Thread by @GRDecter

I just listened to the full audio of a phone call with Sam Bankman-Fried, his only recorded interview since FTX declared bankruptcy.

Here’s what Sam said 🧵

This call was from November 16 between SBF and @TiffanyFong_.

The entire audio was just posted on YouTube this morning.

Here are a few of the most interesting parts:

Sam says that the claims about him being the largest Democratic donor are misleading.

He claims to have donated equally to both sides, but many donations to Republicans were “dark money” that didn’t have to be disclosed.

He says that he intentionally made Democratic donations publicly because the media has a liberal bias and would be more favorable to him.

But he still made donations to Republicans in order to gain influence on both sides of the aisle.

Tiffany asked about the alleged “back door” that allowed SBF to take money out of FTX without anyone else at the company being alerted.

Sam says that’s completely untrue, and says that he actually doesn’t know how to code or even use FTX’s backend.

Sam said FTX’s accounting systems were “poorly labeled” which caused him to be wrong on FTX’s liabilities and assets by an “embarrassingly large number”.

But he insists that this entire fiasco was caused by lazy accounting and internal controls, but not fraud.

When FTX first started, customer wire transfers into the exchange went to Alameda by default, just because FTX didn’t have its own bank account yet.

Sam told Tiffany that the “accounting error” was caused by this arrangement that wasn’t properly fixed later.

Sam also said that filing for bankruptcy was a mistake.

“I honest to God believe that if I hadn’t filed for bankruptcy all users would be whole and withdrawals would be on.”

Why?

Because $4 billion in liquidity “appeared” just “8 f*cking minutes” after FTX filed for bankruptcy.

And then Sam claims that he was trying to hand the $4 billion over, but the trustees of the estate would rather “burn it all to the ground out of shame” than try to fix the situation.

He also claims that he’s fighting a jurisdictional battle “between countries” to resolve everything for customers.

In the call, Sam paints himself as the hero trying to do the right thing, but the bureaucratic establishment just won’t let him.

Yeah, okay.

He says that FTX US customers will get “a penny on the dollar” and FTX International customers will get “20 to 25 cents on the dollar” if he doesn’t help anymore.

He implies that he could get customers a much higher amount if the trustees allowed him to help.

However, again Sam seems to be stretching the truth to make himself look better.

He says that FTX customers can be made whole, but he’s using FTX Token (FTT) values from before it crashed.

FTX’s large FTT position can’t be liquidated without crashing the price further.

SBF also has an issue with how everyone online has been dissecting his personal life.

He said on the call that people don’t care about the true, boring story and are instead wasting their time discussing if the FTX employees living in the shared Penthouse are polyamorous.

I’ll keep you updated on anything else interesting I find out.

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