An island nation in the Caribbean: The Bahamas.

Luxury condos line the coast.

This was the base of a company that in 2022 shook the world with a multibillion-dollar crash.

It was the home of young crypto star Sam Bankman-Fried, also know by the initials SBF.

By 30, he'd grown cryptocurrency exchange FTX Trading into a firm with total assets of over 30 billion US dollars.

SBF was once seen as blazing a trail to a bright future.

I want to.. I do whatever will serve, maximize ultimate aggregate happiness and well-being...

However...

Tonight, we're getting a new indication of the true scope of the FTX cryptocurrency.

...collapsed, prosecutors say that 8 billion dollars vanished.

November 2022.

The firm collapsed and Sam was arrested on suspicion of fraud and money laundering.

For a crypto superstar, it was a dramatic fall from grace.

Michael McAteer. Based in New York, he reports on items in the news that are of interest to people in Japan.

The NHK crew spoke with many stakeholders, and came away with valuable quotes.

We lost 39% in our portfolio. It was the worst losses that we've experienced in our careers.

It's just a story of one man's hubris and greed,

using whatever the nearest financial apparatus was to him to make that happen.

It seemed like a very positive vision.

And so we had every reason to believe that this vision was going to be realized.

"Fake it till you make it."

For the most ruthless US entrepreneurs, this could almost be a guiding principle.

Was Sam Bankman-Fried a visionary or a scam artist?

We explore the murky depths of a massive cryptocurrency money game.

Hi, I'm Michael McAteer.

We're here in front of the New York Stock Exchange.

At the center of old-school tradition of finance.

The world central banks and financial institutions are all parts of this grand old machine.

The past decade though, has seen the rise of the new financial system.

One that doesn't need banks of any kind or transactions happen online, peer-to-peer, decentralized.

Welcome to cryptocurrency.

Crypto gathered momentum in the wake of the 2008 financial crash.

Countless firms had marketed high-risk financial products.

Yet no executive from any of the major investment banks was arrested.

Financial companies collapsed like dominos, the economy tanked, and the ranks of the unemployed grew.

Furious young people occupied Wall Street.

It was the perfect moment to propose a new future for money.

Conventional financial systems operate in centralized networks.

Savers deposit fiat currency minted by central banks.

Banks charge transfer fees for transactions, and users may be hit by exchange-rate losses.

If a bank collapses, users may even lose access to their deposits.

Cryptocurrencies function in a decentralized network.

Blockchain encryption allows users to trade directly.

No bank or other intermediary is involved.

There are no transfer fees, and no exchange-rate losses.

Each person is responsible for their own assets.

This sent an especially powerful message to the young generation.

The best-known crypto currency is Bitcoin.

But anybody can create a cryptocurrency and over ten thousand exist.

The crypto market is worth around 50 billion dollars.

FTX under Sam Bankman-Fried blazed a trail in this new world.

We went to the US West Coast to find out more about SBF.

California is home to a truly elite university: Stanford.

The place where Sam was born and raised is nearby, and we paid a visit.

This is it.

His parents are professors at Stanford Law School.

Joseph Bankman specializes in tax law.

Barbara Fried's interests include law, economics and philosophy.

Both are highly respected academic figures.

Reporter Hannah Miller has been investigating the FBX story.

She says Sam's parents hosted salons at which he would have been exposed to cutting-edge thought.

Just have, you know, debates and eat good food and hang out and relax and socialize...

those are the kind of environment that Sam group grew up in.

That, you know, rigorous conversations at the dinner table were had, you know,

I think he was taught to question things, you know, to look at the world very deeply.

SBF studied at Massachusetts Institute of Technology, MIT, which has produced many Nobel Prize winners.

Here he discovered a way of thinking that changed his life.

It began when he met philosopher William MacAskill.

MacAskill's core tenet is "Earn to Give."

The idea is that the best way to improve the world is to rigorously select organizations

that can optimize the impact of philanthropy.

This approach is known as Effective Altruism, or EA.

