“Sam this is a superb decide and I wholeheartedly hope you signal this tonight,” Mr. Dexter wrote in an electronic mail on the night of Nov. 10. “The sooner John is in place, the sooner the corporate can resolve points that require pressing progress.”
A flurry of emails adopted. In a message at 3:38 a.m. on Nov. 11, Mr. Miller requested for an replace on Mr. Bankman-Fried’s choice. “I’m chatting with Sam,” responded Ken Ziman, a lawyer on the agency Paul Weiss who was representing Mr. Bankman-Fried.
Ten minutes later, Mr. Ziman confirmed that Mr. Bankman-Fried had signed the doc, authorizing Mr. Ray to take over FTX. The corporate filed for chapter a number of hours later.
The submitting was hardly the tip of the chaos. The courtroom submission listed greater than 130 company entities tied to FTX, together with its U.S. arm and Alameda, the hedge fund. However the submitting was inaccurate: Among the entities weren’t owned by the trade. They belonged to AZA Finance, a separate firm that had not too long ago develop into companions with FTX to advertise crypto in Africa.
FTX later acknowledged the error. However in a Nov. 11 Slack message to Mr. Miller and different officers, Elizabeth Rossiello, the chief govt of AZA Finance, referred to as the errors within the chapter submitting “a storm of untamed irresponsibility.”
“That is hurting 9 years of labor now we have finished to create this platform!!” she wrote.
Mr. Miller responded defensively. “We had no cooperation of the founders in making ready this week,” he mentioned. “It was unlucky.”
Mr. Bankman-Fried was additionally annoyed. Regardless of giving up management of FTX, he continued contacting potential buyers about new funding for the trade. In a letter to former colleagues final week, he mentioned he regretted submitting for chapter, claiming that “potential curiosity in billions of {dollars} of funding got here in roughly eight minutes after I signed the Chapter 11 docs.”
He offered no proof for that declare, and in any case, FTX was not his firm to run. On the morning of Nov. 11, Mr. Miller moved shortly to make that clear, requesting the deletion of details about the agency’s outdated management from its web site.