The Justice Department on Friday asked a federal judge to bar FTX founder
Sam Bankman-Fried
from communicating with current and former employees of the collapsed crypto exchange without a lawyer present after prosecutors alleged he recently contacted a potential witness in his criminal case.
Mr. Bankman-Fried, who faces federal charges related to the implosion of FTX, reached out to the general counsel of the company’s U.S. operation through an encrypted messaging application earlier this month, federal prosecutors said in a filing. Prosecutors said Mr. Bankman-Fried has also contacted other current and former FTX employees and are concerned that the communications could lead to witness tampering.
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Prosecutors also requested the judge prohibit Mr. Bankman-Fried from communicating through encrypted messaging applications like Slack and Signal, saying that when he headed FTX he directed employees of the company and his crypto-investment firm Alameda Research to set their communications on these platforms to auto-delete after 30 days. That policy has impeded the government’s investigation, prosecutors said.
“Potential witnesses have described relevant and incriminating conversations with the defendant that took place on Slack and Signal that have already been autodeleted because of settings implemented at the defendant’s direction,” prosecutors said in the filing.
Lawyers for Mr. Bankman-Fried in a letter to the judge said the government was mischaracterizing innocuous conduct by their client in “an apparent effort to portray our client in the worst possible light.” They said the government’s request was overbroad and unnecessary, proposing instead that Mr. Bankman-Fried be prohibited from contacting certain limited witnesses, not all of FTX’s current and former employees.
FTX’s U.S. general counsel, Ryne Miller, couldn’t immediately be reached.
The Manhattan U.S. attorney’s office charged Mr. Bankman-Fried last month with stealing billions of dollars from FTX customers while misleading lenders and investors. He pleaded not guilty and is currently under court-ordered confinement in his parents’ Palo Alto, Calif., home while he awaits trial.
Mr. Bankman-Fried sent a Jan. 15 Signal message to the general counsel in which prosecutors allege he said he “would really love to reconnect and see if there’s a way for us to have a constructive relationship, use each other as resources when possible, or at least vet things with each other.”
Prosecutors didn’t identify the other employees that Mr. Bankman-Fried has allegedly tried to contact but called the communications to the general counsel and others troubling.
“Were the defendant to ‘vet’ his version of relevant events with potential witnesses, that might have the effect of discouraging witnesses from testifying in a manner contrary to the defendant’s narrative,” the Justice Department said in the filing.
Mr. Bankman-Fried’s lawyers said the message to Mr. Miller was more reasonably read as an attempt by Mr. Bankman-Fried to offer his assistance to FTX, not a “sinister attempt” to influence testimony at trial.
is ceding control of Ant Group Co., capping a tumultuous period for the Chinese fintech giant.
Mr. Ma will no longer be the controlling person of Ant, the company said in a statement on Saturday, confirming a previous report by The Wall Street Journal.
The changes are being made to reduce Ant’s reliance on the flamboyant Chinese billionaire, who co-founded
Alibaba Group Holding Ltd.
BABA 2.70%
and helped create Ant, the Journal reported previously.
Mr. Ma will continue to hold voting rights in an entity that controls Ant, alongside nine Ant executives and employees who will be also given voting rights.
Mr. Ma doesn’t hold an executive role at Ant or sit on its board, but is a larger-than-life figure at the company. He has controlled Ant via an entity in which he holds the dominant position. The agreements that allowed Mr. Ma’s dominance will be terminated. The nine other Ant executives and employees to be given the voting rights at the company can exercise their power independently of each other and of Mr. Ma, according to Ant’s statement.
Ant, which owns the popular digital-payment platform Alipay, has been forced to overhaul its operations amid a government crackdown that began with Beijing calling off the company’s multibillion-dollar initial public offering in November 2020. The IPO, which had been slated to happen in Shanghai and Hong Kong concurrently, would have raised more than $34 billion and valued Ant at more than $300 billion.
Ant has been revamping its various business lines, from consumer lending to insurance, and will eventually become a financial holding company subject to regulations in line with traditional financial firms.
The change of control moves Ant a step closer to finishing its overhaul. Yet it also could put back a potential revival of Ant’s IPO for a year or more. Chinese securities regulations require a timeout on public listings for companies that have gone through a recent change in control.
Regulators didn’t demand the change but have given their blessing, the Journal reported previously. Ant is required to map out its ownership structure when it applies to become a financial holding company.
The nine others who will hold voting rights include Chairman
Eric Jing,
Executive Vice President Xiaofeng Shao and Chief Technology Officer Xingjun Ni, in line with the details in the previous Journal report. Mr. Shao is also the general secretary of Ant’s Communist Party committee, according to people familiar with the matter. Mr. Ni was instrumental in founding Alipay in 2004.