Making money to improve the world struck a chord with SBF and other young people

who had been alienated by toxic Wall Street capitalism.

I can make... as much as I can donate.

I certainly... the utilitarian for a while but not hadn't thought all about what that actually meant for my life and my college.

Their implications of this have like if you're actually think about what you could do for the world.

That's going to have implications right? Live your life.

Earn to Give.

Sam Bankman-Fried headed to the world's financial capital of New York,

intending to make money for the social good.

He landed a job at a major proprietary trading firm.

He was paid a high salary - and donated most of it to charity.

We met a key figure from this era of his life.

Brett Harrison was not only his mentor, he went on work at FTX.

- Pleasure to meet you.
- Thank you.

Harrison tells us about the young SBF's growing reputation for adding value to discussions.

At some point, they would say, "Hey, Sam should be part of the conversations too,"

because he's going to be helping design a lot of these systems and working through a lot of the trading problems,

which is interesting because he was still very young, and they were already starting to include him on important discussions.

I was impressed that someone who was 22, 23, was giving large percentages of his salary away immediately

to what I thought were very good causes and thought at the time that that his belief in EA was excellent.

SBF's future as a trader seemed assured.

But after just three years, he quit.

A note he wrote helps explain why.

"Journalism - low pay, but massively outsized impact potential."

"Running for office - or maybe just being an advisor?"

"Working for the movement - EA needs people!"

"Starting a startup - but what, exactly?"

"Bumming around the Bay Area for a month or so - just to see what happens."

It was he announced that he was leaving to go joining a nonprofit.

- Right.
- The Center for Effective Altruism.

And he was going to sort of devote his career towards, you know, his nonprofit aspirations.

And what was so interesting was we all found out much later that he didn't really do that at all.

He had started this competitor trading firm.

In 2017, Sam returned to San Francisco, where his parents live.

Crypto was booming.

In that one year, the dollar value of Bitcoin increased 2000%.

SBF thought that a hedge fund to manage crypto assets would be a good way to make money.

A new company was born: Alameda Research.

Brady Dale, an expert on Effective Altruism community, has written a book on SBF.

He was in crypto, because he could tell that this was one of those once in a lifetime opportunities to make lots of money.

And he was like, "if I could have done this trading oranges or copper, I would have been trading oranges or copper."

And you know, it was about making a giant pile of money so that he could fund his great vision for fixing the world...

Crypto trading was rapidly gaining global momentum.

Sam Bankman-Fried zoomed in on Japan.

Crypto was being traded at higher prices there than in the US.

In the background was the collapse of a Bitcoin exchange called Mt. Gox.

We deeply regret the trouble
caused by our loss of Bitcoin.

The reluctance of Japanese banks to embrace crypto backfire,

demand grew and the price of Bitcoin grows.

SBF saw an opportunity to make money.

He could sell US-bought Bitcoin at a higher price in Japan.

This form of trading is called arbitrage.

At one point, the price of Bitcoin was 10% higher than in the US.

One thousand dollars of US Bitcoin could generate a profit of one hundred dollars when sold in Japan.

But this kind of transaction required the bank account of someone living in Japan.

So SBF asked a Japanese acquintance in the EA community to open an account.

His success in Japan became one of SBF's talking points.

So by the end of this whole thing like how much, how many millions are you doing it?

I think we... I mean, we did not have as much capital as we want it also like capital is a limiting factor,

but I think we got up to ten or so, you know, 10 to 15 a day at the peak.

We spoke with someone who knew SBF at this time.

Crypto trading firm CEO Hirosue Noriyuki.

He received massive orders from Alameda Research.

Yes, they were our biggest customer.

Many firms had "crypto trading"
in their articles of incorporation.

Banks wouldn't let a company
like that open a new account.

But you could change the wording.

Use "financial trading" and the bank
would let you open an account.

We'd handle millions of dollars
in trading for days in a row.

For days? Wow!

Michael McAteer actually started following the crypto story three years earlier than SBF.

