Sam Bankman-Fried blames top lieutenants for FTX troubles in second day of testimony in criminal trial
FTX founder Sam Bankman-Fried leaves US Federal Court in New York City on March 30, 2023.
Kyle Mazza | Anadolu Agency | Getty Images
FTX founder Sam Bankman-Fried resumed his testimony on Monday, and used his time on the stand to blame his former close friends and colleagues for the downfall of his crypto empire.
As his criminal fraud trial enters what’s expected to be its last week, Bankman-Fried is trying to undermine the prosecution’s key witnesses, who placed the FTX founder at the center of the crypto exchange’s misuse of customer funds and its ultimate demise.
Bankman-Fried, 31, faces a potential life sentence if convicted of fraud charges stemming from the collapse in November of FTX and sister hedge fund Alameda Research. He has pleaded not guilty.
On Monday, Mark Cohen, Bankman-Fried’s lead defense attorney, allowed his client to take aim at Caroline Ellison, who ran Alameda and is also Bankman-Fried’s ex-girlfriend. The primary theme was Bankman-Fried’s concern, expressed in conversations between June and September 2022, about whether Alameda was properly hedged given the crash in crypto prices. He said he was notably concerned about the decline in Alameda’s net asset value from $40 billion the prior year to $10 billion.
The market had already dropped 70% and if it fell another 50%, he was afraid the firm would be insolvent, Bankman-Fried told the jury.
“She started crying,” Bankman-Fried said, regarding Ellison’s reaction when he told her that. “She agreed.”
Ellison, who took a plea deal and is cooperating with the government, also said Alameda shouldn’t have made some venture investments, Bankman-Fried testified. He said she offered to step down and said he told her that this wasn’t about blame or past failures, but that Alameda should urgently be putting on hedges. He said he hadn’t intended for her to resign.
In September, he checked in again with Ellison about the hedging activity, Bankman-Fried testified. She said Alameda had hedged. He asked about the scale of the trades and said his instinct was that they could have been twice the size. After Ellison sent him spreadsheets about the trades, she agreed there was more room to hedge and she did so, Bankman-Fried said.
Caroline Ellison, former chief executive officer of Alameda Research LLC, arrives to court in New York, US, on Thursday, Oct. 12, 2023.
Bloomberg | Bloomberg | Getty Images
Bankman-Fried’s testimony on Monday follows his initial appearance on the stand at the end of last week. He told jurors then that he didn’t commit fraud, and that he thought the crypto exchange’s outside expenditures, like paying for the naming rights at a sports arena and its venture investments, came out of company profits.
The majority of the four-week trial so far has been highlighted by prosecutors walking former leaders of Bankman-Fried’s businesses through specific actions taken by their boss that resulted in clients losing billions of dollars last year. Several of the witnesses have pleaded guilty to multiple charges and are cooperating with the government.
Bad hedging, troubled personal loans
As questioning continued on Monday, Bankman-Fried said his analysis suggested that net asset value at Alameda was still $10 billion.
The defense then walked Bankman-Fried through activities from Nov. 1 to Nov. 11, covering the period of FTX’s rapid collapse and its immediate aftermath.
Bankman-Fried said Gary Wang, a co-founder who previously testified on behalf of the prosecution, told him that the backlog of withdrawal demands had to do with a backlog of bitcoin withdrawals and that he was making a fix in the code.
FTX’s engineering director Nishad Singh, who was also called as a government witness, had a problematic personal financial situation, Bankman-Fried testified. He said Singh was suicidal and had a therapist on call 24/7 to watch over him. Bankman-Fried said he was trying to comfort him about his loans and expenses and to prevent him from hurting himself.
Bankman-Fried then blamed Can Sun, who was FTX’s general counsel. He said they had a talk before Bankman-Fried’s follow-up call with investment fund Apollo. The spreadsheet provided to Apollo did have the $8 billion liability included, Bankman-Fried said. He told the court that he spoke with Sun and told Apollo about his best understanding of the framework around the fiat account.
In describing the swift downfall of FTX, Bankman-Fried said that customer withdrawals had quickly increased from $50 million a day to $1 billion a day. He said it was like a run on the bank and he was very concerned since the only way to withdraw all customer funds was to liquidate every open margin trade.
Bankman-Fried defended his tweets that were designed to cool customer concerns.
FTX founder Sam Bankman-Fried is questioned by defense lawyer Mark Cohen as he testifies in his fraud trial over the collapse of the bankrupt cryptocurrency exchange, at federal court in New York City, U.S., October 30, 2023 in this courtroom sketch.
Jane Rosenberg | Reuters
Regarding the “assets are fine” tweet he wrote during the panic, he said he thought Alameda’s net asset value was roughly $10 billion and that FTX didn’t have a hole in its balance sheet.
