Sam Bankman-Fried is incarcerated at a federal prison in Lompoc, California, which sits northwest of Santa Barbara and is dubbed “the City of Arts and Flowers.” Once or twice a week, he calls me, and we talk for the allotted 15 minutes, at which point the line abruptly goes dead. “Hey!” he’ll say brightly when I pick up the phone, a note of forced cheer in his voice that belies his current station in life, as well as what he calls his anhedonia, which is the inability to feel happiness. Even in his wizard-prince heyday running the cryptocurrency exchange FTX, Bankman-Fried would pliantly chat with journalists about virtually any topic, and he has kept up this agreeable PR strategy in prison. He maintains his innocence, and will comprehensively relitigate his case when prompted, but always defers when I ask what he wants to talk about, saying something like, “Um, I’m flexible!” When I ask how his day is going, he’ll respond, “Mostly boring, mostly usual.”

In the two years since he received a 25-year sentence for fraud and conspiracy, Bankman-Fried has retained many of his pre-prison characteristics. Now as then, he takes meds for clinical depression and ADHD: an Emsam adhesive patch, which he collects in “pill line,” along with his daily dose of Adderall. He is still a vegan on animal-welfare grounds, which means he doesn’t eat at chow hall, instead cobbling together ingredients from the commissary list (e.g., dehydrated refried beans at $2.60 a pouch; rice at $1.75 a pack; Goya-brand sazón at $2.45 a box) and finding ways to prepare them by his bunk. To that end, he has put together a tongue-in-cheek “Vegan Prison Cookbook,” which includes instructions such as “If the hot-water machine is broken, instead pour in lukewarm-water-that-tastes-a-bit-odd and microwave it. You will overcook it and it will taste bad.”

Even in the understimulating, internet-less environment of prison, Bankman-Fried, 34, has found ways to indulge his old propensity for distracted multitasking. For the cost of about $135 at commissary, he bought a SCORE 7T tablet. The name stands for Secure Commitment to Offender Re-entry and Enablement and it bills itself as “a robust, purpose-built, locked-down computing device that helps persons-in-custody (PICs) pass their time constructively, improve themselves and prepare to re-enter society.” On it, one can make purchases from an eclectic selection of entertainment options, like the second movie in the Divergent trilogy or a single season of Chicago Fire. The tablet’s gaming options are “mostly really dumb,” Bankman-Fried says, with the passable exception being Shattered Pixel Dungeon, which he has now played roughly 6,000 times, almost always as the “Mage” and, according to one of his prison friends, with an unheard-of nine “challenges” running simultaneously. Often when we are talking on the phone, Bankman-Fried confesses, he is on his tablet playing the game, just as he was on his computer half-playing Storybook Brawl virtually until the moment he was arrested at his Bahamas apartment complex in December 2022.

Talking to Bankman-Fried is enjoyable. Because he is suspicious of experts and conventional wisdom, he’s willing to evaluate almost any subject from first principles. At the height of its influence, FTX had endorsement deals with Tom Brady and Stephen Curry and held the naming rights to the Miami Heat’s arena. I once asked him why he had paid to display FTX patches on the uniforms of MLB umpires and not the athletes people are watching play. For a TV spectator to notice a logo on some team’s uniform, he figured, “there has to be a player on the right team, facing the right direction toward the camera, and not moving so fast that it gets blurry,” whereas umpires made great billboards because they just stand there. During another call, Bankman-Fried was arguing that incarceration doesn’t effectively rehabilitate criminals. I asked how a society without prisons might disincentivize crime. “We could just do what Singapore does, right — give people, like, 30 lashes or whatever,” he countered. “Lashes are pretty bad, and then we don’t lose members of society for decades.”

One day in April, not long after he had arrived at Lompoc, he told me a story. “Oreos are one of the more surprisingly vegan foods,” he said. “When I got here at Lompoc, commissary had Oreos. And you know, there’s part of me that was excited about that. And then another part of me cringed that that was something I cared about. Given, like, I don’t enjoy eating Oreos. It’s not going to make my life any better. It’s such a pale shadow of what the outside was.” I suggested that it was okay to get excited about Oreos given the lack of other things he had to get excited about. “It isn’t that I object to the stimulation from the Oreo,” he said. “I object to that becoming a thing that I’m training too much of my brain on. I don’t want to be replacing important neurons with, like, more duplications of seek-out-Oreo neurons.”

