The New York Times got blowback over an article it published on Sam Bankman-Fried, with critics slamming it as a puff piece on the accused crypto fraudster.
The Times quoted Bankman-Fried extensively for a story whose headline reads: “How Sam Bankman-Fried’s Crypto Empire Collapsed.” The article describes Bankman-Fried as “SBF,” noting that he spoke to the newspaper in an interview on Sunday.
According to the article by Times crypto and fintech reporter David Yaffe-Bellany, Bankman-Fried seemed “surprisingly calm” in the interview, which lasted until after midnight.
“You would’ve thought that I’d be getting no sleep right now, and instead I’m getting some,” Bankman-Fried, whose company was worth as much as $32 billion a year ago, told the Times. “It could be worse.”
Matt Novak, a media critic with the news site Gizmodo, writes that Yaffe-Bellany “lays out the facts in ways that are clearly beneficial to SBF’s version of the story and leaves many of his highly questionable assertions without proper context or even the most minimal amount of pushback.”
“It reads like if the Times had conducted an interview with Bernie Madoff after his ponzi scheme collapsed and ultimately suggested he just made some bad investments,” Novak writes.
In the Times interview, Bankman-Fried declined to go into details about FTX’s handling of customer assets, which were apparently used to make risky bets through a subsidiary, Alameda Research.
Bankman-Fried told the Times that Alameda Research, which was run by Bankman-Fried’s on-again-off-again girlfriend Caroline Ellison, amassed a large margin position on FTX, which means it had borrowed money from the company.
“It was substantially larger than I had thought it was,” Bankman-Fried told the Times. “And in fact the downside risk was very significant.”