Bitcoin! It's in the headlines
but it's not easy to understand.

Here in New York, media outlets
are picking up the story.

McAteer became interested in crypto when a friend asked him to open a bank account in Japan.

I'd never heard of arbitrage.
I asked, "What's that?"

The Mt. Gox hacking and collapse
scared a lot of folks away.

We were so relieved we survived it.

Do I regret it? Well, I mean...
Of course I do.

SBF made massive profits.

But he was also becoming less cautious, occasionally he would make a massive loss.

Staff who joined Alameda with dreams of advancing Effective Altruism became disillusioned. Many quit.

Brady Dale believes it was at this point that Sam began to prioritize goals above methods.

He stopped listening to the opinions of others.

I think Sam was one of those people who had like big ambitions for himself.

And it sort of put his own ambitions ahead of sort of the larger group.

I think he was ultimately a true Sam believer.

I think he was you know,

I think he was always going to trust his own judgment over us maybe the broader EA community.

Sam Bankman-Fried started out as an advocate of Effective Altruism.

What happened? Here's a story that reveals a different aspect of who he is.

One of Sam's favorite board games: Diplomacy.

It is set in the Europe of the First World War.

Players become the leaders of different countries, and engage in a strategic power struggle.

Each player has to decide whether or not to form alliances, to lie, or to betray.

The game has a reputation for ruining friendships.

SBF was greatly influenced by the game of Diplomacy.

You would be, you know, playing against other people, your friends,

you know, who normally you'd be eating with, sleeping with, living with, going to class with.

I think he really excelled at, you know, having these complex strategies,

you know, winning... you're making connections, making allies,

and then eventually turning on them.

But Diplomacy was just a board game.

The crypto world was a chance to bring it to life.

After his success at Alameda, SBF set his sights on dominating global crypto transactions.

His burning ambition now was to win the game of crypto.

SBF had enjoyed major success at Alameda.

His next move was to set up a crypto exchange, FTX Trading.

Two companies with two different business models.

Alameda was a hedge fund that generated returns for investors.

FTX was an exchange that made money from fees for handling crypto-asset trades.

SBF believed that creating a convenient, easy-to-use exchange would attract users.

More users would mean bigger profits.

He was aspiring to emulate Changpeng Zhao, or CZ, the CEO of Binance, the world's biggest crypto exchange.

CZ was born in China and raised in Canada.

He set up Binance in 2017.

After buying up competitors around the world, Binance led the industry in just six months.

When SBF asked CZ for funding to get FTX up and running, he got a surprising "yes."

This is the press release from the investment announcement.

CZ calls FTX an "excellent partner," and SBF acknowledges Binance as a "market leader."

I just do think that they were both just hard-charging ferocious entrepreneurs

who would do whatever it took to be number one. CZ was number one.

He like, invested in Sam a little bit because he thought he was cute. They both use their initials.

I think they were a matched set.

In 2020, the Covid pandemic swept the globe.

People stuck at home began investing in crypto.

The market expanded rapidly.

FTX caught the attention of major investors.

One of them was Sequoia Capital, a top venture capital firm.

What made them choose Sam Bankman-Fried?

The company published a report that they later deleted.

A crucial online meeting was held.

SBF was dressed casually and had an unkempt appearance.

His eyes remained glued to a video game as he laid out an epic vision for his company.

He stated that FTX would offer a new, convenient financial system

that wouldn't charge the transfer fees of traditional banks.

The Sequoia executives who heard the presentation exchanged excited messages.

The executives agreed to a huge investment of over 200 million dollars.

Once Sequoia had made its move, FTX welcomed a long line of enthusiastic investors.

It seems they were chiefly motivated by anxiety.

Fear Of Missing Out or FOMO.

It's the emotion that says "Here's an opportunity that you might miss out

if you do not hang up on understanding the details. Just jump in!"

FOMO was huge back then.

Yeah, everyone had a fear of missing out on investing in crypto.

