With all due respect to our friend Andrew Ross Sorkin, who snagged the primo Zoom interview with S.B.F. from the Bahamas on Wednesday, giving the 30-year-old former billionaire yet another opportunity to blither on and on, against the advice of esteemed counsel, the most important event of the week in the ongoing saga occurred the next day, in the bankruptcy court in Delaware. That’s when Andrew Vara, the U.S. bankruptcy trustee for the Delaware region, filed a motion requesting the judge appoint an examiner in the bankruptcy of FTX Trading et al. If Judge John T. Dorsey signs off, and surely he will, we will eventually—probably in four to six months or so—know what really happened here and why.  

In the meantime, all the late night talking that S.B.F. is doing, claiming he didn’t knowingly commingle funds or intentionally lose more than $10 billion of his customers’ money, is completely irrelevant. What will matter in the FTX Trading debacle is what the examiner discovers happened and whether the S.E.C. and the Justice Department concur—the two of them are also investigating—and whether they decide that S.B.F. has engaged in illegal activity. The examiner’s report, if it happens, will likely be the public’s and the interested parties’ first detailed understanding of what happened and how and why the money was lost. Anything S.B.F. does or says before the examiner’s report is released is largely irrelevant and will likely do more damage to his legal predicament, as he freely admitted to Sorkin on Wednesday. (And he’s still talking and talking: in the last few days alone, to the Wall Street Journal, the FT, Good Morning America and to a very angry group of crypto investors on Twitter Spaces.)