The game is up for Sam Bankman-Fried

Only a month has elapsed since Sam Bankman-Fried, the founder of ftx, a crypto exchange, placed the firm, along with Alameda Research, its sister hedge fund, into bankruptcy proceedings. The exchange was unable to meet customers’ withdrawal requests; the problem, it became clear, was that some $8bn of customer assets had ended up in the custody of Alameda, and were missing. In the intervening days Mr Bankman-Fried has given countless interviews in which he has apologised, appeared confused by the unravelling of his empire, pleaded ignorance and generally tried to shift the blame.

He told “Good Morning America” that he “failed to have proper oversight”. In an interview with New York magazine he said: “I fucked up. I did. In multiple ways, frankly.” He explained to the New York Times that there were mysterious discrepancies between what “the audited financials were, the true financials, what the exchange understood...”, and said to the Wall Street Journal that he could not account for the missing money: “I wasn’t running Alameda.”