Sam Bankman-Fried, the founder of FTX cryptocurrency exchange failureis due to appear at the New York Times DealBook Summit on November 30, to the surprise of many.
The embattled former CEO will speak with DealBook founder Andrew Ross Sorkin, who confirmed the interview in a tweet Wednesday. “There are many important questions to ask and answer,” Sorkin wrote in his tweet, promising “Nothing is off limits.”
Bankman-Fried was due to speak at the conference despite the dramatic implosion of FTX, which was the world’s second-largest cryptocurrency exchange until it filed for bankruptcy earlier this month. Since then, Bankman-Fried has come under intense scrutiny, following revelations that he and his team mismanaged billions of dollars in client funds.
The fee to attend the NYT’s DealBook Summit is $2,499, and other speakers are expected to speak, including Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy, Facebook co-founder and Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg, and New York City Mayor , Eric Adams.
Bankman-Fried confirmed her decision to speak to Sorkin on Twitter on Wednesday, while also quoting a tweet from anonymous cryptocurrency news account @BTC_Archive, who reads “FTX FOUNDER: Within minutes of FTX’s filing for bankruptcy, ‘potential interest in billions of dollars in funding arrived’.”
The founder of FTX, who was also a prolific political donor to the Democrats, must testify before the US House of Representatives Financial Services Committee in December over FTX’s collapse and filing for bankruptcy. FTX’s new CEO John Ray III, who oversaw the aftermath of the energy trading company’s collapse Enron two decades agocalled the cryptocurrency exchange’s disintegration “unprecedented” and said it was marred by a “complete failure of company controls.”
