Anyone who's watched Law & Order knows that, when you're in legal trouble, the first thing you do is stop talking. Shut your trap. Lawyer up. Don't give the cops any more ammo. Sam Bankman-Fried must have watched different shows.
In the face of mounting investigations over the accounting shenanigans that led to the collapse of his $30 billion FTX empire, Bankman-Fried not only kept blabbing but made a series of admissions that can only accelerate his pathway to prison. Those include DMs to a Vox reporter that include "fuck the regulators" and various musings on victims deserving what befalls them because the strong are supposed to rule the world. Or something.
Meanwhile, SBF hasn't been able to step away from his Twitter account. On Monday, he began slowly tweeting out "What happened" one letter at a time—a gimmick more befitting a game show than a massive fraud. Since then, he has been tweeting out apologies that aren't really apologies and making fantastical claims about how he will raise more money and fix everything. Sure, Sam. And maybe you'll be businessman of the year. By Wednesday, the various ramblings became so absurd that the new head of bankrupt FTX used the company's corporate account to make clear SBF no longer had any direction over the company.
The question is why SBF is still blabbing away. He is the son of two law professors and has retained counsel at Paul Weiss (the same white-shoe firm that defended the Madoff family), who have presumably told him to shut the hell up. And yet he won't.
Are his recent messages a final act of trolling by a con man who suckered thousands of customers and investors? Or did his rapid rise to power and fame so warp his mind that he can no longer tell good from bad or recognize that his empire has collapsed once and for all? Perhaps after running what now appears to be a mini-cult in FTX's offices, he really believes he is some sort of all-powerful visionary.
Whatever the reasons behind SBF's undoing, the spectacle of him going off the rails has not been pretty. But his story is now over, and the only thing left is a federal indictment that will surely happen in a matter of days.
Jeff John Roberts
jeff.roberts@fortune.com
@jeffjohnroberts
