And if you were wondering how he squared those values with all the lying he allegedly did during his time at FTX, wonder no more: the answer is utilitarianism.
I glanced over at his parents, Joseph Bankman and Barbara Fried, to see what they made of this; both appeared to be busy scribbling into legal pads. Sam Bankman-Fried, the founder of failed cryptocurrency exchange FTX, has been found guilty on seven counts including charges of wire fraud. Though she answered her questions with the attitude of a student trying to get an A in a difficult class, during court sidebars — where the lawyers bickered with each other in front of the judge and out of earshot of the rest of us — she slumped into herself, looking forlorn.
That made sense. The text messages we saw suggested she made few consequential moves without first consulting Bankman-Fried — not exactly a real CEO.
Amid the chaos, lenders started demanding their funds back. We saw Telegram chats with employees at Genesis, a crypto lender, which was asking Alameda to return its money. There was a tick-tock of Alameda getting its loans called by lenders across the board. FTX customer funds had been used to pay off those loans, she testified. The problem is that putting those funds in an investment portfolio is still stealing the funds. In order to prove fraud occurred, the prosecution must show that Bankman-Fried knowingly lied.
And Bankman-Fried was cagey about what he put in print. He had the company set their Slack and Signal messages to disappear, resulting in a lot of blank Signal chats in previous court exhibits, and again today. She violated that rule with a set of memos about their relationship. Later, Bankman-Fried would literally leak them to that paper. This is where the justified lying came in. The one we saw was dated June 19th, Some of the money that Alameda had borrowed from FTX was put in long-term loans — a second lie on top of the first, since customers could withdraw at any time.
