FTX’s Bankman-Fried Will Attend NYT DealBook Summit Despite Bankruptcy

Sam Bankman-Fried, the notorious founder of failed cryptocurrency exchange FTX, is set to appear at the New York Times DealBook Summit on Nov. 30 — to the surprise of many. 

The embattled former CEO will speak with DealBook founder Andrew Ross Sorkin, who confirmed the interview in a tweet Wednesday. “There are a lot of important questions to be asked and answered,” Sorkin wrote in his tweet, promising “Nothing is off limits.”

Bankman-Fried had been scheduled to speak at the conference despite the dramatic implosion of FTX, which had been the world’s second-largest cryptocurrency exchange until it declared bankruptcy earlier this month. Since then, Bankman-Fried has come under intense scrutiny, after revelations that he and his team mismanaged billions of dollars of customer funds.

The fee to attend the NYT’s DealBook Summit is $2,499 and other speakers scheduled to speak include Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy, Facebook co-founder and Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg and New York City Mayor Eric Adams.

Bankman-Fried, for his part, confirmed his decision to talk to Sorkin on Twitter Wednesday, while also quoting a tweet from anonymous cryptocurrency news account @BTC_Archive, which reads “FTX FOUNDER: Minutes after FTX bankruptcy was signed “potential interest in billions of dollars of funding came in.”

The FTX founder, who was also a prolific political donor to Democrats, is scheduled to testify in front of the US House of Representatives Financial Services Committee in December about the collapse of FTX and its bankruptcy filing. FTX’s newly appointed CEO, John Ray III, who oversaw the aftermath of the collapse of energy trading firm Enron two decades ago, called the cryptocurrency exchange’s disintegration “unprecedented” and said that it was marred by a “complete failure of corporate controls.”