Sam Bankman-Fried has convinced at least one person with his media tour following the collapse of the cryptocurrency exchange FTX — the hedge-fund manager Bill Ackman.
Bankman-Fried has spoken to multiple outlets, from Axios to the New York Times, and an interview with Good Morning America was set to be aired early on Thursday. In those interviews, he maintains he didn’t commit fraud, that he didn’t knowingly commingle funds, and that he was surprised by how large was the position of the hedge fund Alameda that he owned.
“I think that there is a substantial discrepancy between what the financials were, what the auditing financials were, the true financials, what the exchange understood — all of that was consistent — versus what the dashboards that we had displayed for Alameda’s account there, which substantially underdisplayed the size of that position. That’s one of the reasons that I was surprised when we dug into everything — at how big that position had become,” Bankman-Fried told Andrew Ross Sorkin of The New York Times.
Read more on Bankman-Fried’s interviews.
Ackman, the chief executive of Pershing Square, tweeted he believed this account.
Bankman-Fried replied that he appreciated the sentiment.
“I messed up. I’m going to do everything I can to make it right–even though I knew it might never be enough,” he added.
That sentiment was not shared by most others who replied to Ackman.