How Sam Bankman-Fried thought he could win it all back
As Sam Bankman-Fried’s criminal trial gets back underway on Thursday, things feel oddly settled on the legal front. The prosecution and its array of insider witnesses have established beyond any reasonable doubt that Bankman-Fried coordinated the frenetic embezzlement and misuse of customer funds. Barring some truly dramatic revelation or supremely canny tactic by a defense that has so far shown no such capacities, Bankman-Fried will likely be found guilty by a jury of his peers within no more than a few weeks. But the very certainty of the legal case invites a much more difficult question: what was Sam Bankman-Fried’s plan? Bankman-Fried spent, invested, gave away, or otherwise disposed of a gargantuan portion of the funds c US tomers had entr US ted him with. While crypto market volatility helped expose that activity, what could have possibly been his goal in flinging assets into the ether with such seeming abandon? What, even in an ideal world, was the FTX endgame? One of the cl...