This was a founder that who everyone considered to be incredibly bright,

with an impeccable resume, amazing connections,

a really interesting backstory with this idea of Effective Altruism.

They were like, this seems like a great bet.

People saw crypto as the new Facebook
or the new Google. They wanted in.

When financial power houses like Sequoia capital and Ontario Teachers' Pension Plan invested in FTX,

that became a green light for small funds and private investors to jump in after them

because those big funds must have robust due diligence and risk control, right?

Turns out not always.

SBF was now trusted by major investors.

Next came a brand strategy.

We think it fits our business better right now.

We think that given the fact that we're coming from way behind in terms of user base,

but ahead in terms of product, I, you know,

step one here is getting our name and our reputation, our brand out there.

In 2021, FTX became the first crypto firm to win naming rights for a sports arena,

at a cost of 135 million dollars.

Sports stars and supermodels were used to reach out to young potential customers.

I am trading crypto.

FTX is the safest and easiest way to buy and sell crypto. It's the best way to get in the game.

I'm in the Bahamas! Home to fabulous
beaches and FTX's former head office.

The Bahamas were eager to attract crypto, and Sam chose to locate his head office there.

As his crypto empire grew,

SBF spent 120 million dollars buying up a string of expensive beach-front condos.

Writer Brady Dale called it "the Samglomerate."

This is it.

We asked if we could see inside.

Hello. Is this... are we able to come in at all?

- Absolutely not.
- No. No recording.

No recording. OK, thank you very much. Have a great day.

No good, we can't go in.

The interior of an FTX penthouse.

The leaders of SBF's empire enjoyed a luxury communal life.

These three were his closest allies.

Gary Wang, a high-school friend and FTX's top technical expert.

Engineer Nishad Singh.

And Alameda Research's CEO, Caroline Ellison, who was dating Sam.

FTX and Alameda had head offices on the same lot.

Members of the two teams spent much of their lives together.

We were able to meet a former Alameda staff member.

Software engineer Aditya Baradwaj.

Even though the beaches were there, and the beaches were so beautiful,

we didn't really spend that much time on the actual beaches.

We were mostly inside in the office working.

It was like everyone's asking me, "What's this tiny company you're joining?"

And then now the company is in the news and I'm able to point to the news and say,

you know, "That's the company that I'm at." That was pretty cool. Right?

So it was it was very exciting to be in the middle of that.

In spite of Sam's amazing success, there was a major obstacle on his path -

the biggest player in the crypto world: CZ of Binance.

I have a feeling Sam's calculation was the opportunity to pull ahead of Binance is now in this bear market.

Because if there's another bull run before you pull ahead, it's just, you know,

Binance is GM, Binance is Coke, you know, it's just it's number one for good.

SBF started to move in a new direction.

He turned his attention to the world of politics.

In US political circles, crypto was seen by some as a mystery and by others as a threat.

SBF needed to clear a path through these obstacles to enjoy business freedom.

So he began lobbying.

He positioned himself as the face of the crypto industry and pushed to attend congressional hearings.

He indicated he could offer guidance on future regulations.

He also approached regulatory bodies such as the SEC and CFTC.

I'm super happy to serve as a resource for anyone in government or else

who wants in and I'm happy talk about what the industry is like.

I think the goal should be create an environment

where good actors can have thriving businesses that can grow and build out the industry

while making it clear what things you're uncomfortable with as regulators.

Former CFTC chairman Timothy Massad met SBF and thought his lobbying was aimed at dominating the US market.

If he was associated with creating a regulatory framework,

then perhaps he could not only start maybe one of the first fully regulated spot exchanges,

but people would associate FTX with that,

and therefore view FTX as the better entity in the market.

And I think that was also part of his branding efforts in the US.

Brett Harrison was once Sam's mentor, later became the President of the US arm of FTX.

He witnessed firsthand SBF's changing attitude to CZ.

Sam really was trying to position himself as the only good show in town.

What would he say to the politicians about CZ?

It was never anything that was overt.

It just was sort of hints at there being other exchanges out there that aren't as good actors in the community as him.

