Sam Bankman-Fried, the founder and former CEO of the cryptocurrency exchange FTX, was found guilty of all seven criminal charges against him on Thursday night, with the jury deliberating for less than five hours (including a dinner break) after a more than four-week trial. At his peak, SBF, as he is often called, was a billionaire semi-celebrity hailed for his genius. But it turns out that it was basically all a fraud. Bankman-Fried was convicted of wire fraud, conspiracy to commit wire fraud, conspiracy to commit securities fraud, conspiracy to commit commodities fraud, and conspiracy to commit money laundering.
It’s quite a comedown for the boy genius—and for the right-wing loudmouths who predicted that Bankman-Fried would never be charged by the Biden Justice Department because he had been a major Democratic campaign donor. Tucker Carlson went in on that theory in November 2022, saying, “Biden’s Justice Department seems not very interested in a man called Sam Bankman-Fried.”
Carlson continued: “Why is that? Well, maybe because Bankman-Fried was the Democratic Party’s second-biggest donor this cycle. Just over 30 or thereabouts, but he came in right behind George Soros for the amount of money that he gave to Democrats. He’s friends with all of them.” And yet here we are, less than a year later, and Bankman-Fried could be spending the rest of his life in prison. (Also, Bankman-Fried said he gave similar amounts to Republicans.)
