Sam Bankman-Fried, founder of the collapsed FTX, said he regretted his decision to file for bankruptcy and criticized regulators in an interview published by Vox.
Bankman- Fried later on Twitter said that the basis of the interview, an exchange of messages on the same platform, was not supposed to be public.
The company, which filed for bankruptcy last week, has appointed five new independent directors at each of its main affiliated companies, including Alameda research. The bankruptcy process is being navigated by the five new directors and newly appointed Chief Executive John J. Ray.
In the interview, Bankman- Fried said that those who are in charge of FTX's Chapter 11 bankruptcy process were trying to burn it to the ground out of shame, and he had two weeks in which to raise $8 billion and save the company.
He said that it's basically all that matters, raising the money for the rest of my life.
His single biggest mistake had been Chapter 11. If I hadn't done that, withdrawals would be opening up in a month with customers fully whole. He said that regulators make everything worse. He said they don't protect customers at all.
In a statement released on Twitter, Ray said Bankman- Fried had no ongoing role in FTX, FTX US or Alameda Research and did not speak on their behalf.
FTX is in contact with dozens of global regulators, including the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission.
After Vox published the interview, Bankman-Fried said that he had said that some of what he had said had been thoughtless or overly strong and that he was venting about something that was not intended to be public.
It's really hard to be a regulator. He wrote on Twitter that they have an impossible job: to regulate entire industries that grow faster than their mandate allows them to, and that the message exchange with Vox's reporter was not intended to be public. A Vox spokeswoman said all communication with Vox reporters was on-the- record unless the subject and reporter had agreed otherwise.
He made no objections in his reply before he was published. Bankman- Fried didn't respond immediately to a request for further comment from Reuters.