Binance has been the subject of investigations around the world, including in the US.

So I think it's quite possible that Sam was trying to capitalize,

you know, on that, strengthen his own presence in DC.

CZ made comments that suggest he knew what SBF was up to.

Once they go to a stage, to a size, I just hear all kind of rumors, all kind of people telling me,

"Hey, look, this guy's lobbying behind you in DC."

"This guy's saying bad things behind you."

This is and we're like, okay, this is not so good.

For them, they may think it's more meaningful to take market share away from us,

but that's actually also a very, what do I call it, limited mindset.

In 2022, circumstances changed abruptly when Russia invaded Ukraine.

As the inflation rate surged, the Federal Reserve raised interest rates in an effort to rein in prices.

Perceptions that crypto was too risky began to spread

impacting the success of the cryptocurrencies and crypto companies.

But then, Sam Bankman-Fried rode to the rescue, offering funds to struggling firms.

Sam really stepped in. A lot of people were calling him a white knight, that he was here to save the industry.

A lot of people were calling him, the JP Morgan of crypto.

But I wrote a very critical story arguing that he was not doing this out of the goodness of his own heart,

that this was a strategic way to gain more power and influence over the industry that many want to be decentralized,

you know that he was becoming like the figurehead of crypto by doing this.

April 2022.

SBF was on his way to making FTX a permanent fixture of the crypto landscape.

This was the moment he chose to hold a big event in the Bahamas.

He announced that traditional banks would partner with crypto to build a new financial system.

Former US President Bill Clinton and former UK Prime Minister Tony Blair were among the participants.

The event was co-hosted by investor Anthony Scaramucci, formerly of US investment firm Goldman Sachs.

Thank you so much for being with us.

Sam is probably six months older than my oldest son.

And so you know, I took him on...

I had 30 plus years of experience on Wall Street.

And so I was willing to work with him to build and grow his network.

And I trusted and liked him.

In the summer of 2022, Sam Bankman-Fried began to maneuver ahead of November US mid-term elections.

He made huge political donations on his quest to become king of the crypto world.

38 million dollars went to the Democratic party, making FTX its third-largest donor.

It then emerged that he had also made vast donations to the Republican party.

And we will make America Great Again!

Reporter Hannah Miller was starting to become seriously concerned about the way SBF was doing business.

Alameda and FTX should have been separate entities, yet their executives were very close.

She wondered if funds and information were being illegally exchanged.

Carolyn Ellison and Sam Bankman-Fried did date on and off for a period that lasted over years.

You have to remember, they shared a corporate campus in the Bahamas.

All the employees lived and worked together and partied together.

In an effort to find out more, Miller asked SBF for an interview in August.

During that interview, he emphasized over and over that FTX and Alameda were completely separate entities.

Throughout the interview, he grew extremely flustered.

He became combative at times.

And it was very different from the first time I interviewed him.

You know, he really he really didn't seem at ease in the conversation.

Cracks were also appearing inside FTX.

Brett Harrison, President of the US operation, sent SBF an email highlighting issues with management.

He received an astonishing response from Sam's lawyer.

He pulled me into a side room and he threatened me.

I mean, he said, "How dare you have written that letter? You should never have written that letter."

"You have made Sam so angry at you and frustrated for you. He's probably going to fire you."

"And if he doesn't fire you, good luck trying to get paid your bonuses."

And it was, that was one of the strangest moments of my professional career.

It felt like I was talking to the Mafia.

In September 2022, Harrison left FTX.

November 2nd. A shocking article was published.

Internal documents leaked from Alameda Research indicated the hedge fund was on the brink of a crisis.

The documents showed that Alameda's assets were dominated by FTT, a cryptocurrency token issued by FTX Trading.

It turned out that FTX had supported Alameda with FTT.

And the FTT price was artificially inflated to make Alameda seem solvent.

It later emerged that FTX customer funds had been moved to Alameda.

As concern spread about SBF's actions, CZ of Binance wrote a stunning tweet.

