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Sam Bankman-Fried, former CEO and founder of collapsed crypto exchange FTX, is down to $100,000 from the approximately $17 billion he was worth in early November.
In a recent interview with Axios, Bankman-Fried claimed that he currently has around $100,000 in his bank accounts, down by 99% from his net worth of around $17 billion based on calculations by Bloomberg.
“Am I allowed to say a negative number?” he said when asked about his personal finances. “I mean, I have no idea. I don’t know. I had $100,000 in my bank account last I checked,” he said. “It’s complicated. Basically everything I had was just tied up in the company.”
According to SBF’s Forbes profile, most of his wealth was tied up in the ownership of about half of FTX and a share of its FTT tokens. His wealth peaked at an estimated $26.5 billion.
Following the collapse of FTX, Bloomberg called SBF’s loss of fortune “one of history’s greatest-ever destructions of wealth.”
Bankman-Fried owns about 70% of FTX’s US business, which is now essentially worthless. His stake in online brokerage Robinhood, previously valued at more than $500 million, was removed from Bloomberg’s calculation after news reports said that the stake was held through Alameda and may have been used as collateral for loans.
SBF Says Regulation Could Have Helped Prevent FTX Fall
Meanwhile, SBF claimed that proper regulation could have helped prevent the collapse of FTX, saying that he wished “there had been someone who wasn’t me who was in charge of managing conflicts of interest.”
“I think one thing is… if you looked at the reporting, and CFTC applications, that would have been extremely helpful here on international rigor,” Bankman-Fried said.
In fact, SBF has been under extreme criticism for his management of FTX and user funds. James Bromley, a partner at Sullivan & Cromwell who is representing FTX, said during the Delaware Bankruptcy Court last week that the exchange was run as a personal fiefdom of Sam Bankman-Fried.
As reported, FTX lent as much as $10 billion worth of customer assets to fund risky bets by its affiliated trading firm, Alameda Research. Since FTX had $16 billion in customer assets, the exchange had lent more than half of its customer funds.
“I wish I’d been more careful… I obviously deeply regret this. I’ve been focusing on volume, rather than positions for balances,” SBF said. “I should have been more responsible, and I should have been more on top of what was going on.”
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