Andrew Ross Sorkin’s Interview of Disgraced Sam Bankman-Fried Was Journalism Masterclass

CNBC anchor Andrew Ross Sorkin conducted a journalism masterclass this week, grilling disgraced FTX co-founder Sam Bankman-Fried during The New York Times’ DealBook Summit.

Sorkin opened by providing “the generous view” that SBF is young and “made a series of terrible, terrible, very, very bad decisions” and “the less generous view” that the 30-year-old “committed a massive fraud, that this is a Ponzi scheme, a manipulation of the system.” This might seem mundane, but in today’s hyper-ideological and hyper-partisan media ecosystem, usually just one viewpoint is given. Sorkin did anything but, providing an array of reactions while being unafraid of confrontation.

In accordance with the journalistic principle of conveying issues in a way everyday people can understand, as opposed to providing what Sorkin called “an abstraction” in giving the numbers behind the FTX/Alameda Research crash, Sorkin quoted one of the many angry, damning emails from an investor who lost millions in the crash.

The investor, Andrew, wrote to Sorkin: “Can you please ask SBF why he decided to steal my life savings and the $10 billion more from customers to give to his hedge fund, Alameda. Can you ask him why his hedge fund was leveraging long all of these sh*tcoins. Please ask him if he thinks what happened was fraud.”

“What do you tell this man?” Sorkin asked.

Sorkin grilled SBF about contradictory and inconsistent statements such as SBF telling Bloomberg in August there was no connection between FTX and Alameda Research, which SBF also co-founded. For example, Sorkin asked about the connection between Alameda and FTX and noted that Alameda employees, including disgraced former CEO Caroline Ellison, were living in the penthouse with SBF.

“I know the people from Alameda decently well — almost as if you don’t know what’s happening there — “and there isn’t like a large amount, you know, of ways that we are actively working together. Anything like that, Alameda is a wholly separate entity. They are different offices, like different principal offices, we don’t have any shared personnel. We are also not the same company. We not all are under the same corporate umbrella or anything like that.” And yet, it seems like Alameda people were living in the same penthouse where you may very well be right now, all together.

Another example was Sorkin pressing SBF about the co-mingling of funds between FTX and Alameda. SBF even admitted that “FTX and Alameda were very connected in a number of ways.”

“When you scroll back to 2019, Alameda and FTX were very connected in a number of ways,” he said. “One of these was that Alameda was the primary liquidity provider on FTX, it was 40-something percent of volume. It was the backstop liquidity provider. You scroll forward to 2022, it was down to 2 percent of volume.”

Another was Sorkin pressing SBF on U.S. investors using Alameda to put money into FTX, thereby disregarding the know-your-customer rule, which is related to financial ethics such as not money laundering.

Sorkin held SBF’s feet to the fire with no question being off-limits. The interview was pure hardball, nothing fawning whatsoever like the Forbes and other magazine covers SBF was on. If the press acted like Sorkin when it comes to holding those with influence and power, faith in not only the media, but institutions overall, would be higher.

Job well done, Sorkin.

You can watch the interview here.

This is an opinion piece. The views expressed in this article are those of just the author.