The DoJ convicted Bankman-Fried of old-fashioned fraud: predicting the fate of his father in a financial troubled world

Though he was charged with old-fashioned fraud, Bankman-Fried was crypto royalty, which lends his conviction a symbolic importance, says Estes. The DoJ, she says, has sent “a message to the crypto industry that fraud and wheeling-and-dealing is not to be tolerated.” An investigation into the CEO of the world’s largestcrypto exchange, Changpeng Zhao, is ongoing according to reports.

As a boy coming of age in the most rarefied quarters of the achievement class, he grew up in a family that viewed the celebration of birthdays and holidays as an inefficiency easily forgone. From such a childhood emerged an adult who worked 22 hours a day and submitted the prospect of any interaction with another person to a cost-benefit calculation that frequently left him canceling meetings and other obligations at the last minute, because, as Michael Lewis writes in “Going Infinite,” his book about Mr. Bankman-Fried’s rise and fall, “he had done some math in his head that proved that you weren’t worth the time.”

What would a jury of his peers possibly look like? Or, in the specific absence of that, what would 12 ordinary people see when they were seated on the other side of the witness stand from him? The prosecution thought a grown man with self-contradiction and criminal skills would be more likely to catch Mr. Bankman- Fried than the young boy with a penchant for making billions of dollars. The jury only saw the duplicitous adult.

The judge who presided over the case, Lewis Kaplan, will sentence Bankman-Fried in a hearing on March 28. A suitably lengthy prison sentence, says Rabbitte, “may help the next would-be SBF think twice.” There are former FTX customers talking about the progress of the bankruptcy proceeding on Telegram. It’s party time! Throw away the keys,” wrote one Telegram user, Krystal B, after the verdict had been announced. He’s going to be locked up for at least 30 years.

While Bankman-Fried’s conviction will be viewed by most in crypto as “justice served,” says Hillmann, unqualified celebration is premature because the conditions that allowed the FTX founder to establish himself as the latest wunderkind remain unchanged. Bankman-Fried steered a fraudulent business to a $32 billion valuation in three years. He befriended regulators, politicians and venture capitalists. He became friends with athletes and models. He disarmed reporters with his trademark T-shirt, shorts, and dad sneakers. He’s the “next Warren Buffet,” they crooned, the “Michael Jordan of crypto.”

The conviction won’t affect the amount of money recovered from Bankman-Fried, but that won’t deter those with money that was misappropriated from celebrating. Pat Rabbitte used to be a customer of FTX. “The US justice system has worked.”

Depending on the case, the length of deliberation takes a number of hours to days. There was a jury here that took less than five hours to find Bankman-Fried guilty. The prosecution had convinced the jury that Bankman-Fried had, per the indictment filed against him last December, architected and overseen a multibillion-dollar fraud.

Sam Bankman-Fried, Theranos founder Elizabeth Holmes, and Bernie Madoff: When do they find their feet at FTX?

As long as entrepreneurs like Bankman-Fried—and Theranos founder Elizabeth Holmes and Ponzi fraudster Bernie Madoff before him—are able to “buy a fast pass into the kind of esteem in which they were held by some of the most powerful entities in the country,” says Hillmann, there remains cause for concern. The people that were supposed to be watching for warning signs at FTX were sleeping at the wheel and empowering its activities. In all likelihood, he says, “there will be another Sam Bankman-Fried.”