Convicted crypto fraudster Sam Bankman-Fried seems to have posted from his prison cell on Monday night to defend Donald Trump and Elon Musk’s mass firing of federal civil servants.
The bizarre post comes amid reports that Bankman-Fried, who is 11 months into a 25-year sentence, is pursuing a presidential pardon.
The former FTX boss posted on X for the first time in two years, beginning the 10-part thread that began with a joke: “I have a lot of sympathy for gov’t employees: I, too, have not checked my email for the past few (hundred) days.”
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Bankman-Fried was referencing Musk’s controversial demand—emphatically co-signed by the president—that all two million federal employees tell him what they did at work last week.
Bankman-Fried, who was found guilty of stealing $8 billion from customers of his cryptocurrency exchange, continued, ”Firing people is one of the hardest things to do in the world. It sucks for everyone involved.”
“It isn’t their fault if their employer doesn’t really know what to do with them, or doesn’t really have anyone to effectively manage them. It isn’t their fault if internal politics lead their department to lose its way,” the 32-year-old wrote. “But there’s no point in keeping them around, doing nothing.”
With Trump’s backing, Musk and his team at DOGE have moved to purge the federal government of workers he deems ineffective. It’s unclear how many workers have already been fired, but Reuters estimates it’s in the tens of thousands.
It’s not clear how Bankman-Fried was able to post on social media from prison. It’s possible he could have had someone else access the account to make the post on his behalf.
In a sign of his enduring influence in the crypto space, the value of FTX’s token spiked 30 percent for a brief period after the post.
The post comes amid reports that Bankman-Fried’s parents, who are both Stanford Law School professors, are exploring the prospect of a presidential pardon.
Since becoming president, Trump pardoned another white-collar digital criminal: Ross Ulbricht, who founded a site for purchasing drugs and other illegal products on the dark web.
Also signs ostensibly in Bankman-Fried’s favor are Trump’s burgeoning interest in crypto (he and his wife launched their own coins) and the fact that the judge who oversaw the fraudster’s conviction, Lewis A. Kaplan, also adjudicated the successful sexual assault suit against Trump.
In a jailhouse phone interview this month with The New York Sun, Bankman-Fried praised the Republicans’ openness to looser crypto regulations.
“The Biden administration was just incredibly destructive and difficult to work with,” he said. “Frankly, the Republican Party was far more reasonable.”