Mr. Ma has all but vanished from the public spotlight since he laid into Chinese regulators in a controversial speech days before Ant’s planned IPO in 2020. He retired from Alibaba in 2019 but continued to control Ant. The two companies that Mr. Ma co-founded have been charting separate courses in light of Beijing’s crackdown on big internet platforms.
Mr. Ma’s control over Ant goes back more than a decade to the period when he was CEO of Alibaba. Throughout the years, he had contemplated giving up control of Ant out of corporate-governance concerns that risks may arise from Ant being too reliant on a single dominant figure atop the company, the Journal reported previously.
Bahamas securities regulators said they seized digital assets valued at $3.5 billion from FTX’s local operation in mid-November as the cryptocurrency exchange spiraled toward collapse, a figure that FTX’s U.S. managers cast doubt on Friday.
Christina Rolle, executive director of the Securities Commission of the Bahamas, said in an affidavit made public Thursday that the commission sought control of the crypto assets held by FTX Digital Markets Ltd. last month after FTX co-founder Sam Bankman-Fried told local authorities under oath about a hacking attempt. Her affidavit, filed with the Supreme Court of the Bahamas, also confirmed that the Securities Commission relied on Mr. Bankman-Fried and another FTX co-founder, Gary Wang, to make the transfers happen.
is likely to plead not guilty to fraud and other charges at his arraignment next week, according to people familiar with the matter.
The U.S. attorney’s office for the Southern District of New York earlier this month charged Mr. Bankman-Fried with engaging in criminal conduct that contributed to the cryptocurrency exchange’s collapse, alleging that he oversaw one of the biggest financial frauds in American history. Mr. Bankman-Fried is likely to appear in person in New York to enter his plea on Jan. 3, one of the people said.
Before his arrest, Mr. Bankman-Fried blamed the loss of customer funds on sloppy record-keeping and a bank-account issue that allowed Alameda Research, an affiliated trading firm, to cover large losses with money destined for FTX. His not guilty plea was widely expected.
The collapse of FTX has set off the largest crypto-related bankruptcy ever, and court filings are already shedding light on what went wrong and how complicated things could get. Here are three things to know about the company’s bankruptcy process. Photo: Lam Yik/Bloomberg News
Mr. Bankman-Fried stands at odds with his associates—
Caroline Ellison,
the former chief executive of Alameda Research, and
Gary Wang,
FTX’s former chief technology officer—who both pleaded guilty to criminal offenses similar to those Mr. Bankman-Fried was charged with. Both are cooperating with federal investigators.
The collapse of FTX and its sister trading firm Alameda have rattled the nascent world of crypto. Prosecutors allege that Mr. Bankman-Fried took billions of dollars of FTX.com customer money to pay the expenses and debts of his trading firm Alameda Research. Both companies filed for bankruptcy last month. Individual traders who entrusted FTX with their crypto are likely facing lengthy bankruptcy proceedings before they have a chance at seeing any of their funds back.
Mr. Bankman-Fried was released on a $250 million bond last week and has been ordered to stay in his parent’s Palo Alto, Calif., home after his appearance in a New York federal court following his extradition from the Bahamas.
Prosecutors say that from 2019 through November, Mr. Bankman-Fried conspired with unnamed individuals to defraud customers and lenders. He provided false and misleading information to lenders on the financial condition of Alameda, according to the indictment by the U.S. attorney’s office.
Mr. Bankman-Fried is also accused of defrauding the Federal Election Commission starting in 2020 by conspiring with others to make illegal contributions to candidates and political committees in the names of other people.
He and his associates contributed more than $70 million to election campaigns in recent years, The Wall Street Journal previously reported. He personally made $40 million in donations ahead of the 2022 midterm elections.
Mr. Bankman-Fried also faces allegations from the Securities and Exchange Commission and the Commodity Futures Trading Commission.
The SEC alleged in a civil lawsuit that Mr. Bankman-Fried diverted customer funds from the start of FTX to support Alameda and to make venture investments, real-estate purchases and political donations. The CFTC filed a lawsuit linking his allegedly fraudulent conduct at Alameda and FTX to markets that the CFTC regulates.
On Friday afternoon, Mr. Bankman-Fried returned to Twitter for the first time since Dec. 12 to defend himself against rumors that he has been moving funds out of several crypto wallet addresses associated with Alameda.
Cryptocurrency prices have cratered this year amid rising central bank rates and the collapses of a once-prominent hedge fund and crypto lenders, with bitcoin and ether plunging 64% and 67%, respectively, according to CoinDesk data. The total market cap of all digital tokens fell to $795 billion, compared with $2.2 trillion at the start of year, per CoinMarketCap data.
