Here is the apology letter Sam Bankman-Fried sent to FTX employees

“Hello everyone-

I am deeply sorry for what happened. I’m sorry about what happened to all of you. And I’m sorry about what happened to the customers. You gave everything you could for FTX and supported the company and me.

I didn’t want any of this to happen, and I would give anything to go back and do it all over again. You were my family. I’ve lost that, and our old home is an empty monitor warehouse. When I turn around, there’s no one left to talk to. I let all of you down, and when things broke down, I couldn’t communicate. I froze at the pressure and the leaks and the Binance LOI and said nothing. I lost track of the most important things in the commotion of the company’s growth. I care deeply for all of you, and you were my family, and I’m sorry.

I was the CEO and therefore it was my duty to make sure that ultimately the right things happened at FTX. I wish I had been more careful.

I want to give you a better description of what happened, one that I should have written as I understood it much earlier.

Putting things together recently, doing proxies (I don’t have full access to the data right now to get accurate answers), and marking everything in the market, regardless of liquidity, I think the events leading up to the crash this month included:

1) A fall in the markets this spring that led to a reduction of approximately 50% in the value of the guarantee;

a. ~$60b collateral, ~$2b liabilities -> ~$30b collateral, ~$2b liabilities

2) Most of the credit in the industry is exhausted at once;

a. ~$25b collateral, ~$8b liabilities

3) A concentrated and hyper-correlated decline in November that led to another roughly 50% decline in collateral value over a very short period of time, during which there was very little liquidity on the supply side of the market;

a. ~$17b collateral, ~8b liabilities

4) A bank run triggered by the same attacks in November;

a. ~$9b collateral

5) As we frantically put everything together, it became apparent that the position was larger than what was displayed in the admin/users, due to old fiat deposits before FTX had bank accounts:

a. ~$9b collateral, ~$8b liabilities

I never intended for this to happen. I did not realize the full extent of the margin position, nor did I realize the magnitude of the risk that a hypercorrelated shock represents. The loans and secondary sales were generally used to reinvest in the business, including the purchase of Binance, and not for large amounts of personal consumption.

I deeply regret the failure of my supervision. In retrospect, I wish I had done a lot of things differently. To name a few:

a) Be substantially more skeptical of high-margin positions

b) Examine stress test scenarios involving hypercorrelated shocks and simultaneous bank runs

c) be more careful with fiduciary processes in FTX

d) Have continuous monitoring of total deliverable assets, total client positions and other core risk metrics

e) Put more controls around margin management.

And none of this changes the fact that this all sucks for you, and it’s not your fault, and I’m so sorry. I’m going to do what I can to make it up to you, and the clients, even if it takes the rest of my life. But I worry that even then I won’t be able to do it.

I also want to thank those of you who gave me what I now believe to be the right advice on the ways forward for FTX after the accident. You were right, of course: I think that a month earlier FTX had been a thriving, profitable and innovative business. Which means that FTX still had value, and that value could have gone to help make everyone more complete. We probably could have raised significant funding; The potential interest in billions of dollars of financing came about eight minutes after I signed the Chapter 11 documents. Among those funds, the billions of dollars of collateral the company still had and the interest we had received from other parts, I think we probably could have returned a lot of value to customers and saved the business.

There would have had to be changes, of course: a lot more transparency and a lot more checks in place, including monitoring myself. But FTX was something really special, and everyone helped make it happen. Nothing that happened was your fault. We had to make very difficult calls very quickly. I’ve been in that position before, and I should have known that when bad things happen to us, we all tend to make irrational decisions. There came an extreme amount of coordinated pressure, out of desperation, to declare bankruptcy for all of FTX, even the entities that were solvent, and despite claims from other jurisdictions. I understand that pressure and empathize with it; many people had found themselves in challenging circumstances that were usually not their fault. I reluctantly gave in to that pressure, though I should have known better; I wish I had listened to those of you who saw and still see value in the platform, which was and is my belief as well.

Maybe there is still a chance to save the company. I think there are billions of dollars of genuine interest from new investors that could go into making customers feel complete. But I can’t promise you that nothing will happen, because it’s not my choice. In the meantime, I’m excited to see some positive steps being taken, such as LedgerX coming back online.

I am incredibly grateful for everything they have done for FTX over the years, and I will never forget it.

—SBF”