“My view was the exchange was OK and there was no holes in the assets,” he told the court.
On Nov. 8, he realized that Alameda was going to need to be shut down. He had calls with potential investors to try and secure “significant” outside capital due to the run on FTX.
After the defense wrapped up its questioning of Bankman-Fried, the focus turned back to the prosecution. Renato Mariotti, a former prosecutor in the U.S. Justice Department’s Securities & Commodities Fraud Section and now a trial partner in Chicago with Bryan Cave Leighton Paisner, said he expects the cross-examination to be “devastating given SBF’s frequent prior statements about the issues in the case.”
“What we’ve heard so far has been the direct examination — the defense telling its story,” Mariotti told CNBC. “There were no big twists or shockers. The defense doesn’t appear to have an ace up its sleeve.”
Following the morning break, Assistant U.S. Attorney Danielle Sassoon started cross-examination of the defendant.
Bankman-Fried gave a number of very brief answers to questions, frequently saying “yep” or “I don’t recall.” In answering the question as to whether Bankman-Fried had marketed FTX’s global exchange as safe compared to other exchanges, he said “I’m not sure.”
In some instances, his answers were directly followed with a government exhibit, such as a tweet, interview transcript, congressional testimony or email, intended to dispute his answer.
For example, Sassoon asked Bankman-Fried if he assured people that Alameda played by the same rules as others on the FTX exchange. Bankman-Fried said he wasn’t sure. The government followed by showing a tweet from him directly addressing the topic along with an email in which he wrote that Alameda’s account is like everyone else’s.
Another notable disclosure was around Alameda being allowed to have a negative account balance. Bankman-Fried was asked if any other users were able to pledge outside investments as collateral. He said Crypto Lotus was allowed to do it to the tune of $100 million, but that information wasn’t disclosed publicly.
Sassoon asked Bankman Fried, “Would you agree you know how to tell a good story?”
He replied, “I don’t know. It depends on what metrics you use.”
Sasoon then got into the stories he told investors to raise more than $1 billion, including telling them about how FTX used automated liquidation protocols that set it apart.
Sasoon also brought up Bankman-Fried’s past profane comments about regulators. She referenced the direct messages that were published by Vox in mid-November. In one case, the reporter mentioned to Bankman-Fried that he’s said in the past he wanted to make good regulations, and asked if that was just public relations. His text response was, “Yeah, Just PR,” followed by “F— regulators.”
Bankman-Fried was asked to read that last part out loud to the court. And he admitted to referring to a subset of crypto twitter as “dumb motherf——.”
If you are having suicidal thoughts or are in distress, contact the Suicide & Crisis Lifeline at 988 for support and assistance from a trained counselor.
— CNBC’s Dawn Giel contributed to this report
The International Energy Agency (IEA) says renewables and AI are reshaping the world’s energy future, and that transformation is happening faster than anyone expected. In its new “World Energy Outlook 2025,” the IEA warns that energy security risks now stretch far beyond oil and gas. Critical minerals essential to clean tech, defense, and AI have become the new fault lines in global supply chains. The IEA also states that energy has become a central focus of geopolitical power struggles, making it one of the defining economic and security challenges of our time.
A more complex, electrified future
The IEA’s annual “World Energy Outlook” explores three possible scenarios for the future, emphasizing that none are predictions. Instead, they’re roadmaps that show what could happen depending on the choices governments and industries make on policy, technology, and investment.
Across every scenario, one theme stands out: electricity demand is surging faster than for any other form of energy. Electricity currently accounts for only about 20% of global energy use, yet it powers more than 40% of the global economy. Fatih Birol, the IEA’s executive director, said the trend is accelerating: “Last year, we said the world was moving quickly into the Age of Electricity – and it’s clear today that it has already arrived.”
Driving that growth are data centers, AI, and electrification across transportation, heating, and manufacturing. Global data center investment alone is expected to hit $580 billion in 2025 – even higher than the $540 billion the world will spend on oil supply.
Shifting global energy dynamics
Emerging economies, led by India and Southeast Asia, are now shaping energy markets that were once dominated by China. These regions are experiencing a rapid increase in demand for power, mobility, and industrial energy use. By 2035, 80% of global energy consumption growth is expected to come from countries with high solar potential.
At the same time, the IEA warns that grid expansion and storage aren’t keeping up with this growth. While investments in power generation have jumped nearly 70% since 2015, spending on transmission and distribution has risen at less than half that pace. The agency calls for urgent grid upgrades and stronger government coordination to prevent future electricity bottlenecks.
Renewables and nuclear on the rise
Solar leads the charge across all IEA scenarios, with renewables growing at a faster rate than any other energy source. Nuclear energy is also making a comeback: after two decades of stagnation, global nuclear capacity is projected to increase by at least a third by 2035, thanks to both large-scale projects and small modular reactor designs.
