Jurors in Sam Bankman-Fried criminal trial begin deliberations
Indicted FTX founder Sam Bankman-Fried arrives at the U.S. Courthouse in New York City, July 26, 2023.
Amr Alfiky | Reuters
Twelve jurors in a lower Manhattan courtroom have begun to deliberate the fate of FTX founder Sam Bankman-Fried following a month of testimony from nearly 20 witnesses.
The case was handed to the jury around 3:15 p.m. on Thursday, after U.S. District Judge Lewis Kaplan finished reading aloud 60 pages worth of instructions. A verdict could come as early as Thursday afternoon, and Judge Kaplan previously ordered the jury to stay until 8:15 p.m, offering free pizza and Uber rides home.
Bankman-Fried, who started digital asset exchange FTX in 2019, and sister hedge fund Alameda Research two years earlier, is charged with seven counts, including wire fraud, securities fraud and money laundering, related to the implosion of his crypto empire late last year.
He faces more than 100 years in prison if convicted. The 31-year-old graduate of Massachusetts Institute of Technology and son of two Stanford legal scholars has pleaded not guilty to all charges.
In order for Bankman-Fried to be found guilty, the jury must unanimously decide beyond a reasonable doubt that the entrepreneur, once hailed as a crypto genius, intended to defraud investors and customers.
The trial, initially anticipated to run until the Thanksgiving holiday, has moved swiftly. The government curtailed its witness list, and ultimately didn’t bring a rebuttal case after the defense rested. The defense called only three witnesses to the stand, with the bulk of its argument relying on the sworn testimony of the defendant.
Both sides have also moved more quickly than expected on direct and cross-examinations.
Judge Kaplan has encouraged the expedited timeline, holding jurors until 6:30 p.m. on Wednesday in order to finish closing arguments. It’s unclear how long the jury will deliberate, but the judge — while emphasizing that he’s not rushing a decision — said he’s willing to stay until 8:15 p.m. Thursday and told jurors the government would cover dinner and likely pay for their ride home.
Jurors listen to testimony during the fraud trial of Sam Bankman-Fried over the collapse of FTX, the bankrupt cryptocurrency exchange, at Federal Court in New York City, U.S., October 6, 2023 in this courtroom sketch.
Jane Rosenberg | Reuters
Mark Cohen, Bankman-Fried’s defense attorney, made his final plea for his client on Wednesday, arguing that the defendant should be found not guilty on all counts, in part because the FTX founder had acted in good faith and without criminal intent, believing everything would work out.
“Every movie needs a villain,” Cohen said of the prosecution’s case against Bankman-Fried, adding that the government had incorrectly portrayed him as a “monster,” a “bad guy,” and a “criminal mastermind.”
Cohen claimed the case against his client was built on the false premise that FTX was a fraudulent enterprise established to intentionally steal customer funds from its “very earliest days.”
While FTX’s lack of a risk management system or chief risk officer reflected poor system controls, bad business decisions aren’t crimes, Cohen said.
Cohen told the jury that if any members of Bankman-Fried’s inner circle truly thought something nefarious was happening, they had options, including resigning, leaving the Bahamas or “blowing the whistle.” None of them did, he said.
‘Meant to reduce his role’
The defense’s chief witness was Bankman-Fried himself, and most of his testimony amounted to a distraction, Renato Mariotti, a former prosecutor in the U.S. Justice Department’s Securities and Commodities Fraud Section, told CNBC earlier this week. As an example, he cited Bankman-Fried’s blaming of Caroline Ellison, his ex-girlfriend and former head of Alameda, for failing to properly hedge.
His testimony was “meant to reduce his role, like his frequent reminders that others were involved, that he had a lot on his plate, that he was young, or that he wasn’t a programmer,” said Mariotti, who’s now a trial partner in Chicago with Bryan Cave Leighton Paisner.
Caroline Ellison, former chief executive officer of Alameda Research LLC, leaves Manhattan Federal Court after testifying during the trial of FTX CEO Sam Bankman-Fried, on October 10, 2023 in New York City.
Michael M. Santiago | Getty Images
During the government’s closing arguments, prosecutors reminded jurors of the mountain of evidence key witnesses had provided.
“The defendant schemed and lied to get money, which he spent,” Assistant U.S. Attorney Nicolas Roos told the court.
Roos said there’s “no serious dispute” that $10 billion in customer money that was sitting in FTX’s crypto exchange went missing, with some of it going to pay for real estate, investments, loan repayments and political donations.
