Sam Bankman-Fried says 2 top execs have left FTX, with one 'scared' and another 'ashamed and guilty'
(Photo by Jabin Botsford/The Washington Post via Getty Images)
- FTX cofounder Sam Bankman-Fried said two top executives have left the collapsed crypto exchange.
- CTO Gary Wang and director of engineering Nishad Singh are no longer at FTX, he told Vox.
- Singh was "ashamed and guilty" because FTX customers' deposits were lost, Bankman-Fried said.
FTX cofounder Sam Bankman-Fried said Tuesday night that two top execs have left the collapsed crypto exchange.
The disgraced tech mogul, who resigned as the company's CEO on Friday, told Vox's Kelsey Piper that both cofounder and chief technology officer Gary Wang and director of engineering Nishad Singh were no longer at FTX. Bankman-Fried didn't explicitly say whether the two execs had quit, though his comments implied it.
He told Piper that the company could be saved if "EITHER Gary or Nishad comes back" or it wins a jurisdictional battle against the state of Delaware.
When asked to clarify whether they were both gone, Bankman-Fried said that Wang was "scared" and Singh was "ashamed and guilty" because FTX customers' deposits had been lost.
FTX and Bankman-Fried did not immediately respond to requests for comment from Insider.
Bankman-Fried said that Singh put a bigger focus on behaving ethically than he did. He said that the company's collapse "hit all of us hard, but it hit him HARD."
Wang and Bankman-Fried founded FTX in 2019. The Block reported that, while Bankman-Fried was the face of the company, Wang worked quietly in the background and rarely visited the its office in the Bahamas.
"Everyone else always had to be in the office but Gary always had the exception," a person familiar with FTX's operations told The Block. "Gary always struck me as someone who was like, 'just tell me what to do and leave me alone.'"
Despite this, he lived with Bankman-Fried, Singh, and other FTX employees, CoinDesk reported.
As of March, Wang, who had previously worked at Google, was the world's 431st-richest person with a fortune of $5.9 billion, though he has since fallen to 647th-richest with $4.2 billion, according to estimates by Forbes.
FTX's rise suddenly came to a halt in early November, when a bombshell CoinDesk report revealed that most of the assets of Alameda Research, a trading firm set up by Bankman-Fried, were tied up in FTX's in-house token, FTT.
Just days later, FTX rival Binance announced that it would sell its FTT holdings, worth around $530 million. Other traders scrambled to withdraw their own holdings from FTX, with around $6 billion of withdrawals over just three days, according to Bankman-Fried.
Binance went back on a deal to bail FTX out. FTX, Alameda Research, and roughly 130 affiliated companies have begun Chapter 11 bankruptcy proceedings.
As well as Wang and Singh, other workers have been scrambling to leave FTX, too. People familiar with the matter told The Wall Street Journal that dozens of employees quit last week, including its head of product and chief regulatory officer. One worker told The Journal that when he sent his resignation to his boss, the boss said that had already resigned himself.
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