Sam Bankman-Fried’s tweets have come again to hang-out him.
As prospects raced to withdraw their cash from his embattled FTX cryptocurrency alternate practically one yr in the past, Bankman-Fried tried to cease the run on the financial institution with a message to his greater than 1mn followers: “FTX is ok. Property are advantageous.”
In testimony on Friday, FTX co-founder Gary Wang, one in all Bankman-Fried’s closest mates, mentioned the message was a lie: “No . . . FTX was not advantageous,” he instructed jurors. “Property weren’t advantageous.”
Prosecutors have seized on this and different posts from the fallen billionaire’s prolific Twitter account as they attempt to persuade a New York jury that Bankman-Fried lied to the general public, his prospects, lenders and traders, about secret dealings that permit his personal buying and selling agency, Alameda, raid billions in FTX buyer cash.
As Bankman-Fried’s trial received beneath approach this week, prosecutors many times confirmed the jury screenshots of his posts on Twitter, since renamed X, and contrasted the general public statements with insider testimony from Bankman-Fried’s closest associates.
Wang, who has pleaded responsible and is co-operating with the federal government, described how the evening earlier than he had helped Bankman-Fried to pin down precisely how a lot cash Alameda owed to FTX prospects. “The alternate was quick $8bn,” he mentioned.
Offered with a second tweet, the place Bankman-Fried reassured prospects that “FTX has sufficient to cowl all consumer holdings”, Wang once more mentioned that his buddy had lied.
“FTX didn’t the truth is have sufficient property to cowl all consumer holdings,” Wang instructed the jury.
The panel of 12 jurors and 6 alternates features a retired funding banker at Salomon Brothers, two Metro North prepare conductors, and a skilled accountant who’s the workplace supervisor for her husband’s landscaping enterprise.
They should resolve whether or not the pallid 31-year-old Bankman-Fried, sitting just a few toes from them on the defence desk, is known as a grasp legal, or only a spectacularly failed entrepreneur.
Bankman-Fried, who faces a lifetime in jail, has pleaded not responsible and maintains his innocence. His legal professionals mentioned in opening arguments he had made errors within the rush to construct FTX right into a $40bn firm on the forefront of the crypto business, however that Bankman-Fried had acted in “good religion” with out the intent to defraud anybody.
The trial, which has turn out to be a check case for efforts by the US authorities to stamp out the freewheeling offshore cryptocurrency business, will hinge on the private relationships and intimate conversations of a handful of Bankman-Fried’s oldest mates and closest enterprise associates.
The temper within the twenty sixth flooring courtroom in decrease Manhattan was tense as Wang — who first met Bankman-Fried at a highschool summer season programme for presented maths college students and lived with him in school at MIT — walked swiftly previous the defence desk to take his seat on the witness stand.
When the prosecutors requested him to determine Bankman-Fried within the courtroom, Wang strained out of his seat to see his former buddy among the many sea of legal professionals.
Bankman-Fried was emotionless all through the week’s testimony, tapping intensely on a laptop computer and avoiding eye contact with the witnesses. Wang might be cross-examined on Tuesday. One of the crucial awaited witnesses, Caroline Ellison, his one-time girlfriend and Alameda’s CEO, will take the stand early subsequent week, prosecutors mentioned.
“That’s completely devastating testimony,” mentioned Daniel Silva, a former federal prosecutor at regulation agency Buchalter. “The federal government has a compelling case . . . It is a nice story. It’s a film script in an indictment.”
Juxtaposing this testimony with Bankman-Fried’s tweets has turn out to be a strong software for the federal government. The jury noticed a tweet from July 2019 the place Bankman-Fried mentioned Alameda’s account on FTX was “similar to everybody else’s”.
However Wang testified that on the identical day, FTX had applied modifications within the bowels of its laptop code that gave Alameda limitless rights to borrow from FTX — one in all a number of distinctive privileges he helped hardwire into the alternate.
The jury additionally heard from an FTX buyer, a London-based cocoa dealer, who mentioned Bankman-Fried’s assurance within the November tweets led him to go away his funds on the alternate till it was too late.
Matt Huang, an investor at VC agency Paradigm, which put $278mn into FTX, testified that his agency had requested in regards to the alternate’s relationship with Alameda earlier than investing and was instructed that Alameda obtained no particular therapy.
Prosecutors have additionally tried to determine that Bankman-Fried knew about and orchestrated Alameda’s secret entry to buyer cash for years earlier than the alternate collapsed.
Wang testified to conversations about Alameda’s borrowing way back to 2019. He described how the crash in crypto costs in spring 2022 prompted a number of third-party crypto lenders to demand reimbursement of loans from Alameda.
He walked the jury by way of a spreadsheet the place he had calculated Alameda’s money owed to FTX in June 2022 at $11bn, and described a gathering on the alternate’s Bahamas workplace the place Bankman-Fried requested in regards to the calculations earlier than instructing Ellison to repay the third-party loans.
“The cash finally got here from FTX prospects,” Wang mentioned. “We mentioned publicly that we might not use buyer funds like this.”
Requested who he meant by “we”, Wang mentioned merely: “Sam”.