“A pyramid of deceit was built by the defendant,” Roos said. “That ultimately collapsed.”
Critical to the failure of FTX was the use of customer funds to cover losses in Alameda’s books following the plunge in crypto prices last year. Roos said Bankman-Fried is the one who gave special privileges to Alameda, allowing the hedge fund to siphon customer money. He knew it was wrong, Roos said, which is why he kept it secretive.
Roos brought up testimony from three firsthand witnesses who said that they’d spoken with Bankman-Fried about the chief issue — a giant hole in the balance sheet.
Bankman-Fried “had the arrogance to think he could get away with it,” Roos said.
Bankman-Fried knew Alameda had a negative net asset value of $2.7 billion, Roos said, but wanted to make another $3 billion in venture investments. The only way to do that was with FTX customer funds, he said.
Additionally, Roos told the jury, client money went to $100 million in real estate expenses, including a $30 million penthouse in the Bahamas and $16 million for his parents’ home.
In referencing the Super Bowl picture with Katy Perry and others, Roos called Bankman-Fried a “celebrity chaser.”
In closing, the prosecution reminded the court that Bankman-Fried directed losses to be shifted to Alameda and that FTX’s insurance fund had made up numbers. Add it all up, Roos said, and it debunks the defense’s main argument that Bankman-Fried acted in good faith and believed everything would work out.
“This was a fraud that occurred on a massive scale,” he said.
According to a new report from The Wall Street Journal, Tesla’s board has taken steps toward potentially seeking a new CEO to replace Elon Musk.
To say the least, Tesla’s board of directors has been extremely favorable to Elon Musk, Tesla’s largest single shareholder and long-time CEO.
They have backed his every move, granted him a $55 billion CEO compensation package, and remained silent when he threatened Tesla shareholders that he would not develop AI products at Tesla unless given a larger, more controlling share of the company, or decided to fire Tesla’s entire charging team to make an example out of the head of the team.
Tesla’s then-third-largest individual shareholder, after Musk, Leo KoGuan, told Electrek last year that he couldn’t get his concerns about Musk heard by the board.
Most recently, they have not addressed the protests at Tesla stores and product boycotts, which are attributed to Musk’s involvement in politics, angering a significant portion of the population and Tesla’s consumer base.
Many people, including myself, deduced from the board’s silence that it did not plan to take action against Musk’s negative impact on the brand.
Now, a new report from The Wall Street Journal suggests that the board started to move against Musk for the first time last month.
The report brings several new information to light. Here are the main points with quotes from WSJ:
- According to unnamed sources, Tesla’s board reached out to executive search firms to look for a new CEO:
- “Board members reached out to several executive search firms to work on a formal process for finding Tesla’s next chief executive, according to people familiar with the discussions.”
- The board reportedly met with Musk and asked him to spend more time on Tesla:
- “Around that time, Tesla’s board met with Musk for an update. Board members told him he needed to spend more time on Tesla, according to people familiar with the meeting. And he needed to say so publicly.”
- After Musk committed to spending more time at Tesla, it’s not clear what is the current status of the search for a potential new CEO:
- “The board narrowed its focus to a major search firm, according to the people familiar with the discussions. The current status of the succession planning couldn’t be determined. It is also unclear if Musk, himself a Tesla board member, was aware of the effort, or if his pledge to spend more time at Tesla has affected succession planning. Musk didn’t respond to requests for comment.”
- Additionally, Tesla’s board has been looking at adding a director, and JB Straubel, whose role on the board has mostly gone under the radar, has reportedly been meeting with investors:
- “The eight-person Tesla board has been looking to add an independent director, according to people familiar with the process. Some directors, including Tesla co-founder JB Straubel, have been meeting with major investors to reassure them the company is in good hands.”
- WSJ has reportedly seen text messages that Musk sent to someone telling them that he doesn’t wish to be CEO at Tesla anymore:
- “Last spring, he told that person that he no longer wanted to be CEO of Tesla, but that he was worried that no one could replace him atop the company and sell the vision that Tesla isn’t just an automaker, but the future of robotics and automation as well.”
- The report mentioned a Tesla manager who shared frustration about Musk’s negative impact on the business who has reportedly been let go since his comments were reported in the media:
- “Eliah Gilfenbaum, a Tesla executive in California, told his team that it was getting more challenging to hire and retain talent, according to one person who was present. He told them Tesla would be better off if Musk resigned. That was unlikely to happen, he told them, and employees needed to reconcile the boss’s politics with the company’s mission. He advised them to try to compartmentalize and just keep going.”
