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Sam Bankman-Fried, the previous CEO of the now-bankrupt crypto change FTX, likes to speak. He likes to speak to the media. He likes to speak on social media. And he likes to speak to attorneys, even whereas on trial for seven counts of fraud.
On Friday, in a broadly anticipated look on the witness stand, the previous crypto mogul lastly gave his model of FTX’s sudden collapse—and it was a mouthful. Within the weekend interlude earlier than Bankman-Fried takes to the stand on Monday to complete his direct testimony, Fortune dug into the court docket transcripts to quantify how a lot “phrase salad” he produced.
The reply? Unsurprising, much more phrases per response than Caroline Ellison, Gary Wang, and Nishad Singh—the three key lieutenants who testified in opposition to Bankman-Fried earlier than he took to the stand in a single final Hail Mary to rescue his foundering protection.
Bankman-Fried—by the numbers
“The witness has what I’ll merely name an attention-grabbing method of responding to questions,” Choose Lewis Kaplan, who’s presiding over the trial, stated of Bankman-Fried throughout a dry run of his testimony the day earlier than the previous crypto mogul appeared in entrance of the jury.
And when Bankman-Fried did seem in entrance of the jury on Friday, Kaplan’s persistence usually wore skinny. He repeatedly exhorted the previous FTX CEO to cease pitter-pattering round pleasant questions from his very personal lawyer. “Mr. Bankman-Fried, that’s a ‘sure’ or a ‘no,’” Kaplan stated at one level to the defendant, noticeably exasperated.
Kaplan was proper to be annoyed. Bankman-Fried’s solutions throughout direct examination on Friday had 73% extra phrases on common than the solutions of his three lieutenants throughout their direct examinations, in response to an evaluation by Fortune.
In combination, Ellison, Wang, and Singh averaged about 16 phrases in response to questions from prosecutors. Bankman-Fried blurted out nearly 28 to his lawyer, Mark Cohen, whereas on the stand. Singh, the previous head of engineering at FTX, was the second-most verbose of the 4, notching nearly 20 phrases per reply, and Wang, the previous CTO who has a status for being tight-lipped, was the least, at about 12 phrases.
The medians of every witnesses’ phrase rely fell alongside comparable strains, however curiously, Ellison, the previous CEO of the crypto hedge fund hooked up on the hip to FTX, barely surpassed Bankman-Fried. She uttered 12 phrases per reply to his 11.
Going lengthy
Medians assist management for outliers, however within the case of who’s being probably the most longwinded, the outliers, or the longest responses, stand out.
Predictably, Bankman-Fried’s longest reply per phrase rely was a small essay: a 424-word response to a easy query from Cohen, his lawyer: “Are you able to inform us about it?”
Cohen was asking the previous FTX CEO to elucidate the crypto change’s “danger engine,” or the mechanism to cease the fallout from clients’ dangerous bets affecting others on the change. Bankman-Fried proceeded to speak about how a trillion-dollar mistake allegedly led to the introduction of a key piece of code that prosecutors argue was partly liable for letting Alameda Analysis, the crypto hedge fund that Ellison fronted, withdraw billions in buyer funds.
The closest response in size to Bankman-Fried’s was from Wang, which clocked in at way more modest 159 phrases. Singh was conscious of his verbosity. “I am sorry. This reply is lengthy,” he stated in response to a prosecutor’s query about Bankman-Fried’s involvement with Alameda.
And Ellison’s longest reply was her most emotional. Answering a query from prosecutor Danielle Sassoon about her temper swings within the week of FTX’s collapse, Ellison broke down: “I imply, yeah. To be clear, that was general the worst week of my life. I had plenty of temper swings throughout that week and plenty of totally different emotions. However one of many emotions I had was an amazing feeling of aid as a result of, as I stated, this had been one thing that I had been dreading for therefore lengthy…”
After persevering with to explain the sense of aid she felt as FTX crumbled amid accelerating buyer withdrawals, she concluded: “I clearly felt indescribably unhealthy about the entire people who had been harmed and the people who misplaced their cash, the staff that misplaced their jobs, people who trusted us that we had betrayed.”
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