In 2022, it was hard to walk around Washington without seeing Sam Bankman-Fried’s face. While the press often praised him for his humility, the founder and CEO of the crypto exchange FTX plastered ads of himself all over the city, and particularly in areas where congressional staffers might walk to work, like Union Station. Although Sam still lived in the Bahamas in order to avoid regulation, he was shuttling from Nassau to Washington, D.C., every week or two to meet with lawmakers and regulators, making a power play for the nation’s capital.
After FTX’s crash, theories would fly about Sam’s larger designs on Washington. Some speculated that he had been angling to move FTX back to U.S. soil and