Now, back to S.B.F. and an Ellison wrinkle…

The wheels of justice tend to turn slowly after a jury has already rendered its verdict. Indeed, Sam Bankman-Fried, the disgraced FTX founder, has been waiting for about two years on a decision from the Second Circuit, to which he appealed his original, 25-year sentence for fraud and conspiracy. In the meantime, Sam was recently moved to the federal prison in Lompoc, California—the same facility where Michael Milken once served time—where he has been plotting his various legal means of escape.

Alas, it seems increasingly unlikely that Donald Trump will grant him a pardon or commute his sentence: The president likes to exact a price for such beneficence, and I suspect Sam is low on cash these days. It doesn’t help that Sam has tried to shift the blame to Sullivan & Cromwell—the same prestigious Wall Street law firm that now represents Trump in various ongoing legal skirmishes. When Sam drafted a brief in February requesting that Judge Lewis Kaplan grant him a new trial, it rested heavily on his contention that FTX was actually solvent when it filed for bankruptcy and that Sullivan & Cromwell, which made hundreds of millions of dollars as the debtor’s counsel in the bankruptcy proceeding, had a conflict because the firm was explicitly aiding the prosecution. (Sullivan & Cromwell did not respond to a request for comment about Sam’s quest for a new trial.)

On April 22, however, a letter from Sam voluntarily withdrawing his request for a new trial—without prejudice, meaning he reserves the right to refile the request—appeared on the court docket. According to Sam’s letter, he “conceived” of his motion for a new trial and “formulated the arguments, drafted multiple versions of it myself, and did the bulk of the legal research while I was at MDC Brooklyn and had better access to legal materials as well as a word processor.” He also wrote that his parents, Barbara Fried and Joe Bankman, both former Stanford Law School professors, made various editorial and organizational suggestions, some of which he’d accepted. But, Sam continued, he had decided to withdraw the motion because he was facing pushback on two fronts. First, of course, there was the prosecution’s opposition. But Sam was also forced to respond to Judge Kaplan’s skeptical line of questioning—and, he wrote, “I do not believe I will get a fair hearing on this topic in front of you.” That is yet another dig at Kaplan, whom Sam has been feuding with pretty much ever since he was arrested in December 2022.

Meanwhile, Sam—or some surrogate—has been pushing a related argument in the court of public opinion. On the same day that Sam withdrew his request for a new trial, a series of posts (and reposts) appeared on his X account highlighting just how much money he might have returned to investors and customers had FTX not been forced into bankruptcy. To wit: FTX’s top six venture capital investments would ostensibly be worth a stunning $114 billion (not a typo) if John J. Ray III, who took over the bankrupt estate, hadn’t sold them for a fraction of that amount several years ago.

The biggest winner in FTX’s portfolio was Anthropic, in which Sam invested about $500 million in April 2022. According to one of the posts, that stake would now be worth roughly $82.3 billion, or 165x his original investment. (I have not been able to independently verify the calculations.) Instead, Ray sold the Anthropic stake in March 2024 for around $884 million—not a bad return, but a far cry indeed from the $82 billion it would apparently be worth now.

There were other potential big winners, too. Sam’s $189 million stake in Solana, a cryptocurrency, would apparently be worth $5.1 billion. His $612.5 million stake in Robinhood could be worth just under $5 billion. His $1.17 billion stake in Genesis Digital would allegedly be worth some $3.5 billion. And while this next claim is a little harder to verify, Sam tweeted that in 2022, FTX invested $700 million into venture capital firm K5 Global, which invested $200 million of that into SpaceX—a stake that would now be valued at roughly $15 billion. Finally, Sam’s $200,000 investment in Anysphere, which later morphed into the parent company of Cursor, could apparently be worth around $3 billion if SpaceX completes a deal to buy Cursor at a proposed $60 billion valuation. The FTX estate sold that stake in April 2023 for roughly the same $200,000 that Sam had paid for it a year earlier.

The unrealized gains were tallied up by an X account that tracks the famous investor Michael Burry, which wrote, “Had [S.B.F.] done nothing wrong, he’d have an estimated worth of $114,000,000,000 today. Instead he’s tweeting from [a] Federal Correctional Institution.” The post added that Sam “might have been the best V.C. in history.” And that might well be true, but at the moment, Sam is in Lompoc, hoping beyond hope that Trump comes through for him. And, it must be said, it’s not enough for an investor to take a bunch of prescient positions. He has to stay invested in them long enough to realize those gains. Easier said than done, even when you’re not in prison.

Meanwhile, on Thursday morning, Warner Bros. Discovery shareholders took just 11 minutes to approve the $31-a-share, all-cash bid from Paramount Skydance. No surprise there—what WBD shareholder in their right mind would reject the offer? In the end, 99 percent of those who voted by proxy or in person voted for the PSKY deal. The only real drama was related to the second item on the shareholders’ agenda: the gargantuan compensation packages for WBD executives, led by David Zaslav (who—usual disclosure—is a de minimis shareholder in Puck).

If and when the deal closes, Zaz is slated to receive around $550 million, while the other three top WBD executives—Gunnar Wiedenfels, JB Perrette, and Bruce Campbell—will be paid around $140 million each. Collectively, they are likely to receive more than $1 billion when their stock vests sometime later this year upon the change of control of the company. But despite the WBD board’s recommendation, the shareholders did not approve the compensation packages—and it wasn’t really close. Nearly 82 percent voted no. That’s pretty astounding. But no worries, Zaz et al., the vote was nonbinding. The WBD executives will still get their money.

With the shareholder vote now a done deal, can anything stop the sale of WBD to PSKY? Obviously, the more than 4,000 Hollywood folks who signed the recent letter opposing the combination hope so. But the letter was addressed to the D.O.J. and F.C.C., neither of which is expected to raise any kind of stink. Instead, Ellison’s Hollywood antagonists are pinning their hopes on various state attorneys general—particularly, California’s Rob Bonta.

Last month, Bonta and a group of other state A.G.s filed suit to try to block the merger between Nexstar and Tegna, two big television station groups. The judge issued a preliminary injunction that stopped that merger from proceeding any further, pending the outcome of the litigation, even though the merger itself is technically closed. The suit is unlikely to ultimately block the combination, but it has delayed the integration of the two companies. Could the same playbook be used in the WBD-PSKY deal? The short answer is yes, but I suspect the case for reduced competition would be a heavier lift here than with Tegna–Nexstar, despite the outcry over the deal in Hollywood.

Anyway, if the state A.G.s try to delay the deal’s closing beyond September 30, it could cost Larry Ellison real money, or what would be real money to most billionaires. You will recall the so-called “ticking fee” that PSKY agreed to pay WBD shareholders if the closing is delayed beyond that date—25 cents per WBD share, or an extra ~$625 million paid by Larry & Co. to the WBD shareholders for every quarter of delay. As best I can tell, if the deal closes on, say, October 15, WBD shareholders would collectively get a pro-rata portion of that $625 million for every day after September 30. In other words, Bonta can still cause Larry some serious agita—especially when Oracle’s stock is down some 12 percent this year and is only worth $500 billion these days.

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