Sam Bankman Fried is going to prison. Although he will not be in a maximum security prison and will be held as close to his family as possible in the San Francisco Bay Area, he will still end up in prison where he will spend the next 25 years.
Bankman-Fried was sentenced to 25 years in federal prison yesterday, nearly six months after he was convicted on a series of fraud charges related to the November 2022 collapse of the #FTX exchange and trading firm Alameda Research.
The sentence is a big one, but it could have been much harsher. It is only a quarter of the 105 years recommended by the Probation Department, and about half of the 40 to 50 years sought by prosecutors in the New York court that tried Bankman-Fried.
Still, it is far more than the five to six and a half years that Bankman-Fried and his attorneys had hoped for. In support of their conclusion that comparing their clients to other "cold-blooded financial assassins," as lead attorney Mark Mukasey put it, such as Bernie Madoff and Carl Greenwood, was factually unfair, the defense relied on a number of arguments - chief among them that because the estate was obligated to pay off the debt and that no one was harmed by the collapse of FTX - and relied on a combination of Bankman-Fried's characteristics.
Kaplan rejected the first argument, stating that it "completely refutes" the defense argument that no one was harmed by the collapse and that it was "misleading, logically flawed, and speculative.
The argument that Bankman-Fried was driven solely by altruistic motives and was a "beautiful mystery" based on "terrible grief," Kaplan found equally unconvincing. The same can be said for attempts to use Bankman-Fried's autism diagnosis as an explanation for his unfortunate behavior, including an attempt at witness tampering. In Kaplan's view, Bunkman-Fried's effective altruism was a "sham," not the good-hearted "bumbling mathlete" that his lawyers and family tried to portray him as; the Bunkman-Fried of Kaplan's trial was an overbearing, lying, reckless gambler with a penchant for criminality.
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