billionaire investor and entrepreneur Mark Cuban says that FTX’s co-founder former CEO Sam Bankman-Fried (SBF) should be fretting over possible jail time. 

Cuban is the majority owner of the professional basketball team Dallas Mavericks, as well as one of the “sharks” on the highly popular reality show “Shark Tank” (which is aired on the ABC television network).

On 30 November 2022, the New York Times held its annual DealBook Summit in New York City, an an event which was hosted by Andrew Ross Sorkin, Times columnist and DealBook founder and editor at large.

Based on the full transcript of Andrew Ross Sorkin’s interview with SBF published by CoinDesk earlier today, SBF said:

“Clearly, I made a lot of mistakes or things I would give anything to be able to do over again. I didn’t ever try to commit fraud on anyone… I didn’t knowingly commingle funds. And again, one piece of this you have the margin trading you have you know, customers borrowing from each other, Alameda is one of those. I was frankly surprised by how big Alameda’s position was, which points to another failure of oversight on my part. And a failure to appoint someone to be chiefly in charge of that. But I wasn’t trying to commingle funds…

“The time that I really knew there was a problem was Nov. 6. Nov. 6 was the date that the tweet about FTT came out. By late on Nov. 6, we were putting together all of the data, putting together all the information that obviously should have been put together way earlier, that obviously should have been part of the dashboards I was always looking at…

“We were spending an enormous amount of our energy on compliance. We’re spending an enormous amount of energy on regulation on licensure. We’re getting licensed in dozens of jurisdictions…

“Everything I have, I’m disclosing and you know, I’m down to…I have one working credit card left. I think it might be $100,000 or something like that in that bank account. And, I mean, everything that I had, even all the loans I had were, you know, those are all things I was reinvesting in the businesses…I put everything I had into FTX.“

According to a report by CNBC, Cuban, who is also owner of the Dallas Mavericks NBA team, recently said that the former FTX CEO should be “afraid of going to jail for a long time.” 

Last month, Cuban said during an interview with TMZ:

“I don’t know all the details, but if I were him, I’d be afraid of going to jail for a long time… I talked to the guy and thought he was smart… I had no idea he was going to take other people’s money and put it to his personal use.“

Galaxy Digital CEO Mike Novogratz also expects SBF to spend some time in prison in the future. On 1 December 2022, he told Sorkin during an appearance on CNBC’s “Squawk Box”:

“It was delusional. Let’s be really clear. Sam is really delusional about what happened and his culpability in it… He needs to be prosecuted. He will spend time in jail. They perpetuated a large fraud and it wasn’t just Sam. You don’t pull this off with one person.

“And so I’m hoping that the authorities get to the bottom of this faster, not just for the sanctity of the crypto markets, but for all markets... Markets are based on trust and when you have trust broken like this it questions everyone else. People start looking for Black Swans everywhere.”

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