Sam Bankman-Fried Will Speak at Conference Alongside Ukraine President Volodymyr Zelensky and US Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen Despite Ongoing FTX Investigation
FTX founder Sam Bankman-Fried will speak during the New York Times’ annual DealBook Summit alongside Ukraine President Volodymyr Zelensky and US Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen despite the ongoing investigation against his failed venture FTX.
The full-day event, which will be on November 30, will be hosted by Andrew Ross Sorkin, Times columnist and DealBook founder and editor who has also won an Emmy Award for an outstanding live interview, the magazine announced last week.
“The full-day event will feature a group of today’s top business and policy leaders on a single stage,” the announcement reads, which also lists SBF as a speaker.
Other notable interviewees and speakers include Eric Adams, New York City mayor, TikTak CEO Shou Chew, Amazon President and CEO Andy Jassy, Meta founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg, as well as Volodymyr Zelensky and US Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen.
SBF also confirmed the news in a recent tweet in response to a post by the well-known crypto Twitter account Bitcoin Archive that cited a portion of the founder’s recent letter to FTX employees.
“I’ll be speaking with Andrew Ross Sorkin at the Deal Book summit next Wednesday,” SBF said, ostensibly suggesting that he will give more details during his talk at the summit.
SBF Sends Apology Letter to Employees
In an apology letter sent by SBF, the former CEO of FTX blamed his “irrational decisions” on “sh—y” circumstances for the collapse of FTX, once the third-largest crypto exchange in the world.
“I lost track of the most important things in the commotion of company growth. I care deeply about you all, and you were my family, and I’m sorry,” SBF says, according to a copy of the letter shared by CNBC.
In the letter, SBF once again claimed he was close to saving the crypto exchange. He said they received “potential interest in billions of dollars of funding” just eight minutes after he signed the Chapter 11 bankruptcy document.
“Between those funds, the billions of dollars of collateral the company still held, and the interest we’d received from other parties, I think that we probably could have returned large value to customers and saved the business,” he added.
Speculations around the health of FTX and Alameda increased in early November as reports revealed that the investment firm’s balance sheet is loaded with FTT tokens, the native token of FTX. On November 11, FTX announced that it had filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy in Delaware, putting an end to its desperate attempt to raise funds.
