FTX News: Sam Bankman-Fried Posts on X for the First Time in Two Years—FTT Skyrockets

• The founder of bankrupt crypto exchange FTX, Sam Bankman-Fried, has made his first post on X for the first time since January 2023, speaking on the recent job cuts in the US.
• Soon after his post, the FTT token surged by 29%, moving from $1.60 to $2.07 before declining to $1.69. 

In a previous update, we detailed the arrest and the sentencing of Sam Bankman-Fried (SBF), the founder of the bankrupt crypto exchange FTX. According to that report, SBF was sentenced to 25 years in prison and also ordered to pay $11 billion in forfeiture for his orchestration of multiple fraud schemes. However, he recently filed a 102-page appeal to request a new trial concerning his fraud and conspiracy case, as featured in our earlier coverage.

Almost a year after his sentencing and for the first time since January 2023, SBF has made a comeback on social media with a 10-post thread that appears to sympathize with individuals who lost their jobs through the recent government layoffs.

5) Maybe we just didn’t really have anyone free to manage them right then. Maybe they worked best remotely, but our company communicated in-person. Maybe they wanted to work on a particular project, and it just wasn’t what the company needed.

— SBF (@SBF_FTX) February 25, 2025

According to multiple reports, the department led by Elon Musk, the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), and U.S. President Donald Trump have eliminated 95,000 jobs, with a second wave of job cuts expected to be announced.

Commenting on this, SBF highlighted that being unemployed could be “quite frustrating”. According to him, his email, for instance, has remained unchecked for the past few 100 days. He also stated to have a lot of sympathy for government employees.

SBF Speaks About the US Job Cuts

Shedding more light on the recent job cuts, SBF explained that employees mostly get affected by the inability of the company or department to provide enough resources for proper management. Per his observation, this is basically caused by internal politics, which in most cases is not the fault of the employees.

We saw it internally when a manager would get busy or distracted, and half of a department would lose its bearing at the same time. It isn’t their fault if internal politics lead their department to lose its way. But there’s no point in keeping them around, doing nothing.

On the other side, SBF argued that there had been a problem of over-hiring.

Speaking on a similar occurrence in a competitor platform, he disclosed that this company hired several individuals who sat around doing nothing.

This happens, now and then. We saw it at competitors that hired 30,000 too many employees and then had no idea what to do with them—so entire teams just sat around doing nothing all day. And we saw it internally, when a manager would get busy or distracted, and half of a department would lose its bearing at the same time.

Following the recent appearance of SBF on X, the FTX token (FTT) surged by 29% to move from $1.60 to $2.07. However, this was short-lived as the asset took a sharp nosedive to $1.69 at press time. Currently, FTT has declined by 18% in the last seven days. In December, an analyst predicted that this asset would surge by 400%, as highlighted in our previous article.