In October 2023, a jury found Sam Bankman-Fried guilty on seven counts of defrauding FTX customers and investors.
The conviction was front page news for several days.
Nearly to a man, the verdict was and is broadly regarded as well-deserved comeuppance.
However, recent – less widely reported – documents confirm the FTX money has been “found” and all FTX customers and creditors will be more than 100% repaid.
In May, post-bankruptcy FTX CEO John J. Ray, III said FTX customers and creditors will “recover between 118% and 142% of their Petition Date claim values.”
This unexpected and unusual outcome has generally been overshadowed by the news - which came out about the same time - that the judge in the case sentenced SBF to 25 years.
Last fall, at the time of the trial, one prominent detractor from the villainous view was Michael Lewis.
On the same day SBF’s trail started, Lewis - of Moneyball and The Blind Side fame – published Going Infinite, the Rise and Fall of a New Tycoon.
In Going Infinite, over nearly 300 pages, Lewis sympathetically portrays SBF as the spectrum-ish shambolic hero of Effective Altruism who realized too late how far his competitors would go to break FTX (particularly also-disgraced Binance founder Changpeng Zhao).
Lewis describes how SBF, in his perennial costume of rumpled cargo shorts and a not exactly clean FTX t-shirt, would fly to DC and lobby congressional staffers for his Effective Altruism agenda - even as he was briskly building a global bitcoin trading behemoth.
A term first coined in 2011 by a group of Oxford philosophers, a core tenant of Effective Altruism is making as much money as possible with the sole aim of giving it away to causes that scientifically and objectively most benefit humanity.
SBF seems to have been hopelessly un-greedy by Wall Street standards. Driving a Toyota Corolla and living in an apartment with 9 roomies on the same property as FXT HQ (ok, yes, in the Bahamas), he gave and pledged over $300M to Effective Altruism-related causes and was touted as the most generous billionaire in the world.
Today, as FTX investors and creditors begin to get their refunds with interest, SBF remains a convicted felon, apparently playing prison ping pong like a bad ass whilst serving the 2nd year of his quarter-century sentence.
For comparison, Theranos’ Elizabeth Holmes in serving an 11-year sentence for giving blood tests that misdiagnosed everything from diabetes to cancer and whose $600M of creditors will get…squat.
Lewis’ unpopular take on SBF nearly got the best-selling author cancelled. However, perhaps in light of the final outcome, Lewis' view deserves a second chance.
