Thank you for joining us. We’re going to take an extended pause and resume our coverage of the trial Tuesday morning. In the meantime, here are the key takeaways from Sam Bankman-Fried’s third day on the witness stand:
- The prosecution showed the jury emails, tweets, interviews, press releases and congressional testimony in which FTX and Bankman-Fried assured investors that the exchange was safe and that Alameda played by the same rules as others. Assistant US Attorney Danielle Sassoon tried to point out differences in what Bankman-Fried said about the FTX’s risk management and his involvement with Alameda before and after the exchange’s collapse. Bankman-Fried said he couldn’t recall and wasn’t sure about what he said in the past.
- Bankman-Fried pushed back when the prosecution tried to show he was in charge at FTX and Alameda. When asked if he called the shots as CEO, Bankman-Fried replied, “I called some of them.” When asked if he was involved in Alameda’s trading in 2022, Bankman-Fried responded, “depends on how you define trading.”
- Sassoon pointed out that Bankman-Fried backdated documents. She brought up former FTX executive Nishad Singh’s testimony, in which he said Bankman-Fried told him to inflate the exchange’s revenue to reach $1 billion by backdating Serum staking fees. When she showed him a document signed Jan. 1, 2021, Bankman-Fried said he signed it much later than that date and acknowledged that it probably wasn’t the first time he did something like that.
- The prosecution emphasized that SBF cultivated a certain image, by not cutting his hair and wearing a T-shirt and shorts. “You thought highly of yourself?” Sassoon asked. “I did,” Bankman-Fried answered.
- Bankman-Fried often said he didn’t recall exactly what he had said in certain circumstances, with “I am not sure” becoming a standard response. At times he also didn’t answer questions directly, prompting Judge Lewis Kaplan to tell him at one point to “just answer the question.”
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