Sam Bankman-Fried Says FTX Was Never Broke, Just Misunderstood

The 15-page document titled FTX: Where Did the Money Go? sees the convicted founder insist the exchange was solvent all along, undone not by fraud but by its own lawyers.

From bankruptcy to blame

The document, dated 30 Sept and circulated online this week, reads like a closing argument no court ever asked for. Bankman-Fried claims FTX “was never insolvent,” that customer assets “never left,” and that the bankruptcy lawyers and advisers who took control in November 2022 vaporized tens of billions of dollars through incompetence and greed.

He names names: John J. Ray III, the court-appointed chief executive, and law firm Sullivan & Cromwell, who he says “seized control” for their own benefit, delaying repayments for two years while billing the estate nearly $1bn.

Sandmark has not independently verified the document, and it remains unclear whether Bankman-Fried personally released it from prison.

To Bankman-Fried, the recovery rate proves his point: customers are now recovering between 119% and 143% of claim values, so FTX was never truly bankrupt, merely misunderstood. If only, he argues, the lawyers had “done nothing,” the exchange could have repaid customers in 2022 and left “$111bn” for investors.

The selective accounting

The math is vintage SBF: big numbers, heroic assumptions, and a disregard for reality. His calculations lean on today’s prices for assets FTX once held, including 58mn Solana tokens, 7.8% of Anthropic, and hundreds of millions in FTT, FTX’s own house token. With those 2025 valuations retrofitted into 2022 balance sheets, the estate supposedly becomes worth $136bn.

Analysts and bankruptcy lawyers reject the claim. They note that FTX’s books contained illiquid, self-referential assets that lost their value the moment the exchange collapsed. “Solvent but illiquid may sound clever,” one restructuring lawyer told Bloomberg Law, “but not when your collateral is yourself.”

The myth of the missed rescue

The memo’s central fantasy is that FTX could have reopened and repaid everyone “by the end of November 2022.” In reality, the estate has recovered about $18bn against $8bn in claims, an extraordinary comeback but not evidence of a time machine.

More than $900mn in professional fees later, customers are finally getting their money back, and Bankman-Fried is still rewriting history from the wreckage. The document blames the clean-up crew for the crash while skipping over the fact that he was at the wheel when the iceberg hit.

If FTX were a ship, it would be the Titanic: glossy, overconfident, and taking on water fast. Bankman-Fried still seems convinced it’s sailing fine.