Pablo Torre Finds Out
How Sam Bankman-Fried Sportswashed an $8 Billion Crypto Fraud, Starring Tom Brady and Steph Curry
02 Jan 2025
The FTX founder was a "martian" to the sports world. Why did he spend so much on arena naming rights and superstar endorsements? And how the hell did SBF become friends with TB12? Authors Michael Lewis (Going Infinite) and Zeke Faux (Number Go Up) witnessed the rise and fall of a crypto king. Now we can do the postmortem: “Moneyball, on steroids, gone wrong.” This episode originally aired November 21, 2023. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices
Full Episode
Welcome to Pablo Torre Finds Out.
I am Pablo Torre, and today we're going to find out what this sound is. He should have said, Tom, I paid you for 20 hours. Get down here and give me a pep talk, because I'm facing a really tough challenge right now. Right after this ad.
You're listening to DraftKings Network.
With the Galaxy Watch 7 and the Galaxy Ring and the Samsung Health app.
Okay, so I just got to dive right in here because I believe that today's story has been incredibly undercovered in the world of sports, specifically, which is criminal, as it were. This is the story of Sam Bankman-Fried. Sam Bankman-Fried is the founder of a company, a crypto exchange, named FTX. And FTX made Sam the richest person under the age of 30 on the planet.
It put him on the cover of Fortune as the next Warren Buffett and Forbes as the next Mark Zuckerberg. And it put him all over sports itself. You may remember this. FTX had a Super Bowl commercial. Sam was famously endorsed by Tom Brady, Steph Curry and Shohei Ohtani and many of the best athletes in America. all of which turned out to be an enormous problem.
One of the most powerful people in the cryptocurrency industry, Sam Bankman-Fried, arrested overnight in the Bahamas. The federal charges just unsealed. They include eight counts, including wire fraud, securities fraud, and intent to defraud the United States government.
The government also contends that Bankman-Fried was using these customer deposits to both cover bad bets that he made at his crypto hedge fund, Alameda Research, and to make $100 million in campaign contributions. All in, we're talking about more than $8 billion worth of FTX customer money that went missing. Bankman-Fried has pleaded not guilty to all charges.
This is always sort of a gamble, right? The defendant taking the stand in their own trial, the defense putting him up there. How's he doing so far?
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