The former president of FTX US has revealed that former FTX CEO Sam Bankman-Fried once threatened to destroy his professional reputation.
Brett Harrison met Bankman-Fried at New York-based trading firm Jane Street and was hired for FTX US “over text” in 2021.
“Six months into my time at the company, pronounced cracks began to form in my own relationship with Sam,” Harrison wrote in a damning 49-part Twitter thread. “Around then I began advocating strongly for establishing separation and independence for the executive, legal, and developer teams of FTX US, and Sam disagreed.
“I saw in that early conflict his total insecurity and intransigence when his decisions were questioned, his spitefulness, and the volatility of his temperament. I realized he wasn’t who I remembered.”
Harrison said he suspected mental health issues may have been a “contributing factor” to the change in Bankman-Fried.
“In early April 2022, my eleventh month, I made one last try. I made a written formal complaint about what I saw to be the largest organizational problems inhibiting FTX’s future success. I wrote that I would resign if the problems weren’t addressed,” Harrison continued.
“In response, I was threatened on Sam’s behalf that I would be fired and that Sam would destroy my professional reputation. I was instructed to formally retract what I’d written and to deliver an apology to Sam that had been drafted for me.”
Harrison resigned from the role on September 27th, five weeks before the spectacular collapse of FTX.
Bankman-Fried was recently granted bail after posting a $250 million bond guarantee, having pleaded not guilty to eight criminal charges including fraud at FTX and its sister trading company Alameda Research.
“I never could have guessed that underlying these kinds of issues — which I’d seen at other more mature firms in my career and believed not to be fatal to business success — was multi-billion-dollar fraud,” insisted Harrison.
“If any one of us had suspected let alone learned the truth, we would have reported them immediately.”
Harrison’s new venture, as yet unnamed, has won personal financial backing from SkyBridge Capital founder Anthony Scaramucci.
The software company will enable crypto traders to create algorithmic-based strategies to access different markets, both centralised and decentralised.