"Due to recent revelations that have come to light, we have decided to liquidate any remaining FTT on our books."

"We won't support people who lobby against other industry players behind their backs."

CZ had ditched SBF!

Panicking FTX users started selling their own FTT.

Its price began to drop.

Desperate to stem the flow, Alameda's CEO Caroline Ellison offered to buy CZ's tokens.

"If you're looking to minimize the market impact on your FTT sales, Alameda will happily buy it all from you today at $22!"

But her apparent anxiety further spooked investors.

As this drama unfolded, SBF had been silent.

He finally sent out a tweet at midday on the 7th.

"FTX is fine. Assets are fine."

But later, he deleted it.

Sam also tried a radical move:

try to avoid bankruptcy by having CZ buy up the firm.

Behind the scenes, he was trying to find every way possible to, you know,

bail out FTX, get help, I think for him,

it was not a good look, to tweet that out, and then delete it.

Another day passed. SBF tweeted again.

"we have come to an agreement on a strategic transaction with Binance for FTX.com."

But 18 hours after that...

"We have decided that we will not pursue the potential acquisition of FTX.com."

CZ was making it clear that he would not bail out FTX.

Now there was no way to avoid bankruptcy.

The value of the FTT token had fallen 80% in just one week.

"I f***ed up, and should have done better."

The following day, Alameda and FTX filed for bankruptcy.

SBF's last message to CZ?

"You won, @cz_binance."

Alameda engineer Aditya Baradwaj watched the back-and-forth unfold.

We didn't really think that much of it.

I mean, we had seen stuff like this in the news before, right?

People are always saying, you know, positive things, negative things, all kinds of things about Alameda and FTX.

But during a business trip to Hong Kong, Alameda CEO Ellison gathered her team - and the truth came out.

She was crying a little bit. She was very apologetic.

So she started by saying that, that she was sorry for letting us down.

And you know, she was kind of apologizing.

And then she went on to kind of tell us all the details about what had been going on.

Honestly, none of us were really in the mood to accept her apology. Right?

So it was, you know, there was definitely some tension there.

More than 90% of my life savings at the time.

Yeah, so a lot of money.

The news came as a huge shock to many others.

I just couldn't make heads or tails of how this was possible.

Because I worked at that company. I knew what I believed.

It just didn't make any sense to me.

I was really shocked when Sam tweeted that he screwed up.

You know, this was someone who had been at the top of his game for so long within the industry.

I think he wanted to hurt him.

I don't think he knew it was gonna do that. So who knows? I mean, how could you know?

You know, I think he wanted to hurt him. I don't think he wanted to kill him.

If a company is well-run, any other strongly well-run crypto exchange,

if I tweet I want their tokens, I don't think I would do very much.

I can try. I don't think I will do very much...

Many investors suffered massive losses. Scaramucci among them.

Shortly before the bankruptcy, SBF approached Scaramucci to discuss another round of funding.

Scaramucci agreed to introduce Sam to investors in the Middle East and they flew to Dubai.

Dubai is where CZ's Binance had a key office.

I guess he met with some different people there.

And it was fairly negative and quite antagonistic, related to CZ.

And I think that got back to CZ. And so that upset him.

Immediately after that trip, the SBF's empire started to fall apart.

Imagine if that didn't happen,

and we were successful in raising him the billion dollars, we might still be living in the Sam Bankman-Fried world.

And this world would have been even more catastrophic later on.

December 2022.

The start of bankruptcy proceedings for FTX Trading and Alameda Research.

The financial cost came to 8 billion dollars, the largest sum in US history.

Over a million people were impacted.

The chief instruction officer assigned to the case was John Ray,

a veteran who also worked on the Enron bankruptcy and other corporate failures.

He testified to the House about the slapdash accounting at FTX.

This one is unusual and it's unusual in the sense that literally, you know, there's no record-keeping whatsoever.

They use Quickbooks. A multibillion-dollar company using Quickbooks.

- Quickbooks?
- Quickbooks.