Write to Caitlin Ostroff at caitlin.ostroff@wsj.com and Vicky Ge Huang at vicky.huang@wsj.com
In the worst year for stocks since the Great Recession, several big names are headed for their worst year on record with just one trading day left in 2022.
The S&P 500 index
SPX,
+1.75%
and Dow Jones Industrial Average
DJIA,
+1.05%
are both headed for their worst year since 2008, with declines of 20.6% and 9.5% respectively through Thursday. But at least 19 big-name stocks — and half of another — are headed for a more ignominious title for 2022, according to Dow Jones Market Data: Worst year ever.
Tesla Inc.
TSLA,
+8.08%
is having the worst year among the group of S&P 1500 constituents with a market capitalization of $30 billion or higher headed for record annual percentage declines. Tesla shares have declined 65.4% so far this year, which would be easily the worst year on record for the popular stock, which has only had one previous negative year since going public in 2010, an 11% decline in 2016.
Tesla may not be the worst decliner on the list by the time 2023 arrives, however, as another Silicon Valley company is right on its heels. Meta Platforms Inc.
META,
+4.01%,
the parent company of Facebook, has fallen 64.2% so far this year, as Chief Executive Mark Zuckerberg has stuck to spending billions to develop the “metaverse” even as the online-advertising industry that provides the bulk of his revenue has stagnated. It would also only be the second year in Facebook’s history that the stock has declined, after a 25.7% drop in 2018, though shares did end Facebook’s IPO year of 2012 30% lower than the original IPO price.
Only one other stock could contend with Tesla and Meta’s record declines this year, and Tesla CEO Elon Musk has some familiarity with that company as well. PayPal Holdings Inc.
PYPL,
+4.46%,
where Musk first found fame during the dot-com boom, has declined 63.2% so far this year as executives have refocused the company on attracting and retaining high-value users instead of trying to get as many users as possible on the payments platform. It would be the second consecutive down year for PayPal, which had not experienced that before 2021 since spinning off from eBay Inc.
EBAY,
+4.76%
in 2015.
None of the other companies headed for their worst year yet stand to lose more than half their value this year, though Charter Communications Inc.
CHTR,
+1.99%
is close. The telecommunications company’s stock has declined 48.2% so far, as investors worry about plans to spend big in 2023 in an attempt to turn around declining internet-subscriber numbers.
In addition to the list below, Alphabet Inc.’s class C shares
GOOG,
+2.88%
are having their worst year on record with a 38.4% decline. MarketWatch is not including that on the list, however, as Alphabet’s class A shares
GOOGL,
+2.82%
fell 55.5% in 2008; the separate class of nonvoting shares was created in 2012 to allow the company — then still called Google — to continue issuing shares to employees without diluting the control of co-founders Sergey Brin and Larry Page.
Apart from that portion of Alphabet’s shares, here are the 19 large stocks headed for their worst year ever, based on Thursday’s closing prices.
Company
% decline in 2022
Tesla Inc.
TSLA,
+8.08%
65.4%
Meta Platforms Inc.
META,
+4.01%
64.2%
PayPal Holdings Inc.
PYPL,
+4.46%
62.6%
Charter Communications Inc.
48.0%
Edwards Lifesciences Corp.
EW,
+2.87%
41.9%
ServiceNow Inc.
NOW,
+3.67%
39.9%
Zoetis Inc.
ZTS,
+3.00%
39.3%
Fidelity National Information Services Inc.
FIS,
+2.03%
apologized in court this week as she pleaded guilty to fraud and other offenses, telling a judge that she and others conspired to steal billions of dollars from customers of the doomed crypto exchange while misleading investors and lenders.
“I am truly sorry for what I did,” Ms. Ellison, the former chief executive of Mr. Bankman-Fried’s crypto-trading firm, Alameda Research, said in a New York federal court, according to a transcript of the hearing made available Friday. “I knew that it was wrong.”
Ms. Ellison, 28 years old, and former FTX chief technology officer
Gary Wang,
29, pleaded guilty Monday during separate hearings in sealed courtrooms. Both agreed to cooperate with the government’s investigation in exchange for the prospect of lighter sentences.
Ms. Ellison, a former romantic partner of Mr. Bankman-Fried, pleaded guilty to seven criminal counts, including fraud, conspiracy and money laundering. During her hearing, she admitted to conspiring to use billions of dollars from FTX customer accounts to repay loans Alameda had taken out to make risky investments.
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FTX executives had enacted special settings that granted Alameda access to an unlimited line of credit without having to post collateral, pay interest on negative balances or be subject to margin calls, she said.
