“Such Is Life”: FTX Bankruptcy Filing Details SBF’s Cavalier Attitude Toward Misplaced $50 Million

What’s $50 million amongst friends?

That appears to be the cavalier attitude that FTX head Sam Bankman-Fried took while managing his now defunct FTX, according to a new report from Yahoo, which detailed “a complete failure” of corporate controls at the company.

The company’s latest bankruptcy report filed Sunday, coming in at 43 pages, detailed a “lack of appropriate record keeping and controls” in its finances, accounting, governance, and even cybersecurity, Yahoo reported.

The company admitted it didn’t even have a complete and current list of employees when it started going through the bankruptcy process. It’s still poring through QuickBooks, Google docs, spreadsheets, and Slack records, to – as Yahoo put it – “get any insight into where the hell customers’ money went”.

Among other things, the company has found nearly 80,000 transactions labeled “Ask My Accountant” in QuickBooks. It also found communication from SBF stating internally that “we are only able to ballpark what [Alameda’s] balances are… we sometimes find $50 million of assets lying around that we lost track of; such is life.”

The filing said that FTX executives “stifled dissent, commingled and misused corporate and customer funds, lied to third parties about their business, joked internally about their tendency to lose track of millions of dollars in assets, and thereby caused the FTX Group to collapse as swiftly as it had grown.”

Those running the company “showed little interest in instituting oversight or implementing an appropriate control framework”, according to FTX CEO managing the company’s bankruptcy John Ray III.

Hey with these kind of money management and bookkeeping skills, maybe Sam Bankman-Fried could be managing the books for the Pentagon or the Department of Defense.