He pointed me to chapter 22 of Manfred, “Chat L’esponge.” Manfred, named for a childhood stuffed animal, is the serialized prison memoir Bankman-Fried has been writing since before his 2023 trial, which he sends to a small cohort of friends and family via the prison email service CorrLinks. Bankman-Fried’s parents had sent me a collated copy of his entries and then I started receiving entries in real time once he added me to his Listserv. (Corr-Links, also referred to as TRULINCS, allows prisoners to correspond with up to 30 contacts.) “Chat L’esponge,” like much of Manfred, is allegorical and surprisingly humorous considering the subject matter. The chapter imagines a powerful AI trained only on one stupid thing: the characters in SpongeBob SquarePants. “So, each day, you feed ChatGPT’s training algorithm terabyte after terabyte of pictures of Patrick the Star and hours upon hours of audio from Squidward’s clarinet; and you don’t ever feed it any other new data.”

And then when you ask ChatGPT “what is the best argument against abortion,” instead of saying something about the sanctity of life or parents who regret having abortions, it will say “if Patrick were aborted then SpongeBob would be sad.” If you ask it what the best electric guitar is, it will respond “Squidward’s best clarinet solo came in the 4th season, episode 5,” because that is the closest thing to an electric guitar that it still remembers anything about.

Bankman-Fried was trying to explain that what crushes him about prison is the reorientation of his mind toward triviality and therefore the sapping of his latent usefulness as a human being. He didn’t want to become Chat L’esponge. To explain prison life, Bankman-Fried draws on a concept from another TV show, Severance, in which people’s identities are “severed” between their “Innie” work selves and their “Outie” off-work selves. The way Bankman-Fried sees it, to fantasize about something as pedestrian as commissary Oreos is to become a prison Innie. And to become a prison Innie is to succumb to the world’s assessment that he is a criminal.

Bankman-Fried was convicted of misappropriating roughly $8 billion in FTX customer deposits by plowing them into his hedge fund, Alameda Research, which collapsed. He was also found guilty of defrauding lenders and investors. Bankman-Fried contends all this was mostly the result of an innocent accounting glitch and that in any case Alameda was legally allowed to borrow as much as it wanted from FTX. The jury did not buy his argument, deeming him to have engaged in straightforward fraud on a historic scale. The mission of Bankman-Fried’s life now is to free himself from prison, either by legal means or presidential pardon. These efforts have become conspicuous over the course of Donald Trump’s second term, during which Bankman-Fried has unveiled a new identity as a Republican. Last year, he organized an unsanctioned video interview from prison with Tucker Carlson. As punishment, Bankman-Fried was sent briefly to solitary confinement at the Metropolitan Detention Center in Brooklyn, where he was jailed at the time. After that, he revived his mostly dormant X account and through a proxy — his father, Joseph Bankman — started using it to post pro-Trump messages and frame himself as a victim of the Biden administration’s crackdown on the crypto industry.

Meanwhile, Bankman-Fried’s mother, Barbara Fried — retired now from teaching at Stanford Law School — has been fighting for his freedom in public. Beginning in the fall, she started posting essays, some lawyerly, some personal, seeking to complicate the case against her son. Lately, she has been getting slapped on the wrist for various desperate motherly infractions. The judge in his case demanded she stop calling his chambers, and prosecutors in New York’s Southern District noted a legal motion purportedly mailed by her incarcerated son had in fact been FedExed from a location near her home. Mysterious X accounts agitate for his release, as does an anonymously run website called freesbf.org, whose apparent administrator — on X they go by Sam Bankman Freed — stopped replying to my DMs when I asked if they could hop on the phone. On June 12, real-life Bankman-Fried lost his official appeal, narrowing his legal options.

Trump’s soft spot for felons has created a brazen new class of clemency lobbyists and gives Bankman-Fried hope for a pardon that would have been unthinkable under the administration that prosecuted him. His parents have hired two GOP operatives to lobby the administration for his release, and on June 8, news broke that Bankman-Fried had officially filed a bid for a presidential pardon. On Polymarket, his chances of receiving one before 2027 doubled to about 14 percent.

The typical response to a social-media post by Bankman-Fried is some variation of “Rot in jail forever, dude.” Still, some revisionist SBF commentary has been popping up in mainstream outlets such as CNN and Puck. In May, after Drake dropped a song with the lyric “Samuel Bankman, free all my guys up,” Bankman-Fried’s account tweeted at him, “when I get out, I can loan you my bean bag chair.” As of this spring, FTX’s estate has disbursed more than $10 billion to victims via bankruptcy proceedings and is sitting on several billion dollars more in recovered assets. As Bankman-Fried has been using his PR offensive to point out, this means a vast majority of defrauded customers are being paid back with interest. He is also egging on the semi-ironic SBF boosters who now hail him as a venture-capital legend based on his pre-downfall portfolio of investments in start-ups such as Robinhood and Anthropic. The nearly 8 percent, $500 million stake Alameda purchased in the then-little-known AI lab in 2021 would now be worth something like $80 billion if it hadn’t been sold off in bankruptcy.

