Getty Image / Tom Williams / CQ-Roll Call, Inc
Former FTX CEO Sam Bankman-Fried was worth as much as $26 billion a year ago and very recently had an estimated net worth of $16 billion. That is until the house of cards came crashing down and he lost more money in a single day than any billionaire in history since those stats have started being tracked.
The collapse of FTX and Sam Bankman-Fried has been the biggest story in tech over the past month. And that’s saying A LOT with all of the Elon Musk-Twitter chaos erupting every other hour. But SBF was being lifted up on a pedestal as the ‘next Warren Buffett’ until his net worth evaporated in an instant.
Against the advice of his lawyers, Sam Bankman-Fried was a speaker this week at the New York Times’s DealBook conference. SBF told the audience his lawyers told him to stay silent and “recede into a hole.” But he’s choosing to ignore their advice, saying, “That’s not who I am, I have a duty to talk.”
While he didn’t speak in depth about the comingling of funds between FTX and Alameda, he joked that he’s “had a bad month” and got laughs from the audience. Then went on to say that he’s nearly ‘broke’, though SBF’s version of ‘broke’ is VERY different than most people’s version of ‘broke’.
Mr. Bankman-Fried also said the crisis had reduced his net worth to about $100,000. “I don’t have any hidden funds,” he said. “I put everything I had into FTX.”
Here he is saying it on camera during Good Morning America
One might wonder how the former FTX CEO went from overseeing a reported $300 million in The Bahamas real estate to only having an estimated $100K to his name. The NYT article briefly addressed that as well:
FTX has also come under scrutiny for how it spent money, including a $300 million outlay on real estate in the Bahamas. At the conference, Mr. Bankman-Fried defended the spending, saying he was trying to recruit top-level talent to the Bahamas.
But he declined to speak in detail about his possible criminal liability. “There’s a time and a place for me to think about myself and my own future,” he said. “I don’t think this is it.”
Now I’m no Princeton mathematician, but last I checked that ‘estimated $100,000’ is a lot less when you factor in the $55,319 unpaid bill at the Margaritaville Beach Resort in Nassau, The Bahamas. Stand-up individuals, real men, don’t walk out on their bar tabs and leave them unpaid. So he’ll need to quickly remedy that $55K+ bill from the $100,000 he estimates he’s currently worth.
Of course, it is peculiar for him to discuss having ‘$100,000 in his bank account the last time (he) checked’ when investors are missing billions of dollars.