New York
CNN
—
Sam Bankman-Fried, the convicted crypto fraudster who is serving 25 years in prison, is breaking his silence about his life behind bars in a new interview with Tucker Carlson.
One major point of interest about Bankman-Fried has been about whether he has befriended disgraced rapper Sean “Diddy” Combs, who is serving time in the same Brooklyn detention center on racketeering conspiracy and sex trafficking charges. Combs has pleaded not guilty.
Bankman-Fried told Carlson that Diddy is “kind to people in the unit,” adding that he’s “been kind to me.”
“It’s kind of a soul crushing place for the world in general, and what we see are just the people that are around us on the inside rather than who we are on the outside,” Bankman-Fried told Carlson in the roughly 40-minute interview posted on X.
Carlson said that he and Diddy are “two of the most famous prisoners in the world,” but Bankman-Fried won’t tell the rapper that it was his 33rd birthday this week. “Someone else might, but I’m not,” he said.
Living with a celebrity is one of the more interesting aspects of Bankman-Fried’s life, he said. That changed last year after he was found guilty for defrauding customers and investors in his failed crypto exchange FTX. His sentence of 25 years was about half of what prosecutors had asked for, but still put him at the high end for sentence length in prominent white-collar fraud cases.
Bankman-Fried said he’s made some friends, but said prison was a “weird environment” because it’s a “combination of a few other high profile cases and then a lot of … ex-gangsters, alleged ex-gangsters.” Many of them are “surprisingly good at chess,” he learned.
He’s also shifted his political stance. Once a donor to former President Joe Biden, Bankman-Fried said he’s moved right and started donating to Republicans “privately” as much as he was to Democrats in late 2022. He said his politics changed after spending a lot of time in Washington, DC, during the Biden era and was “really, really shocked by what I saw — not in a good direction — from the administration.”
Carlson followed up that it’s “sort of weird” to ask Bankman-Fried if crypto regulation is moving in a “good direction,” but said he “couldn’t resist.”
His response? “Hopefully … Changing the guard helps. But financial regulators — they’re big, giant bureaucracies in the federal government — they’re not used to changing overnight. They have been playing a big, obstructive role for a decade in crypto.”
As for Bankman-Fried’s wealth, once worth around $15 billion, has all but diminished. In addition to the prison sentence, he also ordered a forfeiture of $11 billion.
“The company that I used to own … had nothing intervened, today it would have about $15 billion of liabilities and about $93 billion of assets,” he said. “The answer should be, in theory, yes, there was enough money to pay everyone back in kind. But that’s not how things worked out. Instead, it all got roiled up in a bankruptcy.”
