Sam Bankman-Fried, the former CEO of the failed FTX crypto exchange, was back in a New York courtroom at his criminal trial on Monday, where his lawyer, Mark Cohen, finished up the direct examination that started last week. Recounting the first week of November a year ago as users started to pull funds off the exchange, Bankman-Fried said he thought the company and sister trading firm Alameda Research could still be saved.
In October 2022, Bankman-Fried said he started compiling a list of all Alameda accounts at FTX and found that the overall net asset value was around $10 billion. Alameda's liabilities did not seem catastrophic to Bankman-Fried at that point, he said, adding that if they had been larger, he "would call it a crisis."
In June 2022, he recalled talking to Ellison at the luxury apartment they and other FTX executives shared in the Bahamas. According to Bankman-Fried, he told Ellison that if the market went down another 50%, Alameda might become insolvent. She agreed and started crying, he added, then offered to step down as a CEO, which Bankman-Fried neither approved nor disapproved, he told the court.