The jury in the Sam Bankman-Fried’s jury today was shown an image with singer Katy Perry, and Orlando Bloom at the 2022 NFL Super Bowl.
Sam “SBF” Bankman-Fried spent billions in sponsorship and endorsement deals just before FTX collapsed.
One of his inner circle and lieutenant, Nishad Singh, confirms that there were rooftop meetings where he saw the executives panic as crimes were being committed.
SBF jury shown pictures
The jury in the Sam Bankman-Fried’s jury today was shown an image with singer Katy Perry, and Orlando Bloom at the 2022 NFL Super Bowl.
Nishad Singh, who was FTX head of engineering, pleaded guilty to fraud and campaign finance violations after the exchange collapsed in November 2022. Singh took the stand today to give testimony about the events that led to eventual implosion.
Singh testified that he was aware that the company was redirecting customers’ funds to SBF’s pet projects like spending on celebrity endorsement deals, excessive spending on real estate, and venture capital investments.
“I defrauded customers, investors,” said Nishad Singh, who first met Bankman-Fried while he was in high school.
Following a text conversation he had with Gary Wang, a co-founder of FTX, and Caroline Ellison, who oversaw Alameda, in June 2022, Singh claimed he requested a meeting. The group discussed the significant public relations implications to FTX if Alameda’s financial issues became known in a Signal chatroom named #organization. Singh claimed that Wang told him during that conversation that Alameda was borrowing $13B from FTX.
Singh stated in his testimony that up to that point, he believed FTX’s assets to be larger than its liabilities. Singh claimed that he and Bankman-Fried met on the lush rooftop deck of the Orchid, a private building in the Bahamas where the FTX and Alameda crew had an apartment measuring 11,500 square feet, to talk about the situation.
Read more: Sam Bankman-Fried may testify, but he needs more Adderall
Lot of celebrities
Singh took the jury through a spreadsheet showing the sponsorship agreements that FTX had made, including the one to rename the professional basketball arena in Miami as well as other agreements with sports leagues, actors, and athletes. Eight months before the exchange crashed, in March 2022, the total obligations had reached $1.13B.
They included $150M for Major League Baseball, $205M for the naming rights to the Miami Heat NBA basketball team’s arena, and $10M for Seinfeld co-creator Larry David to appear in a Super Bowl commercial.
FTX had on its roster celebrities like Tom Brady, Gisele Bundchen, Shaquille O’Neal, and Steph Curry.
Behind the scenes, the company also included some of the biggest names in talent management and agents as stockholders, including IMG, the talent company run by sports agent Jeff Austin and Hollywood super agent Ari Emmanuel.
Bloom and Perry attended a four-day crypto conference that Bankman-Fried organized in the Bahamas in April 2022. In February of last year, Perry also joked on Instagram that she was “quitting music and becoming an intern for FTX.”
According to Singh, Bankman-Fried was “ultimately” in command of Alameda. He noted that SBF ran the structure that allowed FTX and Alameda to move money and account for the money that each entity had on hand. He claimed that his boss occasionally stored Alameda’s transfers on one of the six monitors he used while he was the CEO of FTX.
“My understanding was in the end Bankman-Fried held a lot of the final say,” Singh said.
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