At the beginning of the week, Mr Bankman-Fried was still worth almost $16 billion. (FILE)
Days after FTX exchange filed for bankruptcy, company founder Sam Bankman-Fried addressed his followers in a series of tweets.
Hoping that things can find a way to recover, Mr Bankman-Fried wrote, “ I'm really sorry, again, that we ended up here. Hopefully, things can find a way to recover. Hopefully, this can bring some amount of transparency, trust, and governance to them. Ultimately hopefully it can be better for customers.”
He added that the current situation doesn't indicate that the company has come to an end. “This doesn't necessarily have to mean the end for the companies or their ability to provide value and funds to their customers chiefly, and can be consistent with other routes.”
On how he is planning to provide clarity, he added, “I'm going to work on giving clarity on where things are in terms of user recovery ASAP.”
Expressing his shock at how things have unravelled, he added, “I'm piecing together all of the details, but I was shocked to see things unravel the way they did earlier this week.”
At the time of announcing his filing for Chapter 11 bankruptcy, FTX, in its statement, said that their Mr Bankman-Fried has stepped down from his position as that chief executive officer. John J. Ray III will succeed him.
He added, "The full story here is one I'm still fleshing out every detail of, but at a very high level, I fu***d up twice. The first time, poor internal labelling of bank-related accounts meant that I was substantially off on my sense of users' margin. I thought it was way lower."
Apologising to everyone for not providing updates, Mr Bankman-Fried added, "And so I was off twice. Which tells me a lot of things, both specifically and generally, that I was shit at. And a third time, in not communicating enough. I should have said more. I'm sorry--I was slammed with things to do and didn't give updates to you all."
At the beginning of the week, Mr Bankman-Fried was still worth almost $16 billion. The massive wipe-off is considered one of history's greatest-ever destructions of wealth.