Sam Bankman-Fried Testifies in FTX Fraud Trial With No Jurors Present | WSJ News — Transcript

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1. 0:00s be mrey the founder of FTX took the
2. 0:03witness stand for the very first time
3. 0:06he's dressed in a grayish brown suit and
4. 0:09his hair was um had been cut a few weeks
5. 0:13ago so he no longer had that mop of very
6. 0:16unruly hair he seemed like a very uh
7. 0:20presentable suited up uh person in court
8. 0:23it has been a very interesting day
9. 0:26because we all expected Sam to take the
10. 0:30stand and testify in front of the jury
11. 0:32however um the judge asked the jury to
12. 0:35leave and go home um at around 2:00 p.m.
13. 0:38this afternoon because he wanted to see
14. 0:42whether Sam's testimony was going to be
15. 0:45um permissable in front of the jewry um
16. 0:48that's pretty rare and is a major curve
17. 0:52ball for us one of the interesting
18. 0:55things Sam mentioned was that FDX
19. 0:57decided to use all these encrypted
20. 1:00messaging apps such as signal or
21. 1:02telegram because there were a lot of
22. 1:05hacking attempts against FDX uh the
23. 1:07crypto exchange and then um he was also
24. 1:11worried that former employees might um
25. 1:14sell the data to competitors when he was
26. 1:16being questioned by the government
27. 1:18prosecutor he couldn't recall a lot of
28. 1:21the important details about why a
29. 1:24certain subsidiary was created or uh
30. 1:28whose decision it was initially to use
31. 1:31that subsidiary to receive FDX customer
32. 1:34funds a lot of the important details or
33. 1:37events that led to the collaps of um FTX
34. 1:40and Alam he was often invasive and uh
35. 1:45fumbling at times it was pretty
36. 1:48frustrating um to hear a lot of the
37. 1:52answers he he gave which is basically I
38. 1:55don't know I'm not sure when I
39. 1:57interviewed him he was one of the
40. 2:00youngest and richest billionaires in the
41. 2:03world and anything he said had a lot of
42. 2:07we to it and here he needed to convince
43. 2:12people why he didn't steal billions of
44. 2:15dollars in customer funds when a lot of
45. 2:19evidence has come out against him and
46. 2:23that includes the testimonies of the
47. 2:26three closest friends to him um for the
48. 2:30past several years he is expected to
49. 2:32testify in front of the jury so that
50. 2:35would be very interesting for us to
51. 2:41see