KEY POINTS
- Brett Harrison said he taught Bankman-Fried programming at Jane Street
- In one of his interviews last year, Bankman-Fried claimed he “doesn’t know how to code”
- The former crypto tycoon’s sentencing is scheduled for April 2024 after a jury found him guilty of all seven criminal fraud charges
Former FTX US President Brett Harrison has come out of the woodwork to shed light on some of the statements Sam Bankman-Fried said in court and debunked one of his former student’s “many lies.”
Bankman-Fried was found guilty of seven counts of criminal fraud earlier this month in a highly publicized trial where his former colleagues and inner circle testified against him.
As the crypto mogul, who was once one of the most influential names in the cryptocurrency space and had a net worth of billions of dollars, awaits his sentencing scheduled for April 2024, his former colleague and mentor destroyed one of his narratives and claimed the now-convicted executive, is once again, spewing lies, particularly in the part where he said he doesn’t even know how to code.
“I knew Sam from Jane Street,” Brett Harrison, who was FTX.US president until September 2022, said in an interview. Harrison is now the founder and CEO of institutional-grade crypto trading platform Architect
Harrison shared that he used to teach new students at Jane Street how to program and disclosed that Bankman-Fried and Caroline Ellison, the former CEO of the now-defunct and controversial crypto hedge fund Alameda Research, were his students.
“Sam was one of my programming students at Jane Street, Caroline too,” he said, adding that he didn’t interact as much with Elisson in the class but had worked with Bankman-Fried a lot of times.
“That was completely false, one of his many lies,” Harrison said about Bankman-Fried’s claim that he “couldn’t code.”
Bankman-Fried did a series of lengthy telephone interviews with crypto content creator Tiffany Fong following the spectacular collapse of his crypto empire.
On a Nov. 6, 2022 interview, a few days before Bankman-Fried resigned from his post and filed for bankruptcy, the then-FTX CEO claimed he doesn’t know how to code as he was asked about the controversial “backdoor” that reportedly allowed him to “to execute commands that could alter the [FTX] company’s financial records without alerting others.”
While Bankman-Fried appeared surprised at the question, he said, “And this is something I would be doing? That I can tell you is definitely not true. I don’t even know how to code. […] I literally never even opened the code for any of FTX.”
Aside from debunking one of the “many lies” of Bankman-Fried, Harrison also noted that there were several “sound and promising businesses” being built prior to FTX’s bankruptcy but “Sam destroyed it all.”
Following the end of his trial, Natalie Tien, who worked as Bankman-Fried’s assistant and served as FTX’s head of PR and marketing for about two-and-a-half years, expressed her sadness at witnessing her former boss potentially facing a life sentence and said the crypto mogul is just “misunderstood” as he “wasn’t in it to amass a fortune.”
