He added, “My useful life is probably over. It’s been over for a while now, from before my arrest.”
Wearing his khaki-coloured prison uniform and chained at the ankles, Bankman-Fried seemed to briefly get emotional as he spoke for about 20 minutes, expressing regret about “a lot of mistakes” but casting some blame onto others. His trademark messy and bushy hair had returned from the trimmer look he displayed at trial.
He praised some of his former executives and workmates, saying: “They threw themselves into it and then I threw all of that away. It haunts me every day.”
Kaplan later criticized Bankman-Fried’s remarks, saying he expressed “never a word of remorse for the commission of terrible crimes.”
As his misty-eyed client looked on, defence attorney Marc Mukasey said the portrayal of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology graduate as an “arrogant greedy swindler who thought he would get away with fleecing the hard-earned money of hard-working people” was wrong.
“Sam was not a ruthless financial serial killer who set out every morning to hurt people,” Mukasey said in court after urging in court papers that any prison sentence be in the single digits. “Sam Bankman-Fried doesn’t make decisions with malice in his heart. He makes decisions with math in his head.”
The judge later criticized Bankman-Fried’s calculations, saying he was indeed “a math nerd, who looked at decisions in terms of math, expected value.”
He cited trial testimony in which Bankman-Fried’s former girlfriend and fellow executive Caroline Ellison said Bankman-Fried once told her that his willingness to embrace risk was such that he’d be happy to flip a coin if it came up tails and the world was destroyed — as long as if it came up heads, the world would be twice as good.
The judge said Bankman-Fried utilized that risk-taking nature at his companies, “betting on expected value” and weighing the risk of getting caught with the probability of large gains.
“That was the game,” Kaplan said. “It’s his nature.”
Bankman-Fried’s attorneys, friends and family had urged leniency, saying he was unlikely to re-offend. They also said FTX’s investors have largely recovered their funds — a claim disputed by bankruptcy lawyers, FTX and its creditors.
“Mr. Bankman-Fried continues to live a life of delusion,” wrote John Ray, the CEO of FTX who has been cleaning up the bankrupt company. “The ‘business’ he left on November 11, 2022, was neither solvent nor safe.”
One FTX customer, Sunil Kavuri, spoke at the sentencing, saying he’d travelled from London on behalf of over 200 victims who had sent impact statements to the judge.
He said he’d spoken to other “victims just like myself who had their dreams destroyed” and had lived “the FTX nightmare every day for almost two years, every day, every night, a lot of crying sleepless nights.”
Bankman-Fried’s parents, both Stanford Law School professors, did not speak as they left the courthouse Thursday, but later issued a statement: “We are heartbroken and will continue to fight for our son.”
Bankman-Fried, of Palo Alto, California, was once worth billions of dollars on paper as the co-founder and CEO of FTX, which was the second-largest cryptocurrency exchange in the world at one time.
FTX let investors buy dozens of virtual currencies, from Bitcoin to more obscure ones like Shiba Inu Coin. Flush with billions of dollars of investors’ cash, Bankman-Fried took out a Super Bowl advertisement to promote his business and bought the naming rights to an arena in Miami.
But the collapse of cryptocurrency prices in 2022 took its toll on FTX, ultimately leading to its downfall. FTX’s hedge fund affiliate, Alameda Research, had bought billions of dollars of various crypto investments that lost considerable amounts of value in 2022. Bankman-Fried tried to plug the holes in Alameda’s balance sheet with FTX customer funds.
Three people from Bankman-Fried’s inner circle pleaded guilty to related crimes and testified at his trial.
Besides Ellison, two onetime friends of Bankman-Fried — Gary Wang and Nishad Singh — testified they felt they were directed by Bankman-Fried to commit fraud.
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