The interview has been edited and condensed.
David Rubenstein: When tech stocks and cryptocurrencies began to decline in May, did you get nervous?
Sam Bankman-Fried: Not super nervous. It was definitely going to be a rocky road for the industry, and you saw some businesses blow up when Bitcoin hit $20,000. If we saw things melt down much further than they did, if we saw NASDAQ drop 30%, 40% from here and Bitcoin go down to $10,000 per token, I think you would see another round of pain for the industry that would potentially be more of a medium- to long-term problem.
When this was going on, did you calculate your net worth every hour going down?
I tried not to. So if you just pretend that nothing has moved, then you can wish away all the problems.
You were called the J.P. Morgan of crypto after bailing out companies. Does that bother you?
It doesn't bother me too much. I think it’s something I thought was the right thing for the industry. And, you know, our very explicit mandate that we sort of gave to the team of people working on this was, “Your goal is not to make a fortune for us doing this.”
Like, “Your goal is to do OK deals. Your goal is for us to not get our faces ripped off.” But contingent on that, you know, do as much as we can to bail out the industry, and the higher goal was trying to backstop places rather than maximizing on these deals. I would’ve loved other people to do it. I think it would’ve been great.
Were those investments profitable?
Mixed is basically the answer. I think some were going to turn out to be profitable, some won’t be. I mean, with Voyager, I think there’s $70 million there that we put in that I’m not sure we’re ever seeing again.