In court, Sam Bankman-Fried got more guilty by the day

Diamond Rhino

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In court, Sam Bankman-Fried got more guilty by the day

Revisiting the trial of FTX and Alameda Research's founder, as he takes to social media from prison to rehab his image, from the handful of people who watched it in person

Brady Dale

Mar 01, 2026

A jury of his peers found Sam Bankman-Fried guilty on seven counts in 2023. Then Judge Lewis Kaplan sentenced him to 25 years in prison.

In case you’ve forgotten, he launched the crypto exchange that turned out to have a multibillion hole where it’s customer’s money should have been, late in 2022.

In recent days, SBF has attempted to exonerate his image in the public and he has sucked up to President Trump on social media as he campaigns for a pardon.

It would surprise me immensely if it worked, but his antics gave the journalists who were there to watch his trial a reason to have a reunion of sorts. We didn’t really reunite with each other. Several of them united just with me, over a video call, and all six of them I spoke to are now reunited in this podcast.

We revisited the trial, what about it stood out and what we remembered and how convincing we found the prosecution’s case against him (we found it convincing).

I’ve been following Sam since the first time I spoke to him amid DeFi summer in 2020. Then after his empire fell apart, I wrote a whole book about the guy.

My book, SBF: How the FTX Bankruptcy Unwound Crypto’s Very Bad Good Guy, was the first to hit bookstore shelves. It isn’t the most famous, but it the only one that tells the full length of his story. The others that got attention really only cover about the last 15 minutes of his career, but mine goes back to the start of his days in the crypto trading game, right up through his arrival in U.S. prisons.

None of the books so far include in the trial, but this account puts a bunch of perspectives on the trial together. The goal of this dispatch was to look back and talk about what, with time, has become the most memorable parts of the trial — the bits that remain the post compelling. (plus, it’s a fun look under the hood at the reporting process).

Just in case time has caused your memories to fade a little, just in case you have started to wonder whether or not we might have been too quick to judge Bankman-Fried, I think this revisiting of his trial should lay any fermenting misgivings to rest.