is hard under any circumstance. But it’s nearly impossible when every day, every major voice of culture and commerce deafens you with a narrative that implies if you disagree with your manager *you* clearly must be wrong.”