“I also understood that many FTX customers invested in crypto derivatives and that most FTX customers did not expect that FTX would lend out their digital asset holdings and fiat currency deposits to Alameda in this fashion,” she said.
Ms. Ellison also said she and Mr. Bankman-Fried worked with others to conceal the arrangement from lenders, including by hiding on quarterly balance sheets the extent of Alameda’s borrowing and the billions of dollars in loans that the firm had made to FTX executives and associates. Mr. Bankman-Fried was among the executives who received loans from Alameda, she said.
Under questioning from the judge, Ms. Ellison said she knew what she was doing was illegal.
She said that since FTX’s implosion, she has worked hard to assist in the recovery of customers’ assets and aid the government’s investigation.
At the hearing, U.S. District Judge
Ronnie Abrams
granted the request of federal prosecutors to temporarily seal all documents connected to Ms. Ellison’s plea agreement. At the time, Mr. Bankman-Fried was in a jail in the Bahamas after the Justice Department requested local police arrest him, and he had not yet formally consented to his transfer to U.S. custody.
“We’re still expecting extradition soon, but given that he has not yet entered his consent, we think it could potentially thwart our law enforcement objectives to extradite him if Ms. Ellison’s cooperation were disclosed at this time,” Assistant U.S. Attorney
Danielle Sassoon
told Judge Abrams.
A lawyer for Ms. Ellison declined to comment. Ms. Ellison was ordered released on $250,000 bond at her plea hearing. A spokesman for the U.S. attorney’s office in Manhattan declined to comment.
John J. Ray III, the new chief executive of FTX, testified in front of a House committee Tuesday on the collapse of the crypto exchange. His testimony came less than a day after the company founder, Sam Bankman-Fried, was arrested in the Bahamas. Photo: Al Drago/Bloomberg News
Mr. Wang pleaded guilty in front of the same judge. He told Judge Abrams he knew what he was doing was illegal and wrong. “As part of my employment at FTX, I was directed to and agreed to make certain changes to the platform’s code,” he said, adding that he executed the changes knowing they would give Alameda Research special privileges on the FTX platform.
A lawyer for Mr. Wang declined to comment. He has previously said that Mr. Wang takes his responsibilities as a cooperating witness seriously.
The Justice Department charged Mr. Bankman-Fried earlier this month with eight counts of fraud and conspiracy connected to the implosion of his company. He was released from custody on a $250 million bond on Thursday after making his first court appearance in New York following his extradition from the Bahamas. A federal magistrate judge set strict restrictions on Mr. Bankman-Fried, including ordering him to stay in his parents’ Palo Alto, Calif., home and be under electronic monitoring.
Mr. Bankman-Fried has said he made mistakes that contributed to FTX’s demise, but he has denied engaging in fraud.
Write to Corinne Ramey at corinne.ramey@wsj.com and James Fanelli at james.fanelli@wsj.com
oversaw one of the biggest financial frauds in American history, a top federal prosecutor said in charging that the former chief executive stole billions of dollars from the crypto exchange’s customers while misleading investors and lenders.
An indictment by the U.S. attorney’s office for the Southern District of New York, unsealed Tuesday, charges Mr. Bankman-Fried with eight counts of fraud. Prosecutors allege that he took FTX.com customers’ money to pay the expenses and debts of Alameda Research, an affiliated trading firm. Mr. Bankman-Fried is charged as well with conspiring to defraud the U.S. and violate campaign-finance rules by making illegal political contributions.
Damian Williams,
the U.S. attorney for the Southern District of New York, said he authorized the charges against Mr. Bankman-Fried last Wednesday and a grand jury voted on the indictment Friday.
“This investigation is very much ongoing, and it is moving very quickly,” Mr. Williams said at a press conference in Manhattan on Tuesday. “While this is our first public announcement, it will not be our last.”
John J. Ray III, the new chief executive of FTX, testified in front of a House committee Tuesday on the collapse of the crypto exchange. Photo: Nathan Howard/Getty Images
Separately, John J. Ray III, the new chief executive of FTX, said at a congressional hearing Tuesday that FTX incurred losses in excess of $7 billion. Mr. Ray, who oversaw the Enron Corp. bankruptcy early in the 2000s decade, said funds were taken from FTX and Alameda, an affiliated trading firm that incurred trading losses.
Mr. Ray described Enron as having been brought down by sophisticated people whose machinations aimed to keep transactions secret. FTX presents as “old-fashioned embezzlement,” Mr. Ray said. “It’s taking money from customers and using it for your own purpose.”
