'I'm improvising,' Says Sam Bankman-Fried When Asked Why He's Posting Cryptic Tweets

Founder of embattled cryptocurrency exchange FTX, Sam Bankman Fried, says he doesn’t know why he is posting cryptic tweets on social networking giant Twitter, after his exchange, along with 130 other associated companies filed for bankruptcy.

Bankman-Fried, apparently realizing the magnitude of his crimes, also said it was now time for him to improvise.

He published two cryptic tweets over the weekend, the first reading “What” and the second “H.” On Monday, he tweeted “A,” “P,” “P,” and “E,” apparently beginning to spell out “What happened.”

“It’s going to be more than one word. I’m making it up as I go,” Bankman-Fried said in an interview with The New York Times.

Asked if he was planning to continue posting cryptic tweets, he said, “Something like that.”

Coaxed to further elaborate on the argument he was trying to make, the 30-year-old said, “I don’t know. I’m improvising. I think it’s time.”

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FTX founder says Alameda’s Trading Strategies Had Huge Downside Risks

Bankman-Fried, who is facing probes by several regulatory bodies simultaneously, conceded that the downside risk to the margin position that Alameda had accumulated on FTX was immense and that he should have focused on the workings of FTX’s sister firm in hindsight.

“It was substantially larger than I had thought it was and in fact, the downside risk was very significant,” he said.

“Had I been a bit more concentrated on what I was doing, I would have been able to be more thorough. That would have allowed me to catch what was going on, on the risk side,” he said.

Attacking Binance CEO Was Not A Strategic Move, Acknowledges Bankman Fried

The embattled FTX founder added that he was “very frustrated” with what was happening around him, however, he should have understood that it was not right for him to express everything openly.

“(Attacking Zhao) was not a good strategic move on my part,” he said.

The connection between FTX and Alameda was the cause of Bankman’s fall from grace.

As the son of Stanford Law professors, he established the trading company in 2017 and rented offices in Berkeley, California, not far from where he had grown up.

The business quickly gained millions of dollars by taking advantage of the crypto market’s inefficiencies.

In 2019, Bankman-Fried moved the business to Hong Kong, where the regulatory climate is friendlier.

He relocated with a small group of traders, including Caroline Ellison, a former trader at Jane Street, and launched FTX, a platform for cryptocurrency investors to purchase, sell, and store digital assets.

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