The Money Game: Kevin T. Dugan

The Real SBF Stood Up An open-and-shut case finally revealed the criminal behind the legend.

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IT WAS THE TICS that made Sam Bankman-Fried compelling. The fidgets, the eyes f lickering around during TV interviews, the nasally nerd voice. Then there was that garden of dark, curly hair around his chubby face. Crypto was odd drug-dealer money until this Silicon Valley Paddington Bear came along, talking about how he was going to give away his fortune, save the world from pandemics and nuclear war, maybe one day buy Goldman Sachs. And it worked. By the end of 2021, his net worth was somewhere around $26.5 billion; a year before, he hadn’t even made the Forbes billionaires list. What made his success palatable, what gave it a veneer of legitimacy, were these strange little habits of his, each of which signaled eccentricity, brilliance, a childlike innocence.

On November 2, a federal jury in Manhattan found this seemingly harmless creature guilty of seven counts of fraud and conspiracy. It took the jurors less than five hours—an astonishingly swift deliberation considering the overwhelming amount of evidence they had to consider. This included 10 million pages of documents and testimony from three co-conspirators, his company’s former lawyer, friends, and experts who singled him out as the mastermind of the $9 billion fraud that led to the collapse of his crypto exchange, FTX, and his hedge fund, Alameda Research.

The case was almost comically open-and-shut given not only the legend that Bankman-Fried established at the pinnacle of his fame but also the attempts by his supporters and certain journalists to paint him as a complicated, tragic figure in the run-up to the trial. Foremost among the former were his parents. “Sam will never speak an untruth,” his mother, the Stanford law professor Barbara Fried, told