Also Tuesday, the Securities and Exchange Commission alleged in a civil lawsuit that Mr. Bankman-Fried diverted customer funds from the start of FTX to support Alameda and to make venture investments, real-estate purchases and political donations. The Commodity Futures Trading Commission filed a lawsuit Tuesday linking his allegedly fraudulent conduct at Alameda and FTX to markets that the CFTC regulates.
“
Sam Bankman-Fried
built a house of cards on a foundation of deception while telling investors that it was one of the safest buildings in crypto,” SEC Chair
Gary Gensler
said.
The charges are the latest twist in a saga that has rattled the world of cryptocurrencies, a largely unregulated market that boomed during the pandemic but has been hammered this year by rising interest rates and the failure of several significant industry players.
FTX, one of the largest crypto exchanges in the world, filed for bankruptcy last month after the firm ran out of cash and a merger with rival Binance collapsed. The firm’s failure marked a sudden fall from grace for Mr. Bankman-Fried, who portrayed FTX as a safer crypto exchange to use and cast himself as an ally of regulation.
In interviews since the filing, Mr. Bankman-Fried said he bore responsibility for FTX’s collapse but denied he committed any fraud.
Mark Cohen,
a lawyer for Mr. Bankman-Fried, said Tuesday that his client “is reviewing the charges with his legal team and considering all of his legal options.”
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Mr. Bankman-Fried, 30 years old, was arrested Monday in the Bahamas. He appeared in court Tuesday in Nassau. He was denied bail and has been remanded to jail until Feb. 8, according to a person familiar with the matter.
A U.S. court official said that while the case had been assigned to a federal judge in Manhattan, there was no timing yet for Mr. Bankman-Fried’s extradition.
The tales of Mr. Bankman-Fried’s alleged misdeeds resonated with crypto customers around the world, even those who haven’t suffered significant losses as various firms by turns suspended withdrawals and collapsed.
Vasco Tagachi, a 42-year-old Portuguese-Sri Lankan trader based in China, said he felt a sigh of relief after learning of Mr. Bankman-Fried’s arrest. He said he had $57,423 in an FTX account this fall but was able to withdraw almost all of it just before the firm stopped honoring withdrawal requests.
“I had a little bit of tears in my eyes hearing that,” he said.
Prosecutors allege that from 2019 through November 2022, Mr. Bankman-Fried conspired with unnamed individuals to defraud customers and lenders. He provided false and misleading information to lenders on the financial condition of Alameda, according to the indictment.
Sam Bankman-Fried was arrested in the Bahamas on Monday, a day before he was expected to testify on the sudden collapse of FTX before the House Committee on Financial Services. Illustration: Jacob Reynolds
While the 14-page indictment was light on detailed allegations, it says that on Sept. 18, 2022, Mr. Bankman-Fried caused an email to be sent to an FTX investor in New York that contained false information about FTX’s financial condition. In June 2022, the indictment says, Mr. Bankman-Fried and others misappropriated FTX.com customer deposits to satisfy the loan obligations of Alameda.
Mr. Bankman-Fried is also accused of defrauding the Federal Election Commission starting in 2020 by conspiring with others to make illegal contributions to candidates and political committees in the names of other people.
He and his associates contributed more than $70 million to election campaigns in recent years, The Wall Street Journal previously reported. He personally made $40 million in donations ahead of the 2022 midterm elections, most of which went to Democrats and liberal-leaning groups.
Mr. Ray, the FTX CEO, said FTX is investigating whether any loans taken by FTX executives were improperly used for campaign contributions.
Mr. Ray added that tracing fund flows from FTX to executives and third parties was difficult because of the lack of a paper trail for many corporate transactions at FTX.
“We’re dealing with a paperless bankruptcy,” he said. “It makes it very difficult to trace and track assets.”
The CFTC’s complaint contains a detailed discussion of events at Alameda and FTX and argues that the agency, generally less visible to the public than the SEC, also has jurisdiction over the case. While the CFTC regulates U.S. derivatives markets, it can go after fraud that affects some commodity markets.
Besides giving Alameda access to its customer deposits, FTX granted the crypto hedge fund controlled by Mr. Bankman-Fried a series of trading-execution privileges that provided it an edge against other traders on the platform, the CFTC lawsuit alleges.
The CFTC said that while institutional customers had their orders routed through the FTX system, Alameda was able “to bypass certain portions of the system and gain faster access.” It resulted in Alameda’s orders being received by FTX several milliseconds faster than those of other institutional clients.
The lawsuit also alleges that Alameda wasn’t subject to certain automated verification processes, including on whether it had available funds before executing a transaction, giving it further advantage on the speed of its trades.