- The board reportedly told investors that Musk wasn’t as well aware of what’s happening with Tesla as he used to:
- “In recent meetings with investors, board members told them that despite Musk’s government work, he was involved in Tesla meetings remotely. One board member told people that sometimes Musk wasn’t as well prepared and that he needed to be briefed more about what is happening with Tesla. The board members continued to say they believed Musk’s proximity to Trump and the White House would benefit the company over the long term.”
The report provides some insight into how the board is addressing the current situation with its controversial CEO.
During Tesla’s earnings call last week, Musk said that he would scale back his time at DOGE to spend more time at Tesla.
It encouraged some investors, but the CEO still claimed that he would “spend a day or two per week on government matters”:
“I think starting probably next month, May, my time allocation to DOGE will drop significantly. I’ll have to continue doing it for, I think, probably the remainder of the President’s term, just to make sure that the waste and fraud that we stop does not come roaring back, which will do if it has the chance. So, I think I’ll continue to spend a day or two per week on government matters for as long as the President would like me to do so and as long as it is useful. But starting next month, I’ll be allocating probably more of my time to Tesla and now that the major work of establishing the Department of Government Efficiency is done.”
In addition to these duties, Musk serves as CEO of SpaceX and the de facto leader of X/xAI, as well as being involved in Neuralink and The Boring Company.
Musk didn’t respond to WSJ’s request for comments, and as of the time of writing this article, he didn’t seem to have directly addressed the new report on X, but he did share a couple of memes about him “wearing many hats”:
He appeared at Trump’s cabinet meeting today wearing two hats simultaneously.
Electrek’s Take
I’d take the report with a grain of salt. A lot of it makes sense, but there are unnamed sources, and this could be as simple as the board floating the idea of replacing Musk.
Also, I want this to happen, so I’m certainly biased in the sense that I want to believe it’s true.
I think the board and shareholders would have a tough time removing Musk. Shareholders are not sufficiently incentivized by the current stock price, which is resisting Tesla’s declining growth and struggling fundamentals.
And they still believe Elon’s lies about self-driving and humanoid robots soon bringing Tesla back to rapid earnings growth.
I think we might need a few more people to get the “Elon realization moment” before there’s enough motivation from shareholders to push him out.
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On our trip to Shanghai auto show facilitated by Zeekr, my colleague Scooter and I got to see an unbelievable amount of EVs from 20+ makers, many of which we’d never heard of. Each maker offered an incredible array of models but one in particular stood out to me: the Lynk & Co 900.
One thing I love about this Plug-in Hybrid is that it has a relatively huge battery and could be ridden fully electric, outside of road trips. The two 45-52kWh battery options provide somewhere between 220 and 280 km of range using China’s optimistic calculator. That’s 137 – 174 miles of EV range before the gas motor kicks in and about six times the average daily commute.
Zeekr, Lynk & Co’s sister company, has an even bigger battery, but gawdier PHEV with a 380km/236 mile range before the gas kicks in. At this point, we are really talking about an EV with a range extender.
As with many Chinese luxury vehicles, the second row seats really stood out. They are as comfortable as a laz-y-boy and offer to electronically spin around 360 degrees to make the 2nd and 3rd row a conference area. I nearly fell asleep in them a few times. OK I did but that’s because of jet lag or something. I can’t get over how futuristic the back of this car is.
Lynk & Co 900 is 524 cm long, 199 cm wide, 181 cm high and has a wheelbase of 316 cm and uses the SPA Evo modular architecture.
The drive is smooth and quick and never once did that petroleum engine kick in.
The 900 comes with standard roof-mounted LiDAR, with higher-priced variants powered by Nvidia’s Thor smart driving chip enabling door-to-door navigation with G-Pilot H7.
Its sleek body isn’t just for looks as it hits the wind tunnel with an impressive drag coefficient of 0.291 Cd. It also boasts a top tier 0-100 km/h in 4.3 seconds.
