Disgraced crypto boss Sam Bankman-Fried has broken his two-year silence on X to share his “sympathy” with laid-off federal employees and recipients of Elon Musk’s emails asking for their weekly accomplishments or risk termination.
Bankman-Fried, who is 11 months into his 25-year prison sentence for his role in the 2022 collapse of the defunct FTX cryptocurrency exchange which he founded and stole billions ahead of its failure, took to the social media platform on Monday evening for the first time in more than two years.
In a 10-part thread, the 32-year-old convicted fraudster seemingly referenced the Musk-lead Department of Government Efficiency’s push to have federal employees email their work activities from the past week or risk being fired in the wake of the Trump administration’s sweeping departmental cuts as he addressed Elon Musk’s.
“I have a lot of sympathy for gov’t employees: I, too, have not checked my email for the past few (hundred)days,” he tweeted from the Metropolitan Detention Center in Brooklyn. “And I can confirm that being unemployed is a lot less relaxing than it looks.”
He continued: “Firing people is one of the hardest things to do in the world. It sucks for everyone involved. My experience: a) it is usually not the employee’s fault that they got fired b) it is usually correct to let them go anyway.”
In a more generic address about staff lay-offs, Bankman-Fried continued to place the onus on the employer rather than the employees themselves as he detailed circumstances that may relate to staff dismissals.
“It isn’t the employee’s fault, when that happens. It isn’t their fault if their employer doesn’t really know what to do with them, or doesn’t really have anyone to effectively manage them,” he continued. “It isn’t their fault if internal politics lead their department to lose its way.”
He concluded: “But there’s no point in keeping them around, doing nothing.”
It was not immediately clear if Bankman-Fried was posting on X directly, or whether someone was tweeting on his behalf.
After Bankman-Fried’s posts, the FTT, a token associated with FTX, briefly spiked.
Tasked by President Donald Trump with slashing bureaucracy and federal spending through his Department of Government Efficiency, Musk wrote on his X platform Friday that all government staff would receive an email requesting specifics of what they had achieved last week.
Musk took to X on Monday morning and hinted that the emails were simply a ruse to ensure federal employees “had a pulse” and were “capable of responding”.
After initially setting a deadline for 11:59 p.m. on Monday, the tech billionaire gave federal workers a second opportunity to respond to his correspondence at Trump’s “discretion”.
“Subject to the discretion of the president, they will be given another chance,” he tweeted late Monday. “Failure to respond a second time will result in termination.”
Senior officials worked over the weekend to provide employees guidance on how they should proceed, after a growing number of agency heads, including the freshly confirmed FBI Director Kash Patel, urged employees to “pause responses.”
Musk’s latest message appears to contradict recent guidance from the Office of Personnel Management, which told agency leaders Monday afternoon that employee response to the initial email was not mandatory.
It added that failure to reply would not be considered a resignation.
