Leon Black is accused of raping a woman at Jeffrey Epstein’s home in 2002. Cheri Pierson sued Black, the former Apollo Global Management C.E.O., becoming the second woman to publicly accuse him of sexual assault. A lawyer for Mr. Black denied Pierson’s claims and called them an extortion attempt.
Bob Iger commits to reining in expenses at Disney. At his first companywide meeting on Monday, the recently rehired Disney C.E.O. said that he would keep a hiring freeze in place and that Disney+ would focus on turning a profit over adding subscribers. Mr. Iger also said Disney was committed to inclusive storytelling, seemingly defying conservative critics.
Major banks are working on a Zelle fraud compensation plan. The seven owners of the Zelle quick-payment service, including Bank of America and JPMorgan Chase, are discussing a policy that would reimburse customers for some kinds of scams, The Times reports. Lawmakers and regulators have pressed the banks to do more to help victims of Zelle-based fraud.
Inside the last days of FTX
The fallout from FTX’s collapse is still being felt. On Monday, BlockFi, a crypto lender that targeted individual investors, offering them loans and high-interest savings accounts backed by Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies, filed for bankruptcy. In June, FTX extended a $400 million lifeline to BlockFi, which had been struggling for months. At the time, BlockFi had other bidders offering to help. But in the wake of FTX’s demise, few are willing or able to offer a rescue to failing crypto firms.
FTX’s founder, Sam Bankman-Fried, appears to have thought that a savior, or solution, would emerge as his own firm flailed. That was the case even in the exchange’s final hours. The result was a chaotic last few days for FTX, which pitted S.B.F., as he’s known, against his former top aides for control of the firm, according to new documents detailed in a report this morning by The Times’s David Yaffe-Bellany. Documents, internal texts and emails sent in the days before FTX’s Nov. 11 bankruptcy filing show S.B.F. as increasingly deluded and desperate; top lawyers and staffs at the firm struggled to convince S.B.F. that bankruptcy was the only option.
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In a Nov. 10 email to staff, S.B.F. said he was close to securing new financing from the crypto entrepreneur Justin Sun. It never materialized.
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Senior FTX employees reached out to S.B.F.’s father, the Stanford Law School professor Joe Bankman, in an effort to get his son to give up control of the company.
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S.B.F. delayed the hiring of John Jay Ray III, the restructuring expert who has since taken over the company, thinking he still had time to raise new funds.
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Early on Nov. 11, S.B.F. refused to sign off on FTX’s bankruptcy filing.
“The founding team is not in a cooperative posture,” Ryne Miller, a top FTX lawyer based in the U.S., wrote in an email to S.B.F. and other staffers. “Please can you sign the document,” Miller wrote S.B.F. at 2:29 a.m. on Nov. 11.
More on Elon Musk’s Twitter Takeover
S.B.F. continues to believe he could have saved the firm. Even after FTX filed for bankruptcy, and having resigned as C.E.O., he continued contacting potential investors about providing new funding. In a brief interview this weekend, S.B.F. told The Times that he had lined up “numerous parties” willing to invest in FTX, even after its collapse, though he declined to name them.
