Asked by Cohen why he had told Sassoon “no” under oath when asked if he had spent the missing $8 billion of FTX customer funds, Bankman-Fried had a couple of answers. One was, “Money is fungible anyway.” In other words: Hey, who’s to say?! But the other seemed to speak to one of Sam’s broader, odder points of view. “The other part of it, I mean, I don’t know if this is right or wrong, but for better or for worse, it has been a part of me that, like: I wasn’t particularly interested in trying to dole out blame for it. That wasn’t my priority. It generally wasn’t my priority. It was generally something I de-prioritized.”
This tracked with something his mother, a law school professor and ethicist, had written for the Boston Review a decade ago: a polemic against “blame mongering.” It also tracked with what Bankman-Fried had told Michael Lewis in the course of being interviewed for his book Going Infinite: that at his first job out of MIT, “Jane Street [Capital] really didn’t like blaming people. … They sort of asked, ‘Did anyone do anything contrary to what they were being told?’ When the answer was no, they said it could just as easily have been the CEO who did it.”
Source: SBF Often Didn’t Recall in His Testimony. But the Prosecution Did. – The Ringer
