DMs with a ‘Friend’ Reporter are not meant to be public

• Following the FTX crash, the founder and former CEO of the company exchanged wild DMs.
• Sam Bankman-Fried stated Wednesday that he didn’t know the conversation would be made public.
• Bankman-Fried made the remarks in a lengthy and awkward interview with The New York Times.

Sam Bankman Fried claimed that he didn’t know that the famous direct message exchange with a Vox journalist would be made public. He claimed he thought the journalist had been a “longtime friend”.

Direct messages from Twitter were published by VoxNovember 16, 2016: 16 days after his death cryptocurrency exchange, FTX, collapsed. Among the eye-popping messagesFormer CEO and founder of FTX, he said regulators “make it worse” and that he regrets FTX’s filing for bankruptcy.

Bankman-Fried was questioned about the exchange during an interview with The New York Times’sAndrew Ross Sorkin, at the Times’s DealBook Summit Wednesday.

“This interview was not meant for public consumption. It was a friend of my longtime who I foolishly forgot was also reporter,” Bankman Fried stated. “I’m not certain what they thought the capacity at the time but it definitely ended up being covered.”

Kelsey Piper is a Vox staff writer and has been with the company since 2018. LinkedIn.

Insider received a statement from Lauren Starke, a spokesperson of Vox, refuting Bankman-Fried’s claims. Piper interviewed Bankman Fried while reporting on a profile in May. She claimed that they had only interacted once through overlapping professional and social networks several years prior.

“Any suggestion that he forgot she’s a journalist is not credible — in addition to the May interview, she is clearly identified as a reporter in her Twitter bio,” Starke continued. “She notified him via her Vox email, where she clearly signed that she is a Vox journalist, that she intended to write about their on the-record exchange. He did not object to his reply.”

Piper stated that she had a Zoom interview in July with Bankman Fried for a profile project she was working on. After news broke of FTX implodingShe claimed that she messaged him via Twitter for comment, but that she didn’t expect him reply since he was the subject in several other conversations. investigations.

Piper claimed that he got back to Piper a few more days later. This led to the direct message exchange. Vox published the screenshots. Piper also mentioned their conversation from the summer in the exchange.

Unless otherwise agreed upon, conversations with reporters are considered to be recorded.

In a lengthy Twitter threadBankman-Fried referred to Piper as his “friend” shortly after the DMs were published.

“Last night I spoke to a good friend. They published my messages. He wrote, “Those weren’t intended to be public. But I guess they are now.”

On Wednesday, Bankman-Fried did a lengthy, awkward interview with Andrew Ross Sorkin, The New York Times’s DealBook Summit. It covered everything from refuting to rewriting. reports that FTX and Alameda employees were fueled by drugs to calling his parentsAs FTX was falling apart.

Bankman-Fried acknowledges that he lawyers did not want him to be interviewed, said about the FTX fiasco: “I have had a poor month.”