We Don't Talk About Sam

FTX was wining and dining its way to becoming a player in the futures industry. It made for an awkward convention

Everywhere you looked, there it was, the ghostly outline of three letters: FTX. The Futures Industry Association conference in Chicago this month was supposed to be another celebration for the golden boy of markets, Sam Bankman-Fried. At a previous FIA confab in March in Boca Raton, Florida, his FTX crypto exchange flexed its platinum status by hosting a late-night cocktail party by the beach, holding a fireside chat with former baseball star Alex Rodriguez and handing out branded swag from its tricked-out megabooth in the exhibition hall. Bankman-Fried brought pizazz to an industry that lacks fleets of Lamborghinis and is filled with job descriptions such as “exchange operator” and “risk manager” and “commodities regulator.”

Now it’s strikingly obvious that FTX ran its business quite differently from everyone else in the room. In the days before the Chicago conference began, FTX collapsed when it was revealed that it owed its customers billions of dollars more than it could pay. Conference staff papered over the FTX name on banners in the lobby. But they couldn’t fully erase the fact that many sophisticated finance pros were duped by BankmanFried’s wacky charm and lavish spending. 

“There are a few people in the industry that need to think hard about how someone can appear from nowhere and become the primary sponsor when others have been around for 20-plus years,” says Keith Todd, chief executive officer of Trading Technologies, a futures trading platform. “This is a wake-up call. The adults need to run this industry. We need innovators but also adults.”