New Audio Recording of FTX CEO SBF Revealed, Heard for the First Time After the Crash: Here’s What He Said!

It collapsed with chain reactions earlier this month. cryptocurrency Sam Bankman-Fried, CEO of his empire FTX, made a new statement on the subject in the shared audio recording.

After strings of cryptic tweets and a viral DM exchange with a Vox reporter in which he said “fuck the regulators” and admitted that his philanthropic identity was largely fabricated for PR reasons, Bankman-Fried’s true voice was revealed for the first time since the collapse of FTX by Tiff Fong’s newly released has been heard.

Tiff Fong, once a regular crypto investor, also recently leaked an audio recording about the bankrupt crypto firm Celsius.

SBF’s November 16 Speech Leaked

In a phone call with Fong on November 16, just two days after FTX filed for bankruptcy protection, SBF reiterated many of the defenses it had previously shared elsewhere and the rationale for its behavior to explain what went wrong.

In the interview in the audio recording, SBF reiterated its defense that it had a wrong perception of how leveraged it was.

This explanation was not entirely satisfactory as it did not fully address how FTX and Alameda embezzled billions of dollars in FTX user deposits.

“If you always make the right decisions, you won’t end up in the situation I was in,” the SBF said.

SBF’s lawyers were dissatisfied with the statements he made in the days after the bankruptcy. According to the SBF’s statement, his lawyers had asked him to promise that he would “not say he screwed things up again”. Sam Bankman-Fried claimed that he had replied to his lawyers, “to hell with it”.

In the phone call, Bankman-Fried provided some insight as to why it has briefly reopened withdrawals for Bahamas residents, where only he and FTX are located, after shutting down the FTX platform.

FTX CEO Addresses Opening Withdrawals Only to Bahamas Citizens After Crash

FTX had originally claimed that this was to comply with requests from Bahamian regulators. The Bahamian government objected to this, and in a meeting with Fong, Bankman-Fried also denied it:

“I gave the Bahamian government one day’s notice that we were going to do this. They didn’t say yes or no. They didn’t respond and so we did. I did this because it was critical for the stock market to have a future.

You don’t want to be in a country with a lot of angry people, and you don’t want your company to be founded in a country with a lot of angry people. This was our attempt to come up with a forward regulatory pathway for the stock market to appease the citizens of the country we are currently in.”

“I don’t even know how to code, it’s impossible to set up a backdoor in the company”

Regarding whether it created a “backdoor” to move user funds to Alameda unnoticed, as reported by Reuters, Bankman-Fried said, “I certainly didn’t set up a backdoor there, and I don’t know exactly what they mean.”

Bankman-Fried said he “could not have built a backdoor because he didn’t even know how to code,” but that defense doesn’t really address Reuters’ core claim, that it’s using a backdoor, not that it’s building a backdoor.

“I finally started to trust my instincts on matters like this,” the SBF said, as to why he made statements rather than remain silent on the matter.

*Not investment advice.