The Secret Story of FTX’s Rise and Ruin Part 1 – Mother Jones48%

By Reveal84%

7/11/2026, 3:01:00 AM

BS Summary: This article contains 0 faulty reasoning types, including no named faulty reasoning patterns yet, with no single egregious example has been isolated yet. Analysis detected 0 faulty-reasoning hits from 406 analyzed words, generating a BS Score of 50.6% and a BS Rank of 48% (7,401 of 14,081 articles). This article is better (less manipulative) than 52.60% of the article peer group.

FTX founder Sam Bankman-Fried arrives at the federal court in New York in February 2023. Timothy A. Clary/AFP/Getty

Sam Bankman-Fried was once called the “crypto king.” But in November 2022, his company, FTX, imploded within a matter of days. All around the world, customers of the cryptocurrency exchange were suddenly cut off from their money.

“I tried to withdraw an amount, you know, and it would spin and say, your, your withdrawal is pending,” says Tareq Morad, an investor from Canada. “I remember myself doing that around 7, 8 o’clock at night, checking back, going to look: Okay, did it go through? Did it go through? No. No. No.”

Meanwhile, inside the company, employees were panicking. “All that we were told was there’s been a run on the bank and, somehow, money is missing and we don’t know who to trust,” remembers Caroline Papadopoulos, part of FTX’s accounting leadership at the time.

This week on Reveal , through prison interviews with Bankman-Fried, his parents, FTX insiders, and customers, we take you through the frantic week of FTX’s collapse and the controversial and less well-known bankruptcy that followed. At a cost of nearly $1 billion, it has become one of the most expensive in history.

Read the FTX bankruptcy estate’s on-the-record statement to Reveal .

This is an update of a show that originally aired in September 2025 .

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Confirmation Bias
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Anchoring Bias
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Availability Heuristic
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Representativeness Heuristic
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Hindsight Bias
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Overconfidence Bias
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Framing Effect
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Loss Aversion
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Status Quo Bias
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Sunk Cost Effect
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Optimism Bias
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Pessimism Bias
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Negativity Bias
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Self-Serving Bias
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Fundamental Attribution Error
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Actor-Observer Bias
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In-Group Bias
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Out-Group Homogeneity Bias
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Halo Effect
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Horn Effect
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Dunning-Kruger Effect
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Recency Bias
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Primacy Effect
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Blind-Spot Bias
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Ad Hominem
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Straw Man
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Appeal to Authority
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False Dilemma
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Slippery Slope
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Circular Reasoning
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Hasty Generalization
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Red Herring
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Bandwagon
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Appeal to Emotion
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Begging the Question
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Post Hoc (False Cause)
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Tu Quoque
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Burden of Proof
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Appeal to Nature
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Composition/Division
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Anecdotal
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No True Scotsman
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Ambiguity (Equivocation)
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Gambler’s Fallacy
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Middle Ground
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Personal Incredulity
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Special Pleading
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Genetic Fallacy
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Unattributed Quote
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Quote-first Misdirection
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Biased Writer Voice
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Indoctrination
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Politically Left Leaning Bias
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Politically Right Leaning Bias
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Attempt to Sell a Product or Service
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406 words analyzed.

Voice attribution · Experimental

Who is speaking?

See where attributed voices appear and how each speaker's manipulation signature differs from the writer's voice.

2speakers22%attributed speech316writer words
Selected voice

Tareq Morad

0%flagged-word coverage
54 attributed words60% of attributed speech0% writer coverage

No manipulation-pattern hits were found in this speaker's attributed words or the writer's voice.

Attribution is sentence-level. Pattern percentages are calculated only from words assigned to that voice.

Analysis

Hover over highlighted words in the article to view the associated bias or fallacy analysis.