Sam Bankman-Fried is an “awkward high-school math nerd” unfairly depicted by the government as “some sort of monster”, his lawyers argued in their final pitch to convince jurors to acquit the former cryptocurrency mogul on trial in New York.
Addressing the 12-person jury on Wednesday afternoon, Mark Cohen acknowledged his client may have made “bad business judgments” in the run-up to the implosion of his FTX exchange, which collapsed last November with an $8bn hole in its balance sheet. But he argued those were “not a crime”.
Earlier prosecutors in their closing remarks accused the 31-year-old Bankman-Fried of building a “pyramid of deceit” that masked a scheme to steal billions of dollars from customers of FTX.