The edge wasn’t enough to keep Mr. Bankman-Fried from thinking about shutting down Alameda in September, according to the CFTC complaint.
In a document titled “We came, we saw, we researched,” Mr. Bankman-Fried laid out reasons for shutting down Alameda, according to the CFTC lawsuit. Chief among them: Alameda wasn’t making enough money to justify its existence, he wrote.
The CFTC said the statements contradicted what Mr. Bankman-Fried and Alameda were saying publicly at the time.
Tuesday’s congressional hearing was the first public appearance for Mr. Ray on FTX’s bankruptcy. Mr. Bankman-Fried had been scheduled to appear virtually at the same hearing, before he was arrested in the Bahamas at the request of the U.S. government. Bahamian police have said that they would keep him in custody and that they are awaiting an extradition order from U.S. authorities.
“The operation of Alameda really depended, based on the way it was operated, on the use of customer funds,” Mr. Ray said, responding to questions from members of Congress at the hearing. “There were virtually no internal controls…whatsoever.”
He described numerous loans totaling billions of dollars taken out by Mr. Bankman-Fried from Alameda.
“We have no information at this time as to what purpose or use of those funds were,” Mr. Ray added. He said Mr. Bankman-Fried had signed as the issuer and recipient for some of the loans.
Mr. Ray pushed back against recent statements made by Mr. Bankman-Fried that he had little to no involvement in the management of Alameda after passing control of the company to
Caroline Ellison
and
Sam Trabucco,
as well as Mr. Bankman-Fried’s statements that customer funds were passed to Alameda because of an accounting error.
“I don’t find those statements to be credible,” Mr. Ray said.
The Justice Department’s indictment of Mr. Bankman-Fried includes an array of charges with few supporting details, a tactic that could give federal prosecutors flexibility in navigating the rules involving extradition.
The charges against Mr. Bankman-Fried run the gamut from wire fraud to securities fraud conspiracy to conspiring to launder money and conspiring to break campaign-finance laws.
The statutes charged, with the exception of the campaign-finance offense, are enormously broad, said Rebecca Mermelstein, a former federal prosecutor who is now at O’Melveny & Myers LLP.
“By not being superspecific, you protect yourself later against an argument that charges relating to different criminal conduct are being added,” she said.
The arrest of Mr. Bankman-Fried is the latest case to highlight prosecutors’ push to bring white-collar cases to justice faster.
Deputy U.S. Attorney General Lisa Monaco said in a September speech that making prosecutors and companies feel that they were “on the clock” in these cases was a key priority for the department.
FTX founder Sam Bankman-Fried sat down with The Wall Street Journal to discuss what happened to the billions of dollars deposited by the exchange’s customers. Photo: Kenny Wassus/The Wall Street Journal
“We need to do more and move faster,” she said. “In individual prosecutions, speed is of the essence.”
Former federal prosecutors say that high-profile financial cases with lots of victims can increase the pressure on authorities to bring cases more quickly.
“Appearances matter when it comes to criminal justice,” said Mark Chutkow, a former federal prosecutor who is currently head of government investigations and corporate compliance at Dykema Gossett PLLC.
If Mr. Bankman-Fried remains in the Bahamas while the details of his potential extradition to the U.S. are worked out, there is only one prison there: the Bahamas Department of Correctional Services, commonly known as Fox Hill Prison.
Prison inmates reported removing human waste by buckets and developing bed sores from lying on the bare ground, according to a 2021 human-rights report on the Bahamas by the U.S. State Department. Cells were infested with rats, maggots and insects, the report said.
Inmates are supposed to get an hour every day outside for exercise. Because of staff shortages and overcrowding, there are times when inmates will only get 30 minutes a week, said Romona Farquharson, an attorney in the Bahamas.
The prison has different sections that separate those serving terms for violent crimes, for instance, from those who aren’t. Because of overcrowding, there have been instances in which inmates awaiting trial for minor crimes have been sent to the maximum-security facility, said Ms. Farquharson.
“I think they’ve got to be careful not to have him in really rough areas in the prison,” she said.
—Angel Au-Yeung, Ben Foldy and Hannah Miaocontributed to this article.
Write to Corinne Ramey at corinne.ramey@wsj.com, James Fanelli at james.fanelli@wsj.com, Dave Michaels at dave.michaels@wsj.com, Alexander Saeedy at alexander.saeedy@wsj.com and Vicky Ge Huang at vicky.huang@wsj.com
AUSTIN, Texas—Even as a cold night started to settle outside
Tesla
‘s headquarters here on Saturday, a group of cryptocurrency entrepreneurs had no plans to leave until
Elon Musk,
the man they named their currency after, accepted a 12,000-pound sculpture of a Mr. Musk-headed goat riding a rocket.
