SBF Believes that Cutting His Workday from 18 to 13 Hours was One of His Biggest Mistakes. Testimony Draft

• Sam Bankman Fried, the disgraced CEO at FTX, stated that he used work 18 hours a days, according to his planned testimony.
• He wrote that cutting down his workday by 30 percent was one of his greatest mistakes.
• Bankman-Fried was arrested Monday on fraud charges.

Sam Bankman-Fried, founder of FTX, believes one of his biggest errors was reducing his workday to only about 13 hours a days. He wrote this in a draft document of his planned testimony.

Bankman-Fried, in his 7,000-word draft, stated that he was “less grounded” in operational details in the months before his exchange collapsed.

“I had prided myself in staying grounded: Staying in the weeds day to day of the company,” reads a copy of this draft. It was first obtained from ForbesAnd Bloomberg.

“I was also proud of my strong work ethic. When I joined FTX, I worked 18 hours a day. However, I believe I worked about 30% less in 2022 than I used to for most of that time,” he said. “And even though I was working, my focus and discipline were less than they used to be.”

Bankman-Fried said he spent more time this year speaking with regulators, working to create new deals for FTX and managing the exchange’s workforce.

The draft stated that “that’s time that wasn’t spent focusing… on the actual core product including risk management.”

Bankman-Fried was unable to testify before the House Services Financial Committee as scheduled on Tuesday due to illness. arrested the day before in the Bahamas.

John Ray, the newly appointed CEO of FTX, was instead the core of the group. Tuesday’s hearing. Ray accused FTX in engaging in “plain old embezzlement”Under Bankman Fried and called the company’s leader “grossly inexperienced.”

Bankman-Fried disassociated himself from the allegations of fraud in his draft. It was not fully read at Tuesday’s hearing.

He said he was sorry for making “numbers of significant mistakes”, but he didn’t know about the risky investments made by FTX.

“I thought I could hold FTX together despite expansion. I was wrong,” he wrote. “I was unable to concentrate on risk management because I ate too much,” he wrote.

Bankman-Fried was charged with fraud by the Securities and Exchange Commission on Tuesday, and is accused by authorities of diverting “billions of dollars” of FTX’s customer funds for “his own personal benefit and to help grow his crypto empire.”

Mark Botnick, Bankman-Fried’s spokesperson, stated to Insider that he had no comment on Bankman Fried’s draft testimony.