- Sam Bankman-Fried was asked on the witness stand if he hired a risk management team for FTX.
- “We sure should have,” he responded in court.
- Prosecutors allege he siphoned billions of dollars from FTX customers for his own benefit.
Sam Bankman-Fried testified before jurors for the first time Friday morning, explaining his background working for the traditional Wall Street firm Jane Street, before starting his own crypto hedge fund Alameda Research and, later, his cryptocurrency exchange FTX.
He lamented the lack of a risk management team at FTX, a common refrain of his as he works to deflect blame from himself in the company’s catastrophic collapse.
“Did you have a risk management team at FTX?” defense attorney Mark Cohen asked his client.
“We sure should have. But no, we didn’t,” Bankman-Fried replied.
As the company grew, Bankman-Fried said, so did its teams, “cobbling together” a marketing team, as well as teams for customer support, compliance, legal, operations, and “know your customer” initiatives.
He talked about FTX’s rapid growth, from managing a few million dollars a day in trading to hundreds of billions of…
