Sam Bankman-Fried’s Cellmate Says He Never Owned Up — And That’s Why A Pardon Won’t Come

Sam Bankman-Fried says he would “absolutely” welcome a pardon from US President Donald Trump.

Trump, for his part, has already said no.

Cellmate Speaks Up

Michael Avenatti, who shared a prison unit with the former FTX chief, went further than Trump’s January dismissal. In a series of posts on X, Avenatti said SBF never once admitted any wrongdoing during their time together — not privately, not in passing, not ever.

Avenatti is no neutral observer. He is himself a convicted felon, currently incarcerated for extortion and fraud. His criticism of SBF’s character comes from someone with his own considerable legal baggage.

Still, Avenatti did not write off Bankman-Fried entirely. He described the former crypto executive as a technology visionary with genuine intellectual gifts. The problem, in his telling, was not SBF’s intelligence — it was his judgment about his own limits.

The Leadership Question

Avenatti drew a pointed comparison to Google. When Larry Page and Sergey Brin built their company, they eventually brought in Eric Schmidt, an experienced executive, to help run it. They recognized what they didn’t know. Bankman-Fried, Avenatti argued, never made that call.

Had SBF hired “an actual adult in the room” and listened to people with real operational experience, Avenatti said, FTX might never have collapsed. He put a number on it: SBF could today be worth close to $100 billion and still be a free man.

That argument sits awkwardly alongside the legal record. SBF is currently serving a 25-year sentence for his role in the FTX collapse.

His conviction centered on the commingling of customer funds — a finding he continues to dispute. He has maintained that FTX customers were ultimately repaid, a claim critics reject as a distortion of the full picture.

Trump has already weighed in on this publicly. In January, he told The New York Times he has no intention of granting SBF clemency.

During his second term, Trump has issued more than 1,400 pardons and commutations — over 1,200 of them tied to the January 6 cases alone.

SBF has not appeared on any list of people under consideration.

Featured image from Aaron Schwartz/Sipa USA/Alamy, chart from TradingView