Sam Bankman-Fried has been auditioning for a presidential pardon for months, complimenting President Donald Trump on X and granting a jailhouse interview to Tucker Carlson, then a Trump ally. Now he has formally applied for a pardon, according to a Justice Department database.
The effort is seen as a long shot; Trump told The New York Times last year that he wouldn’t pardon the dethroned crypto king, who was sentenced to 25 years in prison. But Trump has pardoned a number of white-collar criminals, including several who have explicitly sought his favor or donated to his causes.
If Bankman-Fried hadn’t been convicted, he might be enjoying a victory lap as one of the savviest investors of the AI moment. FTX’s grab-bag of stakes included shares in Anthropic, SpaceX, Robinhood, and Cursor.AI — the latter of which was sold by FTX’s bankruptcy trustee for its original investment value of $200,000 in 2023 and would be worth billions of dollars today.
“We were not a long-term hedge fund,” that trustee, John Ray III, said at Semafor World Economy in April. “We were a company that had hundreds of thousands of creditors worldwide.”
The pardon petition was earlier reported by Bloomberg.