From inside a federal prison cell, disgraced crypto mogul Sam Bankman-Fried is making a bid for a White House lifeline.
Speaking exclusively to FOX Business correspondent Susan Li, the convicted FTX founder said he “absolutely” wants a presidential pardon, while declining to say whether his family is currently lobbying the administration on his behalf.
“I assume that you would want a pardon from the White House?” Li asked Bankman-Fried over the phone.
“Absolutely,” he responded. “It would be obviously, you know, ultimately up to the president, not up to me.”
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“But have, say, your parents or anyone that you’ve been in contact with at all?” Li asked.
“I can’t speak for them,” Bankman-Fried said.
In March 2024, the former crypto king was sentenced to 25 years in prison after he was found guilty on two counts of wire fraud and five counts of conspiracy following the collapse of his crypto empire FTX in November 2022. The court also found that FTX customers lost $8 billion, FTX’s equity investors lost $1.7 billion, and lenders to the Alameda Research hedge fund Bankman-Fried founded lost $1.3 billion.
Despite his conviction, Bankman-Fried continued to argue that his prosecution was unjust, pointing to the fact that bankruptcy payouts have increased due in part to the recovery in cryptocurrency markets.
“I didn’t steal user funds either,” he told Li. “Customers have been repaid now 170% or so on their deposits. It’s one of the very few cases where the platform was over-collateralized, where customers were more than made whole. And yet there was, you know, not just a criminal investigation, but a prosecution. And, you know, dozens of years of sentence[s].”
“I can only tell you what I think and, you know, ultimately, customers have been repaid again nearly twice what they had on the platform,” Bankman-Fried said, “and it’s a great disservice to them that it has taken three years.”
Bankman-Fried also said he regrets missing out on the artificial intelligence boom and praised Elon Musk’s business acumen.
When asked about his fear of missing out, Bankman-Fried said: “It’s a concern I have. You know, there’s a lot that I did try and position, you know, obviously as a platform towards the future, but my venture fund as well, and to try and play a role in that. I’d certainly much rather be, you know, able to help that out from the outside than in here where there’s very little I can do.”
“I think SpaceX has extremely large potential,” he said. “There are some parallels here where… frankly, there are very few companies that are well positioned to play a large role in the space industry. It’s one of those very few companies and I foresee it having an extremely large amount of upside, you know, even from where it is today, let alone where it was when we invested. And, you know, very few people have been able to grow companies like Elon has.”
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