Days after his crypto empire collapsed in November 2021, Sam Bankman-Fried was already contemplating his comeback by working the media.
One of his top priorities? “Go on Tucker Carlsen, come out as a republican,” SBF wrote in a typo-filled document to himself revealed by federal prosecutors on Friday. The prolific Democratic donor — in fact, the second-largest donor to the Biden 2020 campaign — would say that he was actually on the other team and the whole thing was an act. He would explain that “while public contributions show one thing, you see another thing [when] including super pacs,” then “come out against the woke agenda,” and then “talk about how the cartel of lawyers is destroying value and throwing entrepreneurs under the bus in order to cover up the incompetence of lawyers.”
The document is undated, but it is among filings made by prosecutors to the court less than two weeks before SBF is set to be sentenced on seven counts of fraud and conspiracy. The former crypto king was convicted last year of a scheme to move $9 billion of customer funds from his cryptocurrency exchange, FTX, to prop up his personal hedge fund, Alameda Research. He faces more than a century in prison, though his lawyers are hoping for a maximum of six and a half years and prosecutors are seeking 60 years. (He’s already been in jail for more than a year for leaking his ex’s diary entries.) The document is evidence, prosecutors say, that SBF was a master manipulator, particularly when it comes to using his public image for his personal benefit, and that he should not be spared because of it.
Ever since FTX’s collapse, SBF has been accused of manipulating the media in order to secure his rapid rise. Former employees testified that he exaggerated his own personal image — his wrinkled clothes, his unruly hair, his cheap cars — as a way to gain reporters’ favor and craft a positive story around him and his companies. SBF appears to have written out his grand plan for media manipulation in the kind of explicit detail that comes from a Bond villain prior to his demise. He seems to be weighing who he thinks might assist with spreading his version of events. In one document, SBF had written out a list of people he thinks “might be helpful,” which includes New Jersey senator Cory Booker and 11 reporters, including those from Bloomberg, the New York Times, and The Wall Street Journal. One action item, in a separate document, reads: “Work, on background, with reporters on getting narratives out.”
The notes cast a different light on an infamous interview with Vox reporter Kelsey Piper in which SBF lamented “this dumb game we woke westerners play where we say all the right shibboleths so everyone likes us,” and, in a flash of anger, “fuck regulators.” At the time, it appeared that this was a moment when the crypto billionaire was letting his guard down. (Piper is a fellow traveler in the Effective Altruism movement, and SBF later claimed that he didn’t think he was talking with her in her capacity as a journalist.) In light of his plans to come out as anti-woke on Tucker Carlson, it’s less clear whether this rightward shift — perhaps to a more friendly constituency — was something he was planning long in advance.
While the Feds make their case to incarcerate him for a long time, SBF’s friends and family members have written glowing letters to get him a lighter sentence. Several have noted his philanthropy and his good intentions as reasons why he should be spared an effective life sentence. In one note, his mother, Barbara Friedman, told Judge Lewis Kaplan her son exhibits signs of (but has not been diagnosed as having) autism spectrum disorder and said he has been “wracked with remorse for not having prevented the implosion of FTX and the damage that followed.”
