It’s great to be the hero founder. You are the face of the company and its success—and, if you raise enough money—you sometimes even get to be the face on the cover of business magazines. Everyone wants to be around you and hear what you have to say. Famous authors decide to write about the incredible journey that has been your life.
And when everything goes sour, you weren’t that involved at your company anyway. Or at least, that’s what Sam Bankman-Fried is arguing.
SBF’s defense strategy over the last two days as he faces criminal fraud charges seems to have been a last-ditch effort to imply to jurors that he wasn’t really all that aware of all the happenings at FTX—or sometimes that he wasn’t that aware of even his own interviews he had given to reporters.
As my colleague Leo Schwartz wrote from the courthouse yesterday:
[SBF lieutenants Caroline] Ellison, [Gary] Wang, and [Nishad] Singh all testified that Bankman-Fried had directed a series of changes that allowed Alameda to rack up a negative balance and a $65 billion line of credit on FTX, as well as to plow billions of dollars into risky investments—the foundation for the Department of Justice’s fraud allegations.
During Tuesday’s cross-examination, [Assistant U.S. Attorney Danielle Sassoon] asked Bankman-Fried about his involvement in facilitating the $8 billion hole, citing instances from previous testimony where witnesses said they’d discussed the issue with him.
Rather than claiming responsibility, or even awareness, Bankman-Fried repeatedly painted himself as an absentee CEO, instead shifting blame to other executives. Sassoon brought up a conversation Bankman-Fried held with Wang and Singh about Alameda’s mounting debt several months before FTX’s collapse, including a bug in the database that made the hole seem much larger than it actually was. At the time, the issue was serious enough that Bankman-Fried canceled a planned trip to Washington, D.C.
Sassoon asked whether, in his capacity as CEO, he followed up with them to inquire about the multibillion-dollar hole or where it came from. Bankman-Fried said he did not. When pressed further, he said that they were “busy” and he didn’t want to be “distracting.” Bankman-Fried added that he thought his top lieutenants could get “to the bottom of it.”
The SBF trial should be wrapped up before the end of this week. I know you’ll miss these fun here’s-all-the-SBF-drama-you-missed updates I’ve been bringing you in Term Sheet. But now it’s time to see what the jury thinks.
For more coverage of SBF’s testimony this week, read coverage from my crypto colleagues here and here.
WeWork may file for bankruptcy as early as next week…The co-working startup WeWork, which was at its prime valued at $47 billion before it went public, is planning to file for Chapter 11 bankruptcy as early as next week, people familiar with the matter told the Wall Street Journal. The move comes after disclosures the company made this summer that there was uncertainty over the future of the business and its ability to operate and that WeWork was considering all “strategic alternatives.” When I reached her for comment, a WeWork spokeswoman declined to comment on the WSJ report. ”We do not comment on speculation,” she said.
And now for this month’s cartoon from Ian Foley…
See you tomorrow,
Jessica Mathews
Twitter: @jessicakmathews
Email: jessica.mathews@fortune.com
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