- Sam Bankman-Fried addressed his breakup with Caroline Ellison on the witness stand Friday.
- He said he was too busy for a long-term relationship, which he was historically bad at.
- He was also too busy for haircuts, he testified under oath.
On the witness stand in his criminal trial Friday, Sam Bankman-Fried testified he was too busy running companies worth billions of dollars to get deeply involved in women and haircuts.
Bankman-Fried previously ran both FTX, a cryptocurrency exchange, and Alameda Research, a crypto hedge fund. Federal prosecutors in Manhattan, where the trial is being held, allege Bankman-Fried ran the companies in a way that defrauded customers and investors by comingling funds, ultimately in a way where Bankman-Fried took customer money to enrich himself.
One of their witnesses in the trial is Caroline Ellison, who ran Alameda as a CEO starting in mid-2021. She and Bankman-Fried met while working at Jane Street, a trading firm, before he founded Alameda.
The two had also dated, on and off, starting in 2020, and ending in the spring of 2022. The relationship has become a melodramatic subplot in Bankman-Fried’s downfall. Ellison, a cooperating witness in the trial, earlier pleaded guilty to conspiring with him and other members of his inner circle to steal FTX customer money.
Under oath on Friday, Bankman-Fried said he broke things off because he didn’t have the time for a serious relationship, saying he was “historically bad” at long-term ones.
“I didn’t have the time or energy to put into what she wanted in the relationship,” he said. “It was not the first time I had that problem.”
That explanation is consistent with what Ellison herself said on the witness stand in earlier testimony.
“There was a feeling that I wanted more in our relationship,” she told jurors. “But I felt like he was distant or not paying enough attention to me.”
When Bankman-Fried was running both FTX and Alameda, he worked between 12 and 22 hours per day, he said. That meant little time for haircuts. Ellison previously testified that Bankman-Fried let his mane grow wild as part of his “image” and struggled to recognize him in court, where his curls are more closely cropped.
On Friday, his attorney Mark Cohen asked why he didn’t get haircuts more often.
“I was kind of busy and lazy and didn’t get haircuts for long periods of time,” Bankman-Fried answered, sheepishly.
Cohen also asked why Bankman-Fried often went to meetings and conferences wearing a T-shirt and shorts.
“I found them comfortable,” he said.
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