It is the latest stunt in the cryptocurrency space, where jokes and memes about digital currencies regularly flood social media. But a 6-ton sculpture as a marketing gimmick isn’t so common.
The creators of Elon GOAT say the name of their cryptocurrency was inspired by their respect for Mr. Musk. They and his other fans think he is the “greatest of all time,” or a “GOAT.” They took the admiration literally, spending $600,000 to create a sculpture of Mr. Musk’s head, wearing a gold-plated dogecoin necklace on a goat’s body. The rocket can move, pointing to the sky as if it is taking off. Gas lines run through it so that flames can shoot out of the back.
They trucked it to
Tesla Inc.’s
headquarters, in hopes Mr. Musk would accept the gift. The creators are calling called the event “GOATSgiving.”
Elon Musk has warned of dire financial challenges facing Twitter, the social-media company he took over for $44 billion in October. WSJ’s Mark Maurer explains how the company is trying to fix its finances and avoid a potential bankruptcy. Photo Illustration: Laura Kammermann
But about two hours after the co-founders of Elon GOAT parked the sculpture right outside the Tesla building, there was no sign of Mr. Musk.
Dustin Dailey, a security officer at Tesla, walked over to a group of about 15 people and said they couldn’t accept the sculpture on Mr. Musk’s behalf, but would find a spot for it on their property if Mr. Musk gave the thumbs-up.
But so far Mr. Musk hasn’t given any indication he would accept it or whether he knew the sculpture was there. Tesla didn’t respond to a request for comment
“I am fairly certain he does know about it,” said Mr. Dailey of the sculpture. “It’s all over Twitter.”
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Alec Wolvert, an Elon GOAT co-founder and chief marketing officer, said they were planning on camping out on a piece of public land off a toll road that overlooks the headquarters until Mr. Musk accepted the sculpture.
“We’re gonna stay here as long as possible,” Mr. Wolvert said. “I even heard some people say they were going to strap themselves to it.”
The idea of the sculpture came together last year. “It was an evening joke that kind of just came to fruition,” said
Ashley Sansalone,
an Elon GOAT co-founder.
Metal sculptor Kevin Stone spent nearly six months working on the sculpture of Elon Musk.
Photo:
Kevin Stone
The cryptocurrency entrepreneurs asked Kevin Stone, a metal sculptor in British Columbia, Canada, to make the giant sculpture with Mr. Musk’s head. The goal: to get Mr. Musk to tweet about the sculpture to his more than 118 million followers and draw attention to their cryptocurrency, the Elon GOAT.
“Elon tweeting us would legitimize the token,” said Mr. Sansalone, 40 years old.
Mr. Sansalone said he works on the token full time and previously ran a construction company and traded energy. Unlike bitcoin, ether or dogecoin, the Elon GOAT token is far from a household cryptocurrency name. It is ranked well outside the largest cryptocurrencies by market value, according to CoinMarketCap.
Mr. Musk’s head, which took nearly six months to complete was made by Mr. Stone. The goat body and rocket were made by others in Phoenix to speed up the project, Mr. Sansalone said. Then all the pieces were put together and attached to the back of a 70-foot long semi-truck trailer.
“When I first saw the statue my jaw dropped,” said DeMarco Hill, 51, who spotted it in September in Goodyear, Ariz., where he lives. He grabbed his 12-year-old son and they followed it. “It was something you’ve never seen before in your life.”
Mr. Hill, a trucker who owns his own company, Stay Ready Trucking, thought the stunt was so entertaining that he found Mr. Sansalone and asked if he could participate. Mr. Sansalone said Mr. Hill was needed because only someone with a special license could drive around the heaping pile of metal.
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He has since driven the sculpture through California, Arizona and Washington, before bringing it to Texas. People who drive by honk their horns or give a thumbs-up, Mr. Hill said.
“If I pull up to the side of the road it’s like people crowding around,” he said. “It gets crazy.”
Mr. Sansalone said the sculpture has mostly gotten a positive response. He hasn’t heard anyone mistaken Mr. Musk’s face for someone else. “I would say he is probably the most relevant person on the planet right now,” Mr. Sansalone said about Mr. Musk, the world’s richest person who recently bought Twitter Inc. for $44 billion.
In September, the sculpture sat in front of Tesla’s office in Palo Alto, Calif., during the company’s artificial-intelligence conference. Tesla employees crossed the street to take pictures with the sculpture, Mr. Sansalone said. Mr. Musk was at the conference, according to Twitter posts he made, and Mr. Sansalone assumes the billionaire saw the sculpture.
