Sam Bankman-Fried addresses Musk email to federal employees as he breaks his silence on X after two years
Former FTX CEO tweeted for the first time in more than two years to address the Trump administration’s sweeping departmental cuts
Disgraced crypto boss Sam Bankman-Fried broke his two-year-long silence on X to share his “sympathy” with laid-off federal employees and recipients of Elon Musk’s emails asking for their weekly accomplishments.
Bankman-Fried, who is almost 11 months into his 25-year prison sentence for his role in the sensational 2022 collapse of the defunct FTX cryptocurrency exchange, was recently reported to be sharing a jail cell in Brooklyn with disgraced music mogul Diddy.
In a 10-part thread, the 32-year-old convicted fraudster 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.
It was not immediately clear if Bankman-Fried was posting on X directly, or whether someone was tweeting on his behalf.
“I have a lot of sympathy for gov’t employees: I, too, have not checked my email for the past few (hundred) days,” his account tweeted with Bankman-Fried locked up inside the Metropolitan Detention Center in Brooklyn. “And I can confirm that being unemployed is a lot less relaxing than it looks.”
It 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’s X account continued to place the onus on employers rather than employees 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,” another post read. “It isn’t their fault if internal politics lead their department to lose its way.”
The thread concluded: “But there’s no point in keeping them around, doing nothing.”
Within an hour of Bankman-Fried’s posts, the FTT, a token associated with FTX, briefly spiked from lows of $1.552 to $2.117.
Last week, the crypto tycoon admitted he has grown more sympathetic to Musk’s “chainsaw” approach toward reform, he told the New York Sun from inside prison.
Bankman-Fried also echoed President Donald Trump's criticism of the “politicization” of the Department of Justice and said that his case was touched by the same “prosecutorial abuse.”
Tasked by Trump with slashing bureaucracy and federal spending through DOGE, Musk wrote on his X platform Friday that all government staff would receive an email requesting specifics of what they had achieved last week.
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.”
Earlier Monday, Musk hinted that the emails were simply a ruse to ensure federal employees “had a pulse” and were “capable of responding,” he wrote on X.
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 optional.
The OPM added that failure to reply would not be considered a resignation.