Sam Bankman-Fried Says Fortune Has Dwindled to $100,000 After FTX Collapse

Sam Bankman-Fried speaks onstage during the first annual Moonlight Gala benefiting CARE, Children With Special Needs, in New York City, on June 23, 2022. (Craig Barritt/Getty Images for CARE For Special Children)

The former CEO of the failed cryptocurrency exchange FTX claims his personal wealth has dwindled to just $100,000 after a series of “mistakes” led to the company—once valued at $32 billion—collapsing.

While speaking during the New York Times DealBook Summit on Nov. 30, Sam Bankman-Fried admitted that he clearly had failed “to do a good job” at following through with his duty to stakeholders, customers, creditors, and employees at the cryptocurrency exchange.

“Clearly, I ... I made a lot of mistakes or things I would give anything to be able to do over again,” said Bankman-Fried, appearing virtually from the Bahamas, where FTX is headquartered.

The 30-year-old once had a net worth of nearly $27 billion, while FTX was once valued at $32 billion after raising $400 million from investors.

Since its collapse earlier this month, multiple questions have been raised regarding billions in missing funds. An investigation into the collapse of the company has since been launched by financial regulators and authorities in both the United States and the Bahamas.

When asked what his personal wealth was following the downfall of his company, and whether or not he had “put any money away,” Bankman-Fried stated that he doesn’t have any “hidden funds here.”

“Everything I have, I’m disclosing and, you know, I’m, I’m down to ... I think I have one working credit card left,” Bankman-Fried said. “I think it, I think it might be $100,000 or something like that in, in that bank account. And, I mean, I, you know, everything that I had, even all the loans I had were, those, you know, those were all things that I was reinvesting in, in the businesses that ... I had put everything I had into FTX.”

Lack of FTX Oversight, Regulation

Bankman-Fried reiterated his claims of having just $100,000 left in his bank account in a separate interview with Axios on Nov. 30.

“I mean, I have no idea. I don’t know. I had $100,000 in my bank account last I checked,” he said, adding that “basically everything I had was just tied up in the company.”

FTX is currently going through bankruptcy proceedings after filing for Chapter 11 on Nov. 11, following a liquidity crisis and an abandoned potential rescue deal by larger rival Binance that ultimately saw traders pull billions from the platform.

Bankman-Fried also noted that a lack of proper oversight and regulation has contributed to FTX’s collapse, pointing to huge management failures, oversight failures, transparency failures, and failures in reporting.

“I think that a lot of it was on the risk management side,” he said.

In late November, the Royal Bahamas Police said that they are looking into the collapse of FTX and whether or not any “criminal misconduct occurred.

When questioned by The New York Times whether he had committed any fraud at FTX, Bankman-Fried stressed that while he had made a lot of mistakes, he “didn’t ever try to commit fraud on anyone.”

“I was excited about the prospects of FTX a month ago. I saw it as a thriving, growing business. I was shocked by what happened this month,” he said.

Elsewhere this month, James Bromley, an attorney representing FTX, told a Wilmington, Delaware, bankruptcy court that the former CEO had treated FTX as his own “personal fiefdom,” adding that the now worthless company had been “in the control of a small group of inexperienced and unsophisticated individuals and, unfortunately, the evidence seems to indicate that some or all of them are also compromised individuals.”