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FTX - Sam Bankman-Fried’s luxury penthouse was up for sale.

After FTX collapsed, Sam Bankman-Fried's luxury Bahamas penthouse was up for sale for a while.

By Finst News
• 5 min read
FTX - Sam Bankman-Fried’s luxury penthouse was up for sale.

After his crypto exchange FTX bankruptcy, the luxury penthouse of Sam Bankman-Fried in the Bahamas was up for sale for a while. The price tag for the villa? A tidy $40 million. Real estate firm Seaside Bahamas listed the nearly 1,200-square-meter property on their site, but it’s since been taken offline.

The bad news around FTX keeps piling up. Between eight and ten billion dollars of client funds are believed to have been embezzled by FTX under Bankman-Fried and Alameda Research staff. One of Bankman-Fried’s purchases? His lavish penthouse.

False modesty

No matter how low-key Bankman-Fried has seemed in recent months, the luxury property tells a different story. Looking back, it foreshadowed his risk-management neglect. Reportedly, FTX spent $74 million on real estate in the Bahamas last year. FTX used most of the money to buy Albany Bahamas, a luxury condo complex in New Providence.

Here, some FTX employees lived in and worked in the upscale flats, a housing policy outlined by the company. Colleagues and close associates of the firm reportedly lived here, and Alameda Research employees were believed to have lived here as well.

What happens to the FTX properties?

Whether the penthouse is truly Bankman-Fried’s own unit or property of FTX remains unclear. In a video by YouTuber Nas Daily (now deleted), Bankman-Fried is shown being interviewed in a home that closely resembles the penthouse in the listing.

The property is up for sale because Bankman-Fried lost about 94 percent of his wealth during the FTX collapse. If the real estate was purchased by FTX itself, it remains unclear how it will be treated during the insolvency proceedings.

Creditors of the company could claim various assets, including real estate, as part of the liquidation. The Bahamas Financial Services Authority froze the company’s assets last week and appointed a liquidator to handle the liquidation. It’s possible the liquidator will sell the property as part of the overall process. This has happened before with properties belonging to Three Arrows Capital, another collapsed crypto hedge fund.

In short, there seems to be little left of Sam Bankman-Fried’s former altruism. He wanted to donate his wealth to charities and people in need.

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