'You were my family': FTX founder Sam Bankman-Fried apologizes to ex-staffers for collapse
NEW YORK CITY, NEW YORK: FTX founder Sam Bankman-Fried has expressed regret at the recent turn of events at his company. He told his former employees that he is "deeply sorry" for how things turned out for them and the investors. However, he was quick to blame the company for filing bankruptcy instead of allowing him a more time to fix the issues. “I feel deeply sorry about what happened. I regret what happened to all of you,” Bankman-Fried said.
In the letter to his ex-staffers, he added, “I feel deeply sorry about what happened. I regret what happened to all of you.” It is alleged that the man who many hailed as a champion of "effective altruism" had brought luxury property in the Bahamas worth millions of dollars. He went on, “I didn’t mean for any of this to happen, and I would give anything to be able to go back and do things over again. You were my family. I’ve lost that, and our old home is an empty warehouse of monitors.”
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Bankman-Fried was quick to point out in the letter posted on FTX’s internal Slack channel by one of the staff members, how he could have done things differently, “When I turn around, there’s no one left to talk to,” reports CoinDesk. “Potential interest in billions of dollars of funding came in roughly eight minutes after I signed the Chapter 11 docs,” he claimed, as per the New York Post.
He explained how he could have saved it, “Between those funds, the billions of dollars of collateral the company still held, and the interest we’d received from other parties, I think that we probably could have returned large value to customers and saved the business." "I believe that there are billions of dollars of genuine interest from new investors that could go to making customers whole," he further wrote.
According to the report, on Tuesday, November 22, a FTX attorney told a bankruptcy judge in Delaware, “A substantial amount of assets have either been stolen or are missing.” The company has filed for protection in the US since traders pulled off $6 billion from the crypto platform in three days and rival exchange Binance pulled out of a rescue deal. This has resulted in 1 million creditors facing losses totaling billions of dollars.
Nathaniel Whittemore, a CoinDesk podcaster who worked as FTX’s head of marketing said, “You have to understand just how devastated the average FTX employee was” after the FTX-Binance bailout deal fell off. “Not only, then, did it seem that they might be out of a job, but they were also potentially facing the total loss of their savings,” Whittemore added, as reported by Insider.