Dave Jones, chief analyst at global energy think tank Ember, said, “The world is moving in the right direction, and continued acceleration can drive a more rapid transformation of the energy system. Renewables and electrification will dominate the future – and fossil-importing nations will gain the most by embracing them.”
Energy access and climate urgency
The IEA highlights two critical areas where the world is falling short: universal access to energy and climate goals. Roughly 730 million people still live without electricity, and nearly 2 billion rely on polluting cooking methods. Even in the agency’s most ambitious pathways, global temperatures surpass 1.5C of warming before potentially returning below that level later in the century.
Meanwhile, the effects of climate change are already disrupting energy systems. In 2023 alone, over 200 million households worldwide were affected by energy infrastructure failures, with transmission lines accounting for about 85% of incidents. The IEA says governments must prioritize resilience not only against extreme weather but also against cyberattacks and supply chain shocks.
Birol summed it up: “When we look at the history of the energy world in recent decades, there is no other time when energy security tensions have applied to so many fuels and technologies at once. With energy security front and center for many governments, their responses need to consider the synergies and trade-offs that can arise with other policy goals – on affordability, access, competitiveness, and climate change.”
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Tesla has released a confusing hint that appears to tease a launch in Colombia, which would be Tesla’s second market in South America.
For the last few years, Tesla has been looking to launch its electric vehicles in South America, but progress has been slow.
Last year, Tesla opened its first Supercharger stations in Chile, and opened its first store last month.
Now, Tesla appears to be teasing a launch in Colombia as it posted an image with the outline of the country:
The confusing part is the fact that this was posted on Tesla’s official ‘North America’ account. The automaker doesn’t appear to have a South America or Americas account yet, despite having launched in Chile already.
Tesla won’t be the first automaker to sell electric cars in Colombia. It will have to compete with Chinese electric automakers BYD and Zeekr, which have already entered the market.
Colombia has a reasonably small auto market. From its highs of ~300,000 passenger cars per year in the 2010s, it has never recovered, and it currently registers about 200,000 new cars per year.
Electric vehicles still account for only a small share of the market, as more charging infrastructure needs to be deployed and more automakers need to launch electric models.
Electrek’s Take
This is excellent news. When Tesla launches in a new market, it generally deploys charging infrastructure—DC fast chargers, Superchargers, and level 2 chargers.
Electricity is relatively cheap in the country, and with the proper charging infrastructure, which Tesla excels at, it should help accelerate EV adoption in the country – even though Tesla’s own EV are on the expensive side for the Colombian market.
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Solid-state batteries have long been the holy grail of electric vehicles, especially for light EVs like electric bicycles that are usually charged indoors. They hold major safety benefits over traditional lithium-ion batteries, plus offer better energy density, making it possible to use smaller batteries or simply fit more capacity in the same-sized battery pack.
Solid-state batteries have spent decades being touted as five years away, but if you thought you’d have to keep waiting, then I’ve got news for you: yes, you still have to keep waiting.
However, in the meantime, semi-solid-state batteries are here and will be launched on their first production e-bike next month.
I had the chance to check out the batteries in person at EICMA 2025 when I visited with the company that makes them, T&D. The company was spun out of e-bike component maker Bafang (and founded by the same co-founder of Bafang, Sunny He) in order to move more in the direction of electric motorcycle component development.
In addition to their drivetrain components, a significant portion of their R&D has also focused on semi-solid-state batteries, which contain a minimal amount of electrolyte compared to traditional lithium-ion batteries found in today’s e-bikes. With a fraction of the electrolyte material, these semi-solid-state batteries developed by T&D are more energy-dense and safer than traditional batteries. The cells can be stabbed through by a nail and won’t ignite – don’t try that with the battery on your current e-bike!
Whereas most e-bike batteries today have an energy density of around 150-250 Wh/kg, these new semi-solid-state batteries push the needle even further into the 250-350 Wh/kg ballpark, depending on the specific packaging.
The cells are also rated for long cycle lifespan, with an expected 1,500 charge cycles before reaching 70% of the original capacity. And with fast-charging support, those same cells can be recharged significantly more quickly.
T&D’s semi-solid-state batteries will roll out on their first production e-bike next month, though the company isn’t at liberty to announce which e-bike maker will land the title of first production electric bike with semi-solid-state batteries. Hopefully we’ll hear that announcement soon.
T&D is also known for its e-moto drivetrains. The company’s new Equator City commuter e-moped project, launched in collaboration with Dimentro, utilizes T&D’s swingarm-mounted motor system.
The drivetrain offers 11 kW of peak power, a 5 kWh high-capacity LFP battery, and supports a range of over 100 km (62 miles).
Other projects featuring T&D’s drivetrains at the booth included interesting examples such as a part go-kart, part tractor project that resembles a heavy-towing ATV.
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