Sam Bankman-Fried Implied His Friends Lied About His Role in FTX’s Collapse

Sam didn’t do it. He didn’t defraud anyone, he didn’t steal customer funds – he just built a company which “turned out basically the opposite” of the product he envisioned when he founded FTX: “A lot of people got hurt – customers, employees – and the company ended up in bankruptcy.” At least, that’s his story.

“The biggest mistake was we did not have a dedicated risk management team, we didn’t have a chief risk officer,” he told the court Friday. “We had a number of people who were involved to some extent in managing risk, but no one dedicated to it, and there were significant oversights.”

Bankman-Fried – finally – took the stand to try and convince the 17 people overseeing his criminal fraud trial that FTX and Alameda Research’s collapse were the result of screw-ups and errors, and of his hand-picked lieutenants’ screw-ups and errors – not a deliberate fraud committed by the 31-year-old. Bankman-Fried’s testimony echoed key parts of his attorney Mark Cohen’s opening statement from the beginning of this month – issues happened because ex-Alameda CEO Caroline Ellison didn’t hedge, because FTX was a fast-moving company doing big things quickly, because a number of market shocks hit and because Sam was just one person who couldn’t be everywhere or do anything. We got a preview of sorts on Thursday, but Friday was the first time we saw Bankman-Fried really present his own case for why he shouldn’t go to jail.

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The first half of Friday’s testimony was basically “A History of FTX, presented by Samuel Bankman-Fried.” For those following the case over the past year, nothing new. For those of us who have been tracking FTX since its founding, maybe a bit of useful detail but basically really nothing new. But we’re not the intended audience – the jury is. One audience member in the overflow room, who said she did not have much familiarity with FTX or Bankman-Fried, said she found it useful. And I overheard a few people at the end of the day Friday say they found Bankman-Fried’s version of events plausible.

Shortly after lunch, Bankman-Fried’s defense team’s strategy continued to…