The token associated with defunct crypto exchange FTX surged briefly Monday night after Sam Bankman-Fried, the founder and onetime CEO of the platform tweeted for the first time in two years.
Bankman-Fried, who was convicted on seven different counts of fraud and conspiracy in November 2023, is serving out a 25-year prison sentence. He’s currently detained in the Metropolitan Detention Center in Brooklyn as his lawyers work through an appeal of his conviction. Still, his account on X (formerly Twitter) posted a 10-tweet thread about layoffs, seemingly referencing Elon Musk’s push to have federal employees email their work activities from the past week or risk resignations.
“I have a lot of sympathy for [government] employees: I, too, have not checked my email for the past few (hundred) days,” his thread began. FTT, the token associated with FTX, briefly spiked from roughly $1.55 to $2.07 after his tweets before falling back to around $1.78, according to CoinGecko.
Bankman-Fried does not have direct access to sites like X or email, but can send messages through the Corrlinks system, which lets prisoners in the U.S. communicate with others, a person familiar confirmed.
It was not immediately clear who might be posting the tweets on Bankman-Fried’s behalf.
Over the weekend, Musk, who according to court documents is a special government employee, tweeted that federal employees would have to tell the Office of Personnel and Management what they did last week, with a non-response being considered a resignation. While some federal agency heads or other leaders told their employees not to respond, others said their employees should reply.
It’s another step in Musk’s efforts to lay off broad swaths of the federal workforce at the behest of U.S. President Donald Trump.
Bankman-Fried’s tweets referenced layoffs and detailed circumstances that might cause an employer to fire employees.
“It isn’t the employee’s fault, when that happens. It isn’t their fault if their employer doesn’t really know what to do with them, or doesn’t really have anyone to effectively manage them. It isn’t their fault if internal politics lead their department to lose its way,” the thread said.
After Bankman-Fried’s tweets, another X account claiming without evidence to be him linked a contract address, claiming he received a pardon from Trump and now works for DOGE, the government entity that may or may not be led by Elon Musk. The linked token saw some immediate trading volume, according to on-chain data. The new, seemingly fake account has a label saying “it is a government or multilateral organization account,” suggesting a government agency account may have been compromised and renamed.
Read more: Private Jets, Political Cash Among $1B in Sam Bankman-Fried’s Forfeited Assets: Court
UPDATE (Feb. 25, 2025, 04:05 UTC): Adds information about SBF_DOGE account.