Hillsborough native Sam Bankman-Fried, once the head of a cryptocurrency empire worth over $30 billion, has been sentenced to 25 years in prison for fraud Thursday.
Last year, a New York jury found Bankman-Fried guilty of fraud related to his handling of customer funds at FTX, the cryptocurrency exchange he founded and once helmed. He was found to have used customer money to paper over failed bets at FTX's sister company hedge fund Alameda Research.
Federal judge Lewis Kaplan said the sentencing was based on Bankman-Fried's "brazenness," "exceptional flexibility with the truth" and "apparent lack of any remorse."
Prosecutors of the case were looking for around 40-50 years, calling it one of the greatest financial frauds in U.S. history, while the defense team were pleading for less than 6.5 years.
In a last statement to the judge directly ahead of sentencing, Bankman-Fried's lawyer Marc Mukasey asked the judge to consider his client's more admirable virtues.
"He's an awkward math nerd," Mukasey said. "He's into veganism. He has an off the chart intellect. He is a beautiful puzzle. He can parse words better than a Talmudic scholar. He was a billionaire unconcerned about material possessions."
While Bankman-Fried ran his crypto empire out of the Bahamas at the time it collapsed, he started Alameda Research and FTX in Berkeley. The son of two Stanford professors, he has deep roots in the Bay Area, and with his sentencing now ranks among its greatest business hucksters, following in the footsteps of Theranos CEO Elizabeth Holmes, who began her 11 year sentence last year.
During the heyday of Bankman-Fried's power and influence, Bay Area institutions were not shy about accepting money from the crypto king pin, and just ahead of FTX's collapse its ads featuring a blown up picture of its CEO's face blanketed downtown San Francisco.
After the collapse of the exchange, the University of Berkeley had to publicly back out of a naming rights deal for its football stadium with FTX, while the Warriors and Steph Curry were served a lawsuit for promoting FTX. Stanford University said it would return a $5.5 million gift given by Bankman-Fried's parents.
