In the days following FTX’s dramatic exposure as a billion-dollar fraud in 2021, the cryptocurrency exchange’s founder, Sam Bankman-Fried, considered a pivot away from the Democratic Party, to which he gave so much money. During his trial, prosecutors revealed a note in which Bankman-Fried reminded himself to “go on Tucker Carlsen [sic], come out as a republican.”
In his PR disaster for the ages, the linkup with Tucker Carlson never happened. But more than two years later, sitting in the notorious Metropolitan Detention Center in Brooklyn, the convicted fraudster serving 25 years finally had the time to give that interview — in which the ex–Fox News host mostly wanted to gossip about the more famous detainee on Bankman-Fried’s unit.
“Are you hanging with Diddy? I think he’s in there with you,” Carlson asked of the rapper charged with sex trafficking. “He’s been kind to me,” Bankman-Fried said of his new friend.
“If someone told me three years ago that, Oh, you’d be hanging out with Diddy every day, I’d be like, That’s interesting; I wonder how that’s going to happen,” Bankman-Fried mused. “I guess he gets into crypto or something.”
Carlson, who hasn’t always been so nice to Bankman-Fried, then asked why none of the Democrats who received FTX donations came to his aid during his legal ordeal. Bankman-Fried said that around the time his company was exposed, he was starting to flirt more with the Republican Party — which he asserted “probably played a role” in the government’s prosecution of him.
Perhaps Bankman-Fried had forgotten how he was convicted for a smorgasbord of fraud, including using customer deposits to cover his massive trading losses at his investment firm. But his comments suggest he is bummed to be locked up during a golden age of regulators not giving a hoot about crypto anymore. He criticized former Securities and Exchange Commission chair Gary Gensler, calling him a “politically ambitious” partisan who “wanted his agency to get more power even if he didn’t want to do anything with it except block industries.” With Gensler out at the SEC and regulators dropping high-profile cases against Bankman-Fried’s un-incarcerated peers, he said that “there are a lot of good things” that Donald Trump is doing to end the government’s “obstructive role for a decade” on crypto. Alas, he is missing out on the unregulated fun. Poor guy — it’s his birthday today!
