“Sam, this is an excellent choice and I sincerely hope you sign this tonight,” Mr. Dexter in an email on the evening of November 10. progress.”
A deluge of emails followed. In a message at 3:38 a.m. on Nov. 11, Mr. Miller asked for an update on Mr. Bankman-Fried’s decision. “I’m chatting with Sam,” replied Ken Ziman, a lawyer at the Paul Weiss firm representing Mr. Bankman-Fried.
Ten minutes later, Mr. Ziman confirmed that Mr. Bankman-Fried had signed the document, authorizing Mr. Ray to acquire FTX. The company filed for bankruptcy a few hours later.
The filing was hardly the end of the chaos. The court filing listed more than 130 corporate entities associated with FTX, including the U.S. arm and Alameda, the hedge fund. But the filing was inaccurate: some entities were not owned by the exchange. They belonged to AZA Finance, a separate company that had recently partnered with FTX to promote crypto in Africa.
ftx later recognized the mistake. But in a Nov. 11 Slack message to Mr. Miller and other officials, Elizabeth Rossiello, the CEO of AZA Finance, called the failures in filing the bankruptcy “a storm of wild irresponsibility”.
“This hurts 9 years of work we’ve done to create this platform!!” she wrote.
Mr. Miller reacted defensively. “We had no co-operation from the founders in preparation this week,” he said. “It was unfortunate.”
Mr. Bankman-Fried was also frustrated. Despite relinquishing control of FTX, he continued to reach out to potential investors about new funding for the exchange. In a letter to former colleagues last week, he said he regretted the bankruptcy, claiming that “potential interest in billions of dollars in funding came in about eight minutes after I signed the Chapter 11 filings.”
He presented no evidence for that claim, and either way, FTX was no longer his business to run. On the morning of November 11, Mr. Miller quickly made that clear and asked for information about the company’s longtime leadership to be removed from its website.
