Bankman-Fried trial continues: ‘Listen to the question, and answer the question directly’
Sam Bankman-Fried today returned for his second day in front of the jury, continuing his questioning by lead defence counsel Mark Cohen.
Judge Lewis Kaplan greeted the jury, informing them it was unclear whether the lawyers will finish their cases by Thursday afternoon.
CNN reported that SBF recalled a conversation he had with Caroline Ellison, his ex-girlfriend and then-CEO of Alameda Research, when he said he was worried that if the market decreased another 50 per cent then Alameda would become insolvent.
“She started crying,” he said, “She agreed… that Alameda should have hedged.”
He added that she “offered to step down”, which he said was her decision alone.
According to SBF, the two agreed that the “focus should be urgently putting on the hedges” to prevent Alameda from going bankrupt.
Ellison, who pleaded guilty in cooperation with the government, testified earlier in the trial that she wanted to quit but that Bankman-Fried told her she was “too important” to Alameda.
Having claimed he worked up to 12 hours a day, one “significant and long-running project” on his list was getting FTX’s accounting cleaned up.
He noted that it took “months” every year to get developers and the finance team aligned and that the accounting process was “messy.”
SBF then went on to explain a notorious tweet which stated FTX and its assets were “fine” – this has been central to the government’s argument that he lied to customers and investors about the state of his companies.
He told jurors the tweet was accurate at the time he posted it on the morning of 7 November.
The approximate 50 per cent crash in Alameda’s assets drove the firm’s net asset value from around $10bn to a little bit above zero, SBF testified.
In a hearing outside the presence of the jury last week, prosecutor Danielle Sassoon showed little patience with Bankman-Fried’s meandering answers.
Judge Lewis Kaplan urged SBF to “listen to the question, and answer directly”.
In the last few minutes of today’s trial, Cohen asked SBF about the days immediately after he stepped down as CEO.
“I felt like it was the right thing for me to do,” he said of an interview he gave to George Stephanopoulos on Good Morning America. “I wanted to tell people, tell the world, what I knew.”