Private Jets, Political Cash Among $1B in Sam Bankman-Fried’s Forfeited Assets: Court

A federal court has outlined just how extensive Sam Bankman-Fried’s assets were before the young CEO of FTX was tried and imprisoned for fraud, and the government swooped in to seize roughly $1 billion in financial assets and two aircraft.

The final order of forfeiture issued on Tuesday by the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York formally severed Bankman-Fried’s ownership stake in a property list dozens of pages long. The court document revealed the wide swath of assets the one-time billionaire claimed ownership in, including extensive crypto holdings of Alameda Research, the trading firm SBF co-founded.

From the many pages of cryptocurrencies, Alameda’s assets at Binance included $56 million in Ripple-connected token (XRP), $3.6 million of Tron’s (TRX), $3.4 million of Cardano (ADA), $2.3 million in bitcoin (BTC) and dozens of others, according to the accounting.

The weightiest holding detailed among the assets were the proceeds from the sale of Robinhood stock — $606 million held by Bankman-Fried’s Emergent Fidelity Technologies.

Other financial assets included:

• $119 million in Tether (USDT) held at Binance for Alameda Research
• $21 million at Marex held for Emergent Fidelity Technologies
• $50 million at Moonstone Bank for FTX Digital Markets
• $101 million at Silvergate for FTX Digital Markets
• $7 million at Flagstar Bank for SBF and another individual

The accounting of forfeited assets also included two private jets: a 2009 Bombardier Global 5000 and a 2006 Embraer Legacy.

The court document also detailed an extensive list of more than 250 political donations that had been pulled back from the campaigns and the organizations that received them, including amounts that other FTX executives allegedly gave under SBF’s direction. At one point, one in three members of Congress during the last session were recipients of money from Bankman-Fried or other FTX executives, and they gave to an extensive array of state political organizations, too.

Also on Tuesday, the first payouts began in the bankruptcy of FTX, with $1.2 billion going out to those who were owed relatively small amounts. They were set to recover about 119% of what they’d initially had in their accounts during the 2022 collapse, missing out on the huge upswing in crypto markets since then.