Sam Bankman-Fried said he was "improvising" when he posted a series of cryptic tweets across Monday and Tuesday, just days after his crypto exchange FTX collapsed. The tweets tease that he's about to explain exactly what went down at the company.
The tweets spelled out "What happened," with a follow-up tweet saying: "Not legal advice. Not financial advice. This is all as I remember it, but my memory might be faulty in parts."
The tweets were spaced out with some gaps of multiple hours.
"I'll get to what happened," reads the most recent tweet, posted on Tuesday morning. "But for now, let's talk about where we are today."
—SBF (@SBF_FTX) November 15, 2022
Bankman-Fried had tweeted on Friday that he planned to share a thorough account of what happened at FTX.
"I'm piecing together all of the details, but I was shocked to see things unravel the way they did earlier this week," he tweeted. "I will, soon, write up a more complete post on the play by play, but I want to make sure that I get it right when I do."
Bankman-Fried has lost almost all his fortune over the past week and the two companies he cofounded, trading firm Alameda Research, and cryptocurrency exchange FTX, both filed for bankruptcy.
Bankman-Fried told The New York Times on Sunday that since FTX had collapsed, he'd been coping better than expected.
"You would've thought that I'd be getting no sleep right now, and instead I'm getting some," he told the publication. "It could be worse."
He added that he'd continued to play the video game Storybook Brawl, though not as much as usual. He told the publication that the game "clears my mind."
At the time of the interview with The Times, Bankman-Fried had only tweeted the first two parts of his cryptic thread – "What" and "H." He told the publication that the thread would spell out more than one word but that he was "making it up as I go."
When asked by The Times why he was posting the tweets, he said: "I don't know."
"I'm improvising," he told the newspaper. "I think it's time."
In early November, CoinDesk reported that most of Alameda's assets were tied up in FTX's in-house token, FTT.
Just days later, FTX rival Binance announced that it would sell its FTT holdings, worth around $530 million. Other traders scrambled to withdraw their own holdings from FTX, with around $6 billion of withdrawals over just three days, according to Bankman-Fried.
Binance went back on a deal to bail FTX out. Bankman-Fried has resigned as CEO of FTX, while FTX, Alameda Research, and roughly 130 affiliated companies have begun Chapter 11 bankruptcy proceedings.
As a believer in effective altruism, Bankman-Fried had great ambitions for his wealth, which had once peaked at $26 billion. He was building up his fortune with the plan to give large swathes away, but FTX's collapse put a stop to that. Bankman-Fried's fortune fell by 94% to $1 billion following, Bloomberg reported.
