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The S.B.F. Chronicles, Part 2: Schmuck Insurance

During a sideline conversation at a fintech conference, some 15 months ago, S.B.F. offered some stunning revelations about how the sausage was made at FTX. This is the second in a series.

Sam Bankman-Fried
Sam Bankman-Fried exiting New York City Courthouse on December 22, 2022. Photo: Gotham/GC Images
William D. Cohan
December 28, 2022

Some 11 minutes into a nearly hour-long conversation with Sam Bankman-Fried in September 2021, the former Wall Street broker-turned-television producer Laura Goldman finally got down to business. The two were chatting on the sidelines of Anthony Scaramucci’s 2021 SALT conference at the Javits Center, on September 13, after S.B.F. was on a panel alongside Kevin O’Leary, the Shark Tank star, Jeremy Allaire, the founder of Circle, and Anatoly Yakovenko, the founder of Solana. What, Goldman asked, was S.B.F. going to do to protect FTX’s customers if and when FTX, or its management team, did something “crazy” to cause their money to be lost, or something else equally unfathomable?