Sam Bankman-Fried sentencing: Disgraced FTX founder set to learn prison fate ... trends now

Sam Bankman-Fried's parents have arrived at court as the fraudster is set to face justice over stealing $8 billion from investors.  

Joseph Bankman and Barbara Fried, were spotted arriving at the courthouse for their 32-year-old son's sentencing, set to start at 9:30am.

Joseph Bankman is a lawyer and a longtime tax professor at Stanford Law School. He was employed by FTX to help with tax issues. Barbara Fried is also a lawyer and a professor Emeritus at Stanford Law. 

The parents have been accused of having knowledge of some of the fraudulent activity inside FTX but haven't been charged with any crimes. They were deeded a $16.4 million house in the Bahamas that was almost certainly purchased with FTX customer funds, according to court testimony.

Sam Bankman-Fried is set to learn his ultimate fate today in court. The prosecution wants the disgraced crypto founder to spend 40 to 50 years behind bars, while the defense is asking for a much more lenient sentence of no greater than six and a half years.

Bankman-Fried's parents were a mainstay at the trial in October 2023, which resulted in a conviction on all counts of fraud and conspiracy. 

They were often seen trying to make eye contact and waving to their son throughout the proceedings. While Joseph Bankman was usually more stoic, Barbara Fried was often more up front with her emotions. For particularly difficult moments of the trial, she could be seen with her head in her hands or suppressing tears. 

Bankman-Fried, after being extradited to the US from the Bahamas in December 2022 was placed under house arrest at his parents' home in Palo Alto, California. The home was used as collateral for their son's $250 million bond, which means they'd likely have to forfeit the property if he had fled.

Bankman-Fried didn't flee, but Judge Lewis Kaplan violated his bail agreement in August 2023 when prosecutors accused the crypto founder of leaking personal letters of his ex-girlfriend and Alameda Research CEO Caroline Ellison to the New York Times. This, he ruled, was witness tampering, and Bankman-Fried has been at the Metropolitan Detention Center ever since.

How it started

Bankman-Fried had a charmed upbringing in California. 

In April 2019, after a six-year career in various trading firms, the then 27-year-old founded FTX amid a boom in crypto. 

He told the world he planned to give away his quickly-amassed fortune by the time the bubble burst, and lauded in the global praise of becoming the richest billionaire under 30. 

Venture capitalists lined up to invest in the blossoming platform and SBF, as he has become known, became a poster-boy of the crypto world. 

The company's logo became ubiquitous in pop-culture. 

Then, the 'crypto winter' of 2022 hit, wiping out accounts as the unpredictable and largely unregulated market tumbled. 

Behind the scenes, SBF's parent company, Alameda Research started borrowing to invest in companies in an attempt to keep the market going.  

FTX was fine...until it wasn't

In November 2022, as the walls were closing in, SBF tried to reassure investors. 

Bankman-Fried's November 7 tweet would come back to haunt him countless times during his trial.

'FTX is fine. Assets are fine,' he wrote.

Less than a year later, FTX co-founder Gary Wang would say the exact opposite on the stand.

'FTX did not have enough assets for customer withdrawals,' Wang testified in October 2023. 'FTX did not in fact have enough assets to cover all client holdings…because Alameda had withdrawn a lot of it.'

Alameda is a name you'll hear a lot.

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