The collapse of FTX sent shock waves through the US banking system.

Banks that had underestimated their exposure to the likes of FTX suffered badly.

Sam Bankman-Fried was arrested in the Bahamas on eight charges covering such crimes as wire fraud and money laundering.

Before his trial, Sam made several attempts to prevent his former colleagues from testifying against him.

One target was Caroline Ellison of Alameda Research.

She and Sam had dated, and he leaked her diary to the media to put pressure on her.

Reporter Hannah Miller knew Caroline Ellison through mutual friends.

I can't imagine, you know, dating the CEO of your sister company,

and not letting that affect, you know, the business and how it's run.

There was one where she just spoke about how she'd been waiting for this, you know,

and that in some ways, it was this weird relief for it to be over.

I mean, I can't imagine, you know, having that kind of weight on you

knowing that that things are seriously wrong with the operation that you're responsible for.

The day of the trial has dawned.
This is the courthouse.

The trial focused on whether SBF deliberately passed FTX client funds to Alameda.

As part of a plea-bargain, executives who were once SBF's friends testified that they had acted under his instructions.

Caroline Ellison's statement revealed another side to SBF.

She said he believed that rules about not lying didn't apply to him.

Reporter Brady Dale followed the court proceeding in person.

In the witness box, Sam Bankman-Fried was no longer a charismatic visionary.

They said that he said he couldn't recall or he didn't remember 140 times, you know,

like, suddenly his mind was blank, and he couldn't remember anything.

And it just that I think that contrast was pretty, I think it's pretty easy for the jury to see that it just doesn't look good.

The abrupt fall of an exciting young leader.

Did SBF plan his actions, or did his drive to improve the world blind him to the truth of what he was doing?

There might have been some perverse expected value calculation in his head where "here is how I get to the top."

"I'm going to keep betting and keep betting and keep betting."

"And if it goes down, it goes down. But I will have done my best along the way."

He came across as just like a kind of a nerdy guy, right?

And many of us at the company are basically nerds, right?

And that was a big part of company culture also.

And I think all of that made us see a little bit of ourselves in Sam.

I mean, in the US, we talk a lot about the American dream, you know, that you can be anything you want.

I'm also talking about the venture investors, you know, the politicians,

you know, the journalists who really, you know, took him at his word.

FTX investor Scaramucci also sighs that SBF was battling his own demons.

He was trying to break out of that depression,

there was aspects of the personality where he wanted to be included in sort of the cool club, if you will.

And then there were aspects of his personality because of his depression,

where he had some level of disregard for others, you know.

That's ultimately what we are as human beings, there's complexity to our personalities.

I see it as a sad situation. This is a tragic story.

This is a man, a young man, who was quite ambitious and very smart.

How did this happen?

Reporter Brady Dale suggests that US business culture often engenders a certain type of behavior.

I do think we're the world's greatest risk takers at the moment,

you know, which is sort of like why, for now, we kind of lead in enterprise.

The other thing about how America likes risk

is we like, we do like to trick ourselves with risk.

I think Americans do like this whole narrative. And Sam had a nice narrative.

And so I think that is a part of how it fits.

A toxic mix of extreme wealth, fame, political ambition, savior complex and risk addiction.

These forces propelled Sam Bankman-Fried to unfathomable heights and also caused his downfall.

It's a futuristic crypto story that's also maybe has all this time.

The jury found Sam Bankman-Fried guilty on seven counts, including fraud.

At the end, when he turned to smile at his mother, she collapsed in tears.

He may spend the rest of his life in prison.

A year after the bankruptcy, crypto events are crowded with young people,

and the big crash of 2022 seems almost forgotten.

We are bullish. We believe in blockchain and decentralization 100 million%.

I truly believe if anyone thinks crypto is going anywhere, they're massively mistaken. It's clearly not.

In November 2023, having admitted to the crime of money laundering, CZ quit as CEO of Binance.

Another bright light in the crypto galaxy was extinguished.

But how long will it be before the next superstar appears?