Sam Bankman-Fried posts on X first time in two years; FTT token soars 30%

Sam Bankman-Fried made his comeback today on social media platform X, making his first public post since January 2023. Last time Bankman-Fried posted on the platform, X had yet to be rebranded from Twitter.

Following Bankman-Fried's social media comeback, the FTT token — FTX’s exchange token — briefly surged over 29% from $1.60 to $2.07, according to data from CoinGecko. The token's price has since come back down to $1.77.

At 8:53 p.m. ET time on Monday, the FTX co-founder published a thread of 10 posts where he appeared to relay his thoughts on the recent government layoffs by the Trump administration.

“I have a lot of sympathy for gov’t employees: I, too, have not checked my email for the past few (hundred) days,” Bankman-Fried wrote. “And I can confirm that being unemployed is a lot less relaxing than it looks.”

U.S. President Donald Trump and the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), led by Elon Musk, have carried out mass layoffs across various government departments. Around 95,000 jobs have been eliminated recently, with potential for a second wave of job cuts, according to Reuters.

Bankman-Fried wrote that more often than not, employees are fired due to problems with the company or department not having the resources to manage them properly.

“We saw it internally, when a manager would get busy or distracted, and half of a department would lose its bearing at the same time,” Bankman-Fried said. “It isn’t their fault if internal politics lead their department to lose its way. But there’s no point in keeping them around, doing nothing.”

The former leader of collapsed FTX is currently serving a 25-year sentence after a jury found him guilty of defrauding billions of dollars from investors in what has been described as "one of the biggest financial frauds in U.S. history."

The 32-year-old Bankman-Fried has been vying for a pardon from the pro-crypto president Trump, who had recently pardoned Silk Road creator Ross Ulbricht. Bankman-Fried is also appealing his case, arguing that it should be declared a mistrial.

In an interview with the New York Sun, Bankman-Fried said his case had been affected by the "prosecutorial overreach" seen during the Biden administration, and expressed his disappointments with the previous administration and the Democratic Party. Bankman-Fried was one of the largest donors to the Biden campaign in 2020 against Trump.  

However, decentralized prediction markets platform Polymarket currently indicates a 3% chance that Bankman-Fried would be pardoned by Trump during his first 100 days in office.