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Disgraced former FTX CEO Sam Bankman-Fried fumed over media speculation about his and his fellow executives’ polyamorous lifestyle in a recent interview.
Bankman-Fried lamented that the media’s ‘metric is clicks’ during a November 16 phone call with crypto influencer Tiffany Fong and YouTuber Stephen ‘Coffeezilla’ Findeisen.
Excerpts from the phone call were published by Findeisen on Twitter Wednesday, and Bankman-Fried could be heard saying how he was tired of the speculation about his and his fellow executives’ love lives.
It was revealed earlier this month that Bankman-Fried’s ex-girlfriend and the CEO of one of his companies, Caroline Ellison, wrote about being polyamorous while she and other executives lived together in a house in the Bahamas.
The revelations come just as former FTX employees disclosed the exorbitant spending Bankman-Fried and his fellow executives undertook on the company dime, which included massive food stipends, massages, and even private jets ferrying Amazon deliveries to their luxury Bahamas office.
FTX filed for bankruptcy earlier this month amid reports it owes billions of dollars to customers.
Disgraced former FTX CEO Sam Bankman-Fried fumed over media speculation about his and his fellow executives polyamorous lifestyle in an interview
Bankman-Fried told Fong and Findeisen that the media was focusing on ‘provocative’ subjects so they could avoid a ‘boring story’ that ‘won’t sell.’
The problem is that, at the end of the day, their metric is clicks. That’s what they need to get and it’s fine, it is what it is, but what it means is that a boring story won’t sell and so they’re going to be trying to ask me, like, the most provocative possible questions,’ he said.
He said he thought ‘society’ had spent enough time speculating about the love life of him and his fellow executives living in the Albany resort in the Bahamas.
‘We, as a society, have, in my opinion, in my humble opinion, have spent about enough time this week trying to figure out whether anyone living in Albany was polyamorous,’ Bankman-Fried said. ‘I feel like I’ve answered that question a lot, and the answer is too boring for people to, like, believe.’
Bankman-Fried’s ex-girlfriend, Caroline Ellison, the CEO of FTX’s sister company Alameda Research, became the center of rumors about the polyamorous romantic world of FTX
In her now-deleted Tumblr, Ellison wrote in 2020 under the handle Worldoptimization, ‘When I first started my foray into poly, I thought of it as a radical break from my trad past, but tbh I’ve come to decide the only acceptable style of poly is best characterized as something like ‘imperial Chinese harem’
Bankman-Fried looking harried in the Bahamas in November as FTX collapsed around him
Rumors of the sexual antics of Bankman-Fried and his coworker roommates in the Bahamas began to surface as FTX began to collapse.
According to a November report in CoinDesk, everybody living in the house was paired up with each other, or else used to be at some point.
Among them was Bankman-Fried’s ex-girlfriend, Caroline Ellison, the CEO of FTX’s sister company Alameda Research.
In a February Tumblr post she wrote about her ‘foray into poly’ and said that in a polyamorous relationship everyone should have a ‘ranking of their partners’ and ‘vicious power struggles for higher ranks.’
She said: ‘When I first started my foray into poly, I thought of it as a radical break from my trad past, but tbh I’ve come to decide the only acceptable style of poly is best characterized as something like ‘imperial Chinese harem.’
‘None of this non-hierarchical bulls***; everyone should have a ranking of their partners, people should know where they fall on the ranking, and there should be vicious power struggles for the higher ranks.’
Albany, the Bahamas resort where Bankman-Fried set up the FTX headquarters
Bankman-Fried lived with his FTX headquarters in a luxury home at the Albany resort in the Bahamas
The luxury Bahamas home where Bankman-Fried set up the FTX headquarters
As Bankman-Fried complained about media speculation about the romantic environment at FTX, former employees revealed the outrageous expenditures they enjoyed while there.
The Bahamas headquarters had food catered to it daily, and employees enjoyed ‘free groceries, barbershop pop-up and bi-weekly massages,’ a former employee told the Financial Times. In the US, workers were allowed $200 for DoorDash daily.
There was also a ‘full suite of cars and gas covered for all employees [and] unlimited, full expense covered trips to any office globally.’
Amazon does not deliver to the Bahamas, so FTX opted to hire private jets to bring in employee’s packages.
‘[It was] kids leading kids,’ a former employee said. ‘The entire operation was idiotically inefficient, but equally mesmerizing.’
‘I had never witnessed so much money in my life. I don’t think anybody had, including SBF.’
In response to reports that Bankman-Fried and his employees regularly partied hard with drugs or leaned heavily on amphetamines to work for hours on end, the former CEO said such things never occurred.
‘There were no wild parties.’ He told the New York Times on Wednesday. ‘At our parties we play board games. Twenty percent of people would have a quarter of a beer each and the rest of us would not drink anything.’
He said he had been prescribed certain medications to help him work. ‘I think they help me focus a little bit,’ he said.
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