In his first public interview since the collapse of FTX, CEO Sam Bankman-Fried has revealed that his net worth is now “close to nothing.”
He made the admission in a live interview on Tuesday at DealBook Summit with the New York Times’ Andrew Ross Sorkin.
SBF called in from the Bahamas, where he operated his FTX empire. When asked by Sorkin how much money Bankman-Fried now had at his disposal, the disgraced founder answered, “by my knowledge, close to nothing.”
“I don’t have any hidden funds here, everthing I have I’m disclosing. I think I have one working credit card left, it might be $100,000 or something like that in that bank account. Everything I had, even all the loans I had, those were things I was reinvesting. I put everything I had in FTX.”
FTX was once worth more than $32 billion US, entered bankruptcy protection on Nov. 11 after a whirlwind series of days that saw it go from trying to solve a liquidity crunch by merging with a rival, to having that deal fall apart and succumbing to a run on the bank as traders pulled out $6 billion in funds within three days.
Binance founder Changpeng Zhao, aka CZ, tweeted on Nov. 6 that his exchange, the biggest in the world, would be selling its substantial FTT reserves.
That was the beginning of a chaotic series events that saw CZ announce an intention to buy FTX followed by him rescinding the offer after reviewing FTX’s finances, the closure of Alameda Research, and FTX and FTX.US filing for bankruptcy.
Alameda Research was discovered to be $8 billion in debt, with FTX transfering customer funds to Alameda to plug the hole, leading to the exchange’s inability to service customer withdrawls.
Filings show the company owes almost $10 billion to various creditors, and at least $1 billion worth of customer deposits are missing.
“I didn’t ever try to commit fraud on anyone,” he told Sorkin, “I didn’t knowingly co-mingle funds.”
