Sam Bankman-Fried To Testify In His Own Defense, What Can Possibly Go Wrong?

Sam Bankman-Fried (Photo by Matias J. Ocner/Miami Herald/Tribune News Service via Getty Images)

Mark Cohen has informed Judge Lewis Kaplan that Sam Bankman-Fried intends to testify in his criminal trial.

This should go swimmingly!

Bankman-Fried has suffered through a grueling case by the prosecution that included his company’s former general counsel saying that the defendant asked him to conjure up a “legal justification” for using client funds and the former head of Alameda Research — and SBF’s former girlfriend — testifying that he “directed” her to steal billions from FTX.

So now SBF is going to take the stand himself to clear his name.

For a preview of how this might turn out, let’s all remember what happened the last time someone pushed him to explain his business model honestly. Bloomberg’s Matt Levine, formerly of our sibling site Dealbreaker, hosted the boy billionaire on the Odd Lots podcast and asked him, “Can you give me an intuitive understanding of farming?”

In response, Bankman-Fried offered a detailed description of a box that does “literally nothing” that people might put money into. He continues:

So, you know, X tokens [are] being given out each day, all these like sophisticated firms are like, huh, that’s interesting. Like if the total amount of money in the box is a hundred million dollars, then it’s going to yield $16 million this year in X tokens being given out for it. That’s a 16% return. That’s pretty good. We’ll put a little bit more in, right? And maybe that happens until there are $200 million in the box. So, you know, sophisticated traders and/or people on Crypto Twitter, or other sort of similar parties, go and put $200 million in the box collectively and they start getting these X tokens for it…. And then everyone makes money.

Levine replied, “I think of myself as like a fairly cynical person. And that was so much more cynical than how I would’ve described farming. You’re just like, well, I’m in the Ponzi business and it’s pretty good.”

Yeah, this cross is going to go great!

Joe Patrice is a senior editor at Above the Law and co-host of Thinking Like A Lawyer. Feel free to email any tips, questions, or comments. Follow him on Twitter if you’re interested in law, politics, and a healthy dose of college sports news. Joe also serves as a Managing Director at RPN Executive Search.