Sam Bankman-Fried house arrest: Following extradition from the Bahamas to the US in late-December, Sam Bankman-Fried, the founder of bankrupt crypto exchange FTX, is now staying with his parents in their five-bedroom US$4 million bungalow in Palo Alto, California. He’ll be chilling there until his trial on October 2 this year where he’s going to have a whole lot of free time. So with this in mind, we tried to imagine what Sam Bankman-Fried’s daily routine might look over the next nine months.
For those of you who aren’t aware: Sam Bankman-Fried, who also goes by the acronym ‘SBF’ was released on a US$250 million bond from federal custody. Under the terms of his bond deal, SBF has been subject to a number of constraints, including the surrender of his passport and inability to travel, permanent custody at home with a few minor exceptions like court appearances, physical exercise, religious services and medical treatment.
Essentially, the dude is living scot-free until his court date in October.
Sam Bankman-Fried house arrest
So, how is everyone’s favourite curly-headed money burner spending his days? Other than posting the occasional tweet and penning some fresh articles for his newly-launched Substack, he’s basically got nada to do for the next 9 months.
To answer this curiosity, we rummaged through SBF’s 21,000 tweet archive and pieced together a fictional, albeit very plausible, daily routine for the disgraced founder in his parents’ modest Californian home.
8am: ‘gank’ noobs on League of Legends
“Gm to those that’ll never take work off”, SBF once remarked.
One of the clearest trends throughout his social history was that he enjoyed burning the midnight oil for late-night office work sessions. “If I sleep in the office, my mind stays in work mode, and I don’t have to reload everything the next day”, he said.
But eventually, he’d hit the sack – a beanbag to be more specific — while his chums continued to mill around in the office, SBF would be ‘ganking’ (a slang term for ‘gang killing’) noobs on a few run throughs of the wildly popular game League of Legends, or ‘LoL’ as its known by those of the more terminally-online persuasion.
In fact, SBF’s League of Legends skills once inspired investors at Venture Capital firm Sequoia Capital to invest even more in the now-defunct crypto exchange FTX.
I sit ten feet from him, and I walked over, thinking, ‘oh, shit, that was really good,’” FTX’s head of product, Ramnik Arora, told Sequoia for the firm’s glowing profile of Bankman-Fried. And it turns out that that f*cker was playing ‘League of Legends,’ through the entire meeting.
Sam Bankman-Fried house arrest: Deserving
The radiant piece on Bankman-Fried has since been replaced on Sequoia’s website with a more sombre post where they alerted investors to the fact that they had now marked down their US$214 million investment in FTX to $0.
The full nature and extent of this risk is not known at this time,” the current post reads.
While it’s rumoured that SBF and a number of key staff at FTX would routinely engage in activities of the ‘polyamorous’ variety, now that he’s back living in his parent’s house, such extravagant and debaucherous slumber parties would most likely be frowned upon, at the very least would be considered a little awkward.
So, let’s say he’s tucked up into bed by midnight and is now getting a solid eight hours.
9am: eat breakfast and take stimulants
SBF once advised “stimulants when you wake up”, as well as that “coffee is in pills now”, so let’s conclude that he’s dropping a few capsules of caffeine, Adderall and his favourite transdermal stimulant Emsam to start his day.
A combined dose of 200mg caffeine, 20mg of Adderall and 6mg of Emsam usually don’t fail to awaken the senses.
After going through the usual morning routine of taking a shower, getting dressed and blow drying his luscious locks, the next thing on his mind will likely be food, but chances are the stimulants might blunt the appetite a little.
SBF follows a strict vegan diet, so breakfast will likely consist of some form of health-focused cardboard-tasting cereal topped with a plant-based milk replacement of either coconut, soy or almond.
During his eight-day stint in Fox Hill Prison in the Bahamas, SBF was afforded “royal treatment” according to a New York Times report. The responsibility-dodging vegan shunned the typical sloppy dish of sardines and grits — a porridge created from oat substitute cornmeal topped with oily fish – in favour of crusty toast and fruity jam. So, maybe he’s continued his prison diet?
