[imagesource: YouTube / NBC News]

The past seven days have been total and utter carnage in the crypto world.

At the centre of it all is crypto exchange FTX and its now former CEO, Sam Bankman-Fried, or SBF as he has long been known.

Once dubbed ‘crypto’s white knight’, SBF’s world and his personal net worth have come crashing down in the most dramatic fashion.

SBF resigned over the weekend as FTX declared bankruptcy and customers grappled with the possibility they’ll never get their money back.

In the midst of this public unravelling, a number of billionaires have laid into the former billionaire, including Elon Musk and Mark Cuban.

The latter said FTX had “somebody running a company that’s just dumb as f*** greedy” and Musk was also unforgiving, reports Fortune:

Musk appeared to ghost an offer of up to $15 billion from Bankman-Fried’s adviser while he was seeking partners for his $44 billion takeover of Twitter. Musk seemed to doubt Bankman-Fried’s financial standing at the time…

“To be honest, I’d never heard of him. But then I got a ton of people telling me [that] he’s got, you know, huge amounts of money that he wants to invest in the Twitter deal. And I talked to him for about half an hour. And I know my bullshit meter was redlining. It was like, this dude is bullshit—that was my impression.”

Right on the money, pal.

Musk went on:

“Then I was like, man, everyone including major investment banks— everyone was talking about him like he’s walking on water and has a zillion dollars. And that [was] not my impression…that dude is just—there’s something wrong, and he does not have capital, and he will not come through. That was my prediction.”

Sadly for those who invested huge sums of money in buying crypto on FTX, they don’t have billions to fall back on.

It’s been widely reported that at least $1 billion of customer funds are missing from FTX, according to reporting by Reuters. In addition, SBF “covertly transferred $10 billion of customer funds from FTX to his own trading company Alameda Research”.

The Daily Beast with more on that front:

On Saturday morning, disgraced cryptocurrency poster boy Bankman-Fried said he is in the Bahamas, where FTX is based, according to Reuters. He denied rumors on Twitter that he had flown to South America following the spectacular collapse of his crypto exchange FTX.

He also denied the outlet’s “characterization” of the $10 billion transaction. “We didn’t secretly transfer,” he wrote via text message, “We had confusing internal labeling and misread it.”

On Twitter, I guess it’s all about being cryptic these days:

2) H

— SBF (@SBF_FTX) November 14, 2022

Wow, thanks for clearing everything up.

SBF’s entire $16 billion fortune has now been wiped out, with Bloomberg calling it “one of history’s greatest-ever destructions of wealth”.

At least his name will forever be etched into the record books.

[sources:fortune&dbeast]