Disgraced FTX founder Sam Bankman-Fried whined that his “useful life” was over before he was sentenced Thursday to 25 years in prison.
“At the end of the day, my useful life is probably over,” Bankman-Fried said in a rambling 20-minute statement to a Manhattan court before Judge Lewis Kaplan handed down the sentence. “It has been over for a while now.”
The FTX founder, 32, was convicted of stealing more than $8 million from his customers.
“I have long since given everything that I had to give, and I would do anything to be out there right now trying to help, but I know that’s not going to happen,” he said. “I can’t really do that from prison. I can’t really help.”
Bankman-Fried stood uncuffed in his tan jail garb to deliver his meandering mea culpa. His hands were tightly clasped at his waist and his head was mostly bowed, with occasional glances at the judge, who called him “unremorseful.”
He said he made a “series of bad decisions” that led to the implosion of FTX, his cryptocurrency company, but the decisions were neither “selfish” or “selfless,” but just “bad.”
The fraudster said his customers “should be paid in full” to the “current value of assets” as there are “billions more than is necessary” available to use.
He also apologized to his employees, who “watched me throw away everything they had built.”
“I know a lot of people feel really let down, and they were right, they were, were very let down. I’m sorry about that. I’m sorry about what happened at every stage, things I should have done and said, things I shouldn’t have. I failed everyone that I care about and everything I care about too,” he said.
“They threw themselves into it. And then I threw all of that away,” he continued. “It haunts me every day.”
Judge Kaplan didn’t buy into Bankman-Fried’s apologies and said the disgraced tech whiz was “presenting himself as the good guy” when it was just an “act.”
“He did it because he wanted to be a hugely, hugely politically influential person in this country,” Kaplan said. “He knew it was wrong, he knew it was criminal, he regrets that he made a very bad bet about the likelihood of being caught.”
Outside of his 25 years in prison, the former business owner was ordered to pay back $11 billion and has to forfeit any asset that could help him make the large repayment.
At his peak, the fraudster’s empire was worth $40 billion and he was rubbing elbows with the rich and powerful.
That all fell apart when he was arrested weeks after his platform collapsed and he was charged with using FTX users’ funds to pay off his $8 billion debt to his failing hedge fund Alameda Research.
He was later convicted of seven counts of fraud and conspiracy.
Kaplan Kaplan suggested that Bankman-Fried — who is currently being held at the Metropolitan Detention Center in Brooklyn — be sentenced to serve his time in a medium-security prison near his family’s home in Northern California.
The Bureau of Prisons are expected to make a decision on where the scammer will go in the coming months.