Alternatively, the Bankman-Fried breakfast table may end up resembling the scene from Breaking Bad where the White family sit around in silence while Walt stares in vague disgust at his cholesterol-friendly, veggie-bacon, pondering the series of events that led up to this moment.
10am: walk the dogs
Meet Wendy and Gopher, the four-legged FTX office mascots.
SBF often shared pics of them on Twitter, one time even joking that the team had tried to sack Gopher due to lack of work productivity, but that “every time we try to reassign him Wendy won’t stop barking.”
We’re not sure whether they’re actually SBF’s pooches, or indeed remain with him during house arrest, but for argument’s sake let’s say Wendy and Gopher are shacked up with the Bankman-Fried fam. What a treat!
12pm: check twitter, write blog posts & move funds in secret.
- Check Twitter and reply to some DMs (but definitely not the ones asking sticky questions around transparency of funds though).
- Draft a new Substack post and continue to deny all personal responsibility for any money lost in the collapse of FTX while remaining extremely vague about how customers can still be “made whole”.
- Use a VPN to secretly access the backdoor privileges once installed at FTX to move some tokens around in secret and then deny it when blockchain sleuths catch ‘someone’ shifting millions around between wallets that very few other people have access to.
2pm: lunch
While SBF says that he survived on a “jar of peanut butter” during his stay at the Bahamas’ Fox Hill prison, when that ran out he would have been forced into eating a delicious dish of unseasoned beef with rice for lunch. Dinner is typically skipped at Fox Hill.
However, now that he’s back in California it’s likely that Sam will enjoy some stewed greens and vegetables for lunch and dinners.
3pm: daydream about baseball
In November of 2021, Sam let us in on a little secret, saying that if he could run it back and do it all again he would’ve loved to have been the General Manager of a baseball team.
“I suck at baseball”, he once said, so a role on the sidelines as the coach seems more appropriate. With SBF’s previous ventures into sports — which saw the home of the Miami Heat renamed ‘FTX Arena’ now coming to a tragic end — maybe its best that SBF avoids any role that sees him adopt any sort of financial oversight in the future.
Sam Bankman-Fried house arrest
4pm: hobbies
According to Twitter, it seems that SBF has no hobbies.
So, maybe he can spend this period of the afternoon putting his hand to something creative. Perhaps build a puzzle on his dining room table, or knit a cosy sweater to wear to court in October.
In lieu of any hobbies outside of stream-rolling n00bs on League of Legends, it seems like now would be the perfect time for him to brush up on his ‘paper toss’ skills, something he’s bragged about having some aptitude for in the past.
Sam Bankman-Fried house arrest
7pm: dinner
Bankman-Fried has talked about his stoic cooking routine in the past, saying that he “cooks most nights,” but remains “a picky eater.” However he remains determine to share some of his recipe ideas with the good people of Twitter.
Hopefully one of his parents possess some culinary skills that go beyond drowning a frying pan with oil and chucking in ingredients…
After dinner, it’s probably straight back to the beanbag, but don’t worry, there’s no time for sleep on the grind.
Sam Bankman-Fried house arrest
9pm: sacrifice sleep for more League of Legends
It seems as though sleep isn’t a top priority for SBF, having written in the past about how he often enjoys staying up late to play League of Legends, so he doesn’t have to let his brain reset and lose valuable “memory time”.
“Some people drink too much; some gamble. I play League.”
Sam Bankman-Fried on Twitter
Still, Sam is not without his reservations for playing League, saying that the “single most universal thing” experienced by those who play League of Legends is that “they wish they didn’t”.
Either way, SBF is gonna be up late ganking noobs or writing overly-optimistic posts for his new Substack, especially now that he can’t ‘inspire’ his employees to stay up past 3am to finish their projects.
Gn SBF.
