SBF

Chapter 44New Boss, First Day

First‐day declarations in bankruptcy cases, I am told by a coworker who has covered many bankruptcies, are supposed to come out on the first day.

FTX's came out six days later, on November 17. A summary of it written by Axios quoted a piece of a paragraph that has been quoted again and again since. New FTX CEO John Ray, III, writes:

Never in my career have I seen such a complete failure of corporate controls and such a complete absence of trustworthy financial information as occurred here. From compromised systems integrity and faulty regulatory oversight abroad, to the concentration of control in the hands of a very small group of inexperienced, unsophisticated and potentially compromised individuals, this situation is unprecedented.

And Ray has seen some things. He's overseen the unwinding of some very big companies. Most notably, Enron, the crash of the energy company that came right after the DotCom boom crumbled, when it felt like the US economy couldn't catch a break.¹

Before the public could hear from Ray, though, we would hear from SBF. Vox.com would publish excerpts from an extensive interview over Twitter DM that Kelsey Piper conducted with him.

I mostly haven't mentioned other reporters by name in this account (you can see their bylines in the chapter notes, though), but it's worth mentioning Piper because this incident turned personal. She's one of the reporters on the “Future Perfect” project at Vox, which reports from the perspective ...