Lynk & Co is making waves with its upcoming 900 model, which has already received over 40,000 pre-orders ahead of its official launch on April 28. Built on the SPA Evo architecture, the six-seater combines class-leading 88.2% space efficiency with innovative 180-degree rotating second-row seats, targeting premium family buyers seeking versatile cabin configurations. The intelligent cockpit features front and rear 30-inch 6K displays driven by dual Qualcomm 8295 chips, delivering 60 TOPS computing power for eight-screen coordination via the LYNK Flyme Auto system. Powering the SUV is a 2.0T plug-in hybrid (PHEV) powertrain with 3-speed DHT Pro transmission and dual rear motors, generating 650kW total output to achieve 0-100km/h acceleration in 4.3 seconds – positioning the 900 as one of the fastest electrified SUVs in its segment.
It turns out that there are other similar vehicles from other Chinese makers including the Li L9, Denza N9 and Aito M9.
Electrek’s take:
The Lynk & Co 900 is the Chinese EV market in a nutshell: 90% of the car at half the price of its western rivals. Compare to a Range Rover, Rivian R1S, the upcoming Scout, Hyundai Ioniq 7 or a Kia EV9 and it is hard to imagine how well these would sell in the US and Europe.
Something else I love to see is a huge battery PHEV with enough range for reasonable daily tasks before the gas engine kicks in. Scout has a similar idea so we might get to try something similar in the US.
Even in China Lynk&co has noted it had 40,000 pre-orders before launch, so I think this is going to be a popular vehicle. I don’t think, even with the bananas current trade climate, this one will show up in the US. Europe on the other hand might want to keep an eye out however.
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If you’ve been holding off on going solar, now might be the time to revisit that quote. According to EnergySage’s new Solar & Storage Marketplace Report, prices for both home solar and solar + storage reached record lows in the second half of 2024.
EnergySage, an online solar shopping marketplace (and Electrek affiliate) analyzed millions of quotes from installers across the US in its 20th semiannual report. The data covers January through December 2024 and offers a detailed look at what homeowners pay for solar panels, batteries, inverters, and more.
Home solar and battery storage price quotes hit record lows
The median price for solar-only systems dropped to $2.65 per watt in the second half of 2024, down from $2.80 per watt earlier in the year. That’s the lowest price EnergySage has recorded.
Battery-backed systems saw an even bigger price drop: home solar + storage quotes fell from $2.59 per watt in H1 2024 to $2.40 per watt in H2 2024. Tesla’s Powerwall 3 is playing a big role in the storage price drop. The new version includes an integrated inverter, which shifts some of the cost from the solar quote (measured in $/W) to the storage quote (measured in $/kWh).
These falling prices were driven by a mix of factors. Equipment costs have dropped – Wood Mackenzie reports that residential solar panel prices were down 30% year-over-year. High interest rates and stable electricity prices have softened demand, pushing installers to offer more competitive pricing. And in California, changes to the state’s Net Billing Tariff have also pressured installers to drop prices.
“Heading into 2025, solar and battery prices had never been lower on the EnergySage Marketplace, and for homeowners, that means more affordable and accessible clean energy solutions,” said Emily Walker, director of content and insights at EnergySage. “This creates a compelling record-low benchmark to measure against as we begin to see the effects of shifting policies and tariffs take hold this year.”
Say hello to high-wattage solar panels
Home solar panels are getting more powerful, faster. In H2 2023, 81% of quotes included panels rated under 400 watts. By H2 2024, that number had dropped to just 14%. The shift is thanks to advances in panel efficiency and design: Either the panels themselves are getting bigger, or they’re packing more power into the same space.
High-wattage panels can reduce the number of panels needed per home, saving space and installation time. But there’s a wild card in 2025: tariffs. Bloomberg reported in April that the US had a stockpile of 40-50 gigawatts of solar panels at the end of 2024, which may buffer the US solar industry from big price hikes. However, that could slow down innovation and complicate the supply chain.
“As panel technologies improve, more homeowners are being offered higher-output systems – meaning fewer panels, more power, and a better return on investment,” said Walker. “We’re closely watching how inventory strategies and upcoming tariffs may shape this trend.”
Read more: Tesla Powerwall 3 is disrupting the solar inverter market
To limit power outages and make your home more resilient, consider going solar with a battery storage system. In order to find a trusted, reliable solar installer near you that offers competitive pricing, check out EnergySage, a free service that makes it easy for you to go solar. They have hundreds of pre-vetted solar installers competing for your business, ensuring you get high-quality solutions and save 20-30% compared to going it alone. Plus, it’s free to use and you won’t get sales calls until you select an installer and you share your phone number with them.
Your personalized solar quotes are easy to compare online and you’ll get access to unbiased Energy Advisers to help you every step of the way. Get started here. –trusted affiliate link*
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