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Sam Bankman-Fried says a Bahamian house in his parents’ name was meant to be for FTX staff.
“It was not intended to be their long-term property,” he said. “It was intended to be the company’s property.”
Reuters had reported that the $16.4-million house listed Bankman-Fried’s parents as signatories.
Sam Bankman-Fried says a multi-million-dollar house reportedly bought in his parents’ name in the Bahamas was actually meant to be company property.
“I don’t know the details of the house for my parents,” Bankman-Fried told The New York Times’ Andrew Ross Sorkin at the publication’s DealBook summit on Wednesday. “I know it was not intended to be their long-term property. It was intended to be the company’s property. I don’t know how that was papered in.”
Reuters reported last week that a $16.4 million house in a gated community with beach access in the Bahamas listed Bankman-Fried’s parents, Joseph Bankman and Barbara Fried, as signatories and was described in property records as a “vacation home.”
A spokesperson for his parents, both Stanford University law professors, previously told Reuters that they had been trying to return the deeds to the company “since before the bankruptcy proceedings.”
“They may have stayed there while working with the company sometime over the last year,” Bankman-Fried said at Wednesday’s summit. Since FTX collapsed, his parents have continued supporting him, he said.
In recent weeks details have emerged of the company’s lavish spending. During first day of FTX’s bankruptcy trial, a bankruptcy attorney for the company said that one of its US arms had “purchased almost $300 million worth of real estate in the Bahamas.”
“Based on preliminary investigations, most of those real estate purchases related to homes and vacation properties that were used by senior executives of the company,” the attorney said.
Bankman-Fried told Sorkin on Wednesday that there were “a lot of property purchases in the Bahamas.”
He said that around 100 Silicon Valley workers had relocated to Nassau, the country’s capital, to work for FTX. “We were trying to incentivize that and to make sure that they had an easy way to find a comfortable life,” he added.
Bankman-Fried previously told Reuters that FTX provided its staff with free meals and an “in-house Uber-like” service to transport them around the island, and 10 of them lived together in a luxury penthouse said to be worth roughly $40 million. He said at the DealBook summit that he no longer lived in the penthouse.
“I don’t live there now,” he said. “I have not lived there for most of the time.”
Bankman-Fried had touted himself as a believer in effective altruism, saying he was building up his fortune with the plan to give almost all of it away. The crypto mogul’s fortune once peaked at $26 billion, but has now been wiped out. Bankman-Fried said Wednesday that he had “close to nothing” left.
New CEO John J. Ray lambasted the company’s “complete failure of corporate controls” in a bankruptcy document earlier this month.