Progressive FTX founder Sam Bankman-Fried admits ethical image an act: 'Dumb game we woke westerners play'

Progressive FTX founder Sam Bankman-Fried, now facing personal and legal ruin after his cryptocurrency exchange collapsed this week, appeared to admit in a new interview that his professed ethics were largely an act, calling it a "dumb game we woke westerners play."

Bankman-Fried, 30, became a billionaire founding FTX, and his commitment to philanthropy in the forms of donations to causes addressing issues like pandemics and climate change, as well as his massive donations to Democrats and liberal PACs, made him a major player in Washington and subject of media fascination. Now he's facing investigations in multiple countries and has seen his fortune disappear.

Holed up in the Bahamas after the $32 billion company went belly-up for a variety of reasons and over $1 billion in customer funds vanished, he was candid this week in an unusual interview conducted with Vox's Kelsey Piper via Twitter's direct message feature. Bankman-Fried expounded on the murky world of cryptocurrency, his distaste for regulators and his notion of ethics.

"So the ethics stuff - mostly a front? [P]eople will like you if you win and hate you if you lose and that's how it all really works?" Piper asked.

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"Yeah," he wrote back. "I mean that's not *all* of it but it's a lot."

After Piper praised him as "really good at talking about ethics" for someone who seemed to view the whole system as a game with "winners and losers," he wrote back, "I had to be."

"It's what reputations are made of, to some extent…I feel bad for those who get f---ed by it. [B]y this dumb game we woke westerners play where we say all the right shibboleths and so everyone likes us," Bankman-Fried wrote.

Heavily profiled in the media for everything from his casual attire and lifestyle to his funding of liberal causes and Democrats — $38 million alone in the 2022 cycle — Bankman-Fried's reputation now appears to be in tatters.

The New York Times profiled him in May, noting his leadership in the mercurial crypto world and how he "lived modestly for a billionaire" and has "pledged to give away virtually his entire fortune, which currently stands at $21.2 billion." 

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It also discussed his different progressive and philanthropic causes, noting that "last year, Mr. Bankman-Fried gave away $50 million, funding pandemic-related causes and research into artificial intelligence. He’s also supporting climate change mitigation."

"The things that matter most are the things that have long-term impact on what the world will look like," Bankman-Fried told the Times. "There are trillions of people who have not yet been born."

In another Times article last year, he was called "a prime example of a new kind of billionaire. In 2011, during the Occupy Wall Street protests, he was a student at M.I.T., considering becoming a physics professor and interested in effective altruism, a philosophy that supports applying data and evidence to doing the most good for the many."

Effective altruism champion and philosopher William MacAskill, a mentor of Bankman-Fried whom he's known since his MIT days, tweeted last week he would be ashamed if the "good will" that Bankman-Fried and his company generated had "laundered fraud."

Bloomberg reported on his commitment to giving away his fortune in April, noting his "Robin Hood-like philosophy." The Washington Post reported this week Bankman-Fried was "raised as a utilitarian — a doctrine holding that the most ethical choice is the one that does the most good for the most people."

This week, the paper was mocked for a separate article mourning that his fight to stop the next pandemic could be upended by his company's collapse and the ensuing industry upheaval.

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Even Vox, a left-leaning news site, is tangled up in Bankman-Fried's web of philanthropy, as disclosed in Piper's interview.

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"Disclosure: This August, Bankman-Fried’s philanthropic family foundation, Building a Stronger Future, awarded Vox’s Future Perfect a grant for a 2023 reporting project. That project is now on pause," the piece concluded.