SBF seeks Trump pardon | Semafor
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Sam Bankman-Fried seeks Trump pardon
Jun 9, 2026, 1:45pm EDTJun 9, 2026, 1:45pm EDT<br>PostEmailWhatsappCopy link
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Eduardo Munoz/Reuters
Sam Bankman-Fried has been auditioning for a presidential pardon for months, complimenting President Donald Trump on X and granting a jailhouse interview to Tucker Carlson, then a Trump ally. Now he has formally applied for a pardon, according to a Justice Department database.<br>The effort is seen as a long shot; Trump told The New York Times last year that he wouldn’t pardon the dethroned crypto king, who was sentenced to 25 years in prison. But Trump has pardoned a number of white-collar criminals, including several who have explicitly sought his favor or donated to his causes.<br>If Bankman-Fried hadn’t been convicted, he might be enjoying a victory lap as one of the savviest investors of the AI moment. FTX’s grab-bag of stakes included shares in Anthropic, SpaceX, Robinhood, and Cursor.AI — the latter of which was sold by FTX’s bankruptcy trustee for its original investment value of $200,000 in 2023 and would be worth billions of dollars today.<br>“We were not a long-term hedge fund,” that trustee, John Ray III, said at Semafor World Economy in April. “We were a company that had hundreds of thousands of creditors worldwide.”<br>The pardon petition was earlier reported by Bloomberg.
— Liz Hoffman
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