“All there was to look at was a lit-up rocket erected in the middle of the street,” he said.
On Saturday night, the group remained hopeful.
At one point in the evening, a group of about 20 people who were waiting outside started to chant “Elon claim your goat” in the hopes that the god of crypto, as one co-founder put it, would hear them.
“I’m a huge fan of Elon and I want to give this man his flowers while he’s alive,” said Aamir Manzoor, a 36-year-old from Toronto who is a holder of Elon GOAT. “He’s done a lot for the world.”
Write to Joseph Pisani at joseph.pisani@wsj.com, Alyssa Lukpat at alyssa.lukpat@wsj.com and Adolfo Flores at adolfo.flores@wsj.com
A research paper published at Harvard University is advocating that central banks should buy bitcoin
BTCUSD,
+2.41%
as a hedge against sanctions by other countries.
The paper, titled “Hedging Sanctions Risk: Cryptocurrency in Central Bank Reserves,” was authored by Ph.D. candidate Matthew Ferranti from Harvard’s economics department, and likens central banks’ gold reserves to potential bitcoin holdings.
Ferranti points out that central banks in countries across the globe should look into holding bitcoin as a hedge against possible financial sanctions. He gives the example of the unprecedented financial sanctions levied against Russia by the U.S. and many western nations following its invasion of Ukraine — billions in Russian assets were frozen after the Ukraine war began.
“Sanctions risk may diminish the appeal of U.S. Treasuries, propel broader diversification in central bank reserves, and bolster the long-run fundamental value of both cryptocurrency and gold,” Ferranti writes.
In the paper, Ferranti says El Salvador is a model for central banks owning bitcoin. The country, headed by bitcoin bull Nayib Bukele, has purchased millions of dollars worth of the crypto and has even made bitcoin an official national currency.
See also: ‘We just bought the dip’: El Salvador expands bitcoin holdings
Since the inception of popular cryptos like bitcoin and ether
ETHUSD,
+3.74%,
part of its appeal has been the lack of involvement from central banks, in favor of the decentralized nature of the digital asset.
In the wake of the recent crypto winter and collapse of popular crypto exchange FTX, as well as financial issues for crypto companies Voyager and Celsius, some crypto bulls have called for increased regulation and transparency for the industry.
The paper comes after FTX struggled with liquidity issues in November, eventually leading to a bankruptcy filing. Sam Bankman-Fried resigned as CEO and later apologized for the collapse of his former company.
See: Why do people invest in crypto? ‘It’s partly fraud and partly delusion,’ says Charlie Munger.
Also see: Tom Brady, Steph Curry and Kevin O’Leary set to lose big from FTX bankruptcy filing
Bitcoin’s price is down over 70% over the past year, and the price for ether is also down over 70% over the same period. The total market cap for all crypto nearly hit $3 trillion during parts of 2021, but is now around $800 billion.
said it fired three of the founder’s top deputies.
Gary Wang, an FTX co-founder and its chief technology officer; FTX engineering director Nishad Singh; and Caroline Ellison, who ran Mr. Bankman-Fried’s trading arm, Alameda Research, were terminated from those roles after FTX tapped
John J. Ray
to oversee the companies’ bankruptcy, an FTX spokeswoman said late Friday.
Mr. Bankman-Fried resigned on Nov. 11, when FTX filed for bankruptcy. He was replaced by Mr. Ray, a veteran restructuring executive who once oversaw the liquidation of Enron Corp.
FTX and Alameda sought protection from creditors after executives at both businesses revealed that FTX had lent billions of dollars worth of customer assets to Alameda to plug a funding gap, The Wall Street Journal previously reported. In a Thursday court filing, Mr. Ray highlighted numerous failings, including “the concentration of control in the hands of a very small group of inexperienced, unsophisticated and potentially compromised individuals.”
On a Nov. 9 video call with Alameda employees, Ms. Ellison said that she, along with Messrs. Bankman-Fried, Wang and Singh, were aware of the decision to send customer money to the trading firm, the Journal previously reported.
The four executives also comprised the board of what they called the Future Fund, a philanthropic arm charged with making grants to nonprofits and investments in “socially-impactful companies.”
Messrs. Bankman-Fried, Wang and Singh all owned stakes in at least some of the FTX companies, according to Mr. Ray’s court filing.
“Mr. Bankman-Fried ultimately agreed to resign, resulting in my appointment as the debtors’ CEO,” Mr. Ray wrote in the filing. “I was delegated all corporate powers and authority under applicable law, including the power to appoint independent directors and commence these Chapter 11 cases on an emergency basis.”
Write to Justin Baer at justin.baer@wsj.com and Hannah Miao at hannah.miao@wsj.com