Push Kim.
Hello listeners. If you've been enjoying our coverage of the trial of Sam Bankman Freed so far and are looking to dive even deeper into Sam's past, you should take a listen to Wondery in Bloomberg's podcast Spellcaster, the Fall of Sam Bankman Freed. His fall from grace represents one of the most spectacular failures of corporate controls in American history.
Here interviews with Sam Bankman Freed himself and his former girlfriend and business partner, Caroline Ellison, who later admitted something had gone very wrong inside their operation. From Bloomberg and Wondery comes Spelcaster, hosted by Bloomberg reporter Hannah Miller, now with an all new bonus episode that takes you inside the courtroom at Sam Bankman Fried's trial, including expert analysis, what to watch for, and more behind the scenes reporting.
Here's a clip from Spelcaster. Follow Spellcaster on the Wondery app or wherever you get your podcasts.
The Baja Maar Resort is a gargantuan hotel on a gorgeous stretch of Bahama's beach front. You enter by crossing a Roman style bridge over a landscaped lake where every night there's a glitzy fountain show with pulsing lights and extremely loud music. It's like the Bellagio on the Caribbean. Take In Climb checked into the Baha mar one afternoon in April of twenty twenty two.
So you arrive and there's a fish tank behind the check and dusk.
A big vertical tank filled with lionfish.
To be more specific, there were signs for Cryptobahamas everywhere. It really felt like the whole island was kind of buzzing about this event.
Tagan was a twenty nine year old crypto entrepreneur and influencer. She'd done a lot of these crypto conferences before, but she didn't know much about this one called Crypto Bahamas, other than that it was invite only and she'd agreed to speak the event.
It almost had this dark fantasy Disneyland Vegas vibe to it, and it really felt surreal from the moment that I landed.
She got her badge and was directed toward the VIP reception. She walked out on the hotel lawn to find a small gathering of people surrounded by cabanas and giant video screens. A local marching band played in the background.
There was one big table. It was a long, rectangular table set for about sixty people, So we kind of cull us in the middle of that table and we all talked together. It was a three course meal, no caviat but definitely nice food.
The guests took turns introducing themselves. There were a lot of the usual suspects hedge, fun guy, venture capital dude, crypto bro. Then a woman sat down at the table.
She came with two guys and they were very nice. They apologized for being late to the dinner.
Can recognize the woman right away. It was Katy Perry has an international pop superstar, Katy Perry. Then the guy next to her spoke of.
He said, I got famous from my role playing legalist and Lord of the Rings, and it was actually Orlando Bloom.
But for this crowd, Katy Perry and Orlando Bloom weren't the biggest celebrities there. The next morning, Michael Lewis, the world renowned business journalist, sat on stage with an awkward looking thirty year old guy with a mop of curly hair, wearing shorts and a baggy T shirt.
Three years ago, nobody knew who you were, and now you're sitting on the cover of magazines and you're a gazillionaire and you're.
This was who people were here to see, the co founder and CEO of FTX, one of the world's largest crypto exchanges. He was a billionaire many times over, a prolific political donor, a boundary breaking philanthropist, and he does it all in just a few years.
These are world This is your breaking land speed records, and I don't think people are really noticing what's happened, just how dramatic the revolution has become. There's a status of people that's going on in the financial world, and you're sitting right in the.
Middle of it. Sam Bankman Freed.
Yeah, I mean basically, And I think the way that sort of I approached it was like, what should the product be like?
You know, Lewis has written some of the definitive business books of the past forty years, Moneyball, Liar's Poker, and The Big Short. He has spent a lifetime sorting businesses, good guys from the Charlatans, and on stage at least he sounded impressed by what Sam Bankman Freed had accomplished. And Sam didn't just sit with Michael Lewis. He was everywhere. He shared the stage with former President Bill Clinton and
former British Prime Minister Tony Blair. He had an intimate heart to heart with Tom Brady, and then another with the quarterback's then wife, Giselle Bunschin, the Brazilian supermodel.
Oh that's just done, you know, I mean, ultimately, the scale of impact you can have on the world is just really, really large.
Sam was beyond awkward. His leg bounced wildly as he spoke, his eyes darted around the room, and.
You know, that's I think what really sets it apart.
His audience didn't seem to care. His awkwardness came off as a kind of charm like he was totally indifferent to what people thought about it, and they lapped it up, especially when he talked about his driving motivation doing good. Sam had promised to give all of his wealth away, all twenty six billion dollars of it.
The Ftech Foundation's recent announcement to give up to one billion dollars this year alone to high impact chair parties show how Sam is transforming corporate governance and becoming the modern day CEO that the world needs today.
We'll discuss on stage with Giselle. Salmon bailed a new ad showing him standing with his arms crossed with a calmly confident, even virtuous expression on his face. He wore a hoodie and shorts. The quote on his ad said, I'm in on crypto because I want to make the biggest global impact for good. Taigan Klein had never seen anything like it.
I think a lot of people were kind of in awe.
The crowd was captivated by Sam's good intentions, by the celebrities and world leaders he kept company with, and the sheer scale of his promises.
And this is where I realized that it was kind of the Sam Show.
The Sam Show. The spring of twenty twenty two, Crypto was booming and Sam Bankman Freed was the star. At one point, FTX said it was processing on average, twelve and a half billion dollars worth of transactions each day, and it was all Sam claimed in the name of one day giving his fortune away to save the world. Then, not long after his star turn in the Bahamas, The Sam Show began a very different season. Competitors and regulators began to circle Crypto prices were falling. Behind the scenes,
Sam's closest advisors were abandoning him. At the same time, my colleagues at Bloomberg started poking at the myth of Sam Bankman freed, and we published stories about it. We weren't the only ones, but even we couldn't imagine the full scale of what was wrong inside Sam's empire. By year's end, FTX was bankrupt, eight billion dollars were missing, and Sam was in handcuffs. Investors, prosecutors, lawyers, and crypto fans were all left to figure out what was real and what wasn't.
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