Fallen crypto mogul Sam Bankman-Fried sentenced to 25 years in prison

As his misty-eyed client looked on, defense attorney Marc Mukasey said the portrayal of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology graduate as an “arrogant greedy swindler who thought he would get away with fleecing the hard-earned money of hard-working people” was wrong.

“Sam was not a ruthless financial serial killer who set out every morning to hurt people,” Mukasey said in court after urging in court papers that any prison sentence be in the single digits. “Sam Bankman-Fried doesn’t make decisions with malice in his heart. He makes decisions with math in his head.”

The judge later criticized Bankman-Fried’s calculations, saying he was indeed “a math nerd, who looked at decisions in terms of math, expected value.”

He cited trial testimony in which Bankman-Fried’s former girlfriend and fellow executive Caroline Ellison said Bankman-Fried once told her that his willingness to embrace risk was such that he’d be happy to flip a coin if it came up tails and the world was destroyed — as long as if it came up heads, the world would be twice as good.

The judge said Bankman-Fried utilized that risk-taking nature at his companies, “betting on expected value” and weighing the risk of getting caught with the probability of large gains.

“That was the game,” Kaplan said. “It’s his nature.”

Bankman-Fried’s attorneys, friends and family had urged leniency, saying he was unlikely to re-offend. They also said FTX’s investors have largely recovered their funds — a claim disputed by bankruptcy lawyers, FTX and its creditors.

“Mr. Bankman-Fried continues to live a life of delusion,” wrote John Ray, the CEO of FTX who has been cleaning up the bankrupt company. “The ‘business’ he left on November 11, 2022 was neither solvent nor safe.”

One FTX customer, Sunil Kavuri, spoke at sentencing, saying he’d traveled from London on behalf of over 200 victims who had sent impact statements to the judge.

He said he’d spoken to other “victims just like myself who had their dreams destroyed” and had lived “the FTX nightmare every day for almost two years, every day, every night, a lot of crying, sleepless nights.”

Bankman-Fried’s parents, both Stanford Law School professors, did not speak as they left the courthouse Thursday, but later issued a statement: “We are heartbroken and will continue to fight for our son.”