Sam Bankman-Fried Blames Ex-Pals and Pleads Ignorance to Jury

As the founder and CEO of FTX, Sam Bankman-Fried won over presidents, pop stars, and princes. On Friday, he faced his toughest audience yet: a jury of his peers.

Bankman-Fried took the stand Friday following a dry run Thursday in front of federal Judge Lewis Kaplan and attorneys on both sides of his fraud case. Kaplan barred the former billionaire from pinning several of his alleged missteps on advice from his company’s lawyers, but otherwise let him speak widely about his experience as head of the now-bankrupt crypto exchange.

It was the first time in the three-week trial the jury heard from the disgraced founder directly, and early in his testimony, Bankman-Fried copped to making “a number of small mistakes and a number of large mistakes”—the largest of which, he said, was not hiring a risk-management team.