The SBF story was compelling long before his arrest. The son of academics, Bankman-Fried was a believer in utilitarian philosophy and the star benefactor of the effective-altruism movement, which has evolved from its origins in mosquito nets and kidney donation to grander ambitions to prevent pandemics and mitigate the risks of artificial intelligence — in short, to save humanity. The movement sought to solve these problems in part through its “earn to give” ethos, which involved young idealists reaping profits on Wall Street to maximize their philanthropic potential. Bankman-Fried excelled at the “earn” part of the equation — at one point he was declared the richest person in the world under 30 — which turned this couch potato with crazy hair into a Democratic megadonor and magazine-cover star. He was possessed with the conviction that he was put on earth to sit at a computer and make enough money to personally fund EA’s most grandiose goals and whichever politicians might prioritize them. The SBF version of “Greed is good” struck many liberals as a plausibly benevolent worldview. All of it came tumbling down when he was convicted, leaving Bankman-Fried open to accusations that his ethical-capitalist persona was, like his sudden conversion to Trumpism, insincere.

As fraudsters went, he didn’t have Bernie Madoff’s froideur or Elizabeth Holmes’s charismatic-founder act or the bad-boy notoriety of Martin Shkreli — or really any of the standard “crook” vibes that would seem to translate to prison life. His absent-minded tendencies and Plushie-like physique suggested physical vulnerability. What made him dangerous, in the eyes of the justice system, were the same qualities that underwrote his rise: his unique mind and his conviction in his own ability to determine, through high-stakes bets, what was right for the world. “There is a risk that this man will be in a position to do something very bad in the future, and it’s not negligible risk,” Judge Lewis A. Kaplan said at Bankman-Fried’s sentencing in March 2024. “So, in part, my sentence will be for the purpose of disabling him.”

He has resisted disablement. There’s a passage in Manfred in which Bankman-Fried argues against what he calls the “‘anti-cruel’ line of thinking.” “There is an undercurrent of people who argue that I should be released from prison in less than 25 years because to do otherwise would be cruel,” he writes, summing up this view as “SBF should be released at an age where he can still settle down to a quiet life somewhere, they say; get married, have kids. Write stories, sometimes, about readjusting to society as an ex-con. Slow down; get off his meds. Detox from a frantic working environment. Be healthy and safe.” To be clear, he adds, “I do think I should be released in less than 25 years!” Just not on those grounds.

Over email, he tells me what is wrong with this line of thinking: “It presumes that my goals in life are to find some semblance of personal happiness and fulfillment, rather than still trying to have positive impact on the world.” Because he maintains he did nothing wrong, Bankman-Fried rejects the idea that the story of his life should follow some standard redemptive arc. Not only does he not wish to exit prison as a changed person, it is more or less his greatest fear.

Bankman-Fried’s First significant experience behind bars came at the Metropolitan Detention Center, a pair of orange-and-sand-colored buildings in Sunset Park, where he was held from August 2023, shortly before his trial, until March 2025. MDC is sometimes described as one of the worst prisons in the country, full of violent maniacs and abysmal conditions, but the unit Bankman-Fried was placed into is a best-case scenario. It’s a dorm-style protective-custody unit called 4 North, reserved for inmates who might be endangered living among the general population: celebrities, political figures, cooperating witnesses, and sex offenders, the last two categories representing “bad paperwork” cases that occupy the lowest social strata in prison life. Often defendants are sent there before they face trial or to await sentencing in one of New York’s federal courts. This is where the rappers 6ix9ine and Diddy passed through and where captured Venezuelan president Nicolás Maduro reportedly now lives.

“What was that movie, Full Metal Jacket? It’s almost like a Marine Corps barracks,” says Carmine Simpson. Simpson, 31, is an ex-NYPD cop from Long Island who last year was sentenced to 23 years in prison for soliciting sexual images and videos from minors and is now serving the rest of his term at a low-security prison in Virginia. He was awaiting sentencing in 4 North when Bankman-Fried arrived.

From Virginia, Simpson mailed me a sketch he drew of the........

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