The Biggest Move of Sam Bankman-Fried's Career

There is the security of knowing one has a statistically smaller chance of getting shot with an arrow. And then there is the security of knowing that there are people who will care deeply if one is.

—David Graeber and David Wengrow, The Dawn of Everything

The government has rested its seemingly impregnable case in the trial of United States of America v. Sam Bankman-Fried, a/k/a “SBF.” 

By all accounts, mincemeat has been made of the vegan would-be altruist. After weeks of testimony from Sam Bankman-Fried’s colleagues, it now seems undeniable that SBF knew that $9 billion had funneled from his FTX customers into his personal hedge fund. 

All that remains for Bankman-Fried’s defense, according to former federal prosecutor Rebecca Mermelstein, is a Hail Mary. His lawyers must seed some kind of jury nullification, spinning a yarn so beguiling that the jury decides that, while SBF clearly broke laws, those archaic laws, relics from the snoozer finance days before bitcoin, are too stupid or Sam is too awesome for him to be anything other than guilty of nothing. To make this last stand, presumably, SBF himself is going to take the stand possibly today—a rare move in a fraud case but perhaps the little lord’s only shot. Take me as I am. 

Perhaps he should have considered an insanity plea. It’s not clear whether Sam Bankman-Fried’s cognitive eccentricities add up to a court-worthy diagnosis, but if sanity has something to do with “knowing right from wrong,” SBF himself, in his many reflections on ethics, has said the distinction bedevils him. And then there’s his self-described soullessness.

“I don’t really have a soul,” he wrote in 2021, as reported in Michael Lewis’s Going Infinite. “My empathy is fake, my feelings are fake, my facial reactions are fake.” 

“[I don’t] really respect anyone else,” he continued. “[I am] constantly thinking really offensive things.”