Sam Bankman-Fried's Prison Life and Desperate Pardon Campaign

Sam Bankman-Fried, serving a 25-year sentence at a federal prison in Lompoc, California, has constructed a surprisingly structured existence behind bars while waging an aggressive campaign to get out. He calls journalists once or twice a week for 15-minute phone sessions, maintains his veganism by cooking from commissary ingredients — dehydrated refried beans, rice, Goya sazón — and has written a tongue-in-cheek 'Vegan Prison Cookbook.' He plays the mobile dungeon crawler Shattered Pixel Dungeon on a $135 SCORE 7T prison tablet, reportedly clocking around 6,000 games, often simultaneously while on the phone — a habit eerily reminiscent of how he played Storybook Brawl virtually until the moment of his December 2022 arrest in the Bahamas.

Bankman-Fried, 34, still takes Adderall and an Emsam patch for ADHD and clinical depression, and he's been serializing a prison memoir called Manfred — named after a childhood stuffed animal — which he distributes to about 30 contacts via the prison email system CorrLinks. The memoir is allegorical, occasionally funny, and revealing. One chapter imagines an AI trained exclusively on SpongeBob SquarePants content, which Bankman-Fried uses as a metaphor for his fear that prison is rewiring his brain toward triviality — replacing useful cognition with what he calls 'seek-out-Oreo neurons.' He draws on the TV show Severance to describe the psychological threat of becoming a 'prison Innie,' someone whose identity has been hollowed out by incarceration. His greatest fear, he says explicitly, is exiting prison as a changed person.

His legal options are narrowing fast. On June 12, Bankman-Fried lost his official appeal, which was widely expected. He maintains that his conviction — for misappropriating roughly $8 billion in FTX customer deposits into his hedge fund Alameda Research — stemmed from an innocent accounting error, not intentional fraud. The jury, and the sentencing judge, disagreed sharply. Judge Lewis Kaplan said at sentencing that part of the 25-year term was specifically to disable Bankman-Fried, citing a 'not negligible' risk that he could 'do something very bad in the future.'

With the appeal gone, the pardon route has become central. Bankman-Fried filed an official bid for a presidential pardon on June 8. His parents hired two Republican operatives to lobby the Trump administration, and his father Joseph has been running his X account, posting pro-Trump messages and framing his son as a victim of the Biden administration's crypto crackdown. His mother, former Stanford Law professor Barbara Fried, has been posting legal essays and personal appeals — and has gotten into trouble: a judge ordered her to stop calling his chambers, and prosecutors flagged that a legal motion ostensibly mailed by Bankman-Fried from prison was actually FedExed from near her home. Prediction markets put his pardon odds before 2027 at around 14 percent, double what they were before news of the formal bid broke.

Meanwhile, a semi-ironic rehabilitation of his reputation is underway in some corners of the internet. Drake dropped a song in May referencing him by name, prompting Bankman-Fried's account to tweet a joke about loaning the rapper his bean bag chair. His boosters point to FTX's bankruptcy estate having already disbursed more than $10 billion to victims — with several billion more in recovered assets — meaning most defrauded customers are being repaid with interest. They also note that Alameda's 2021 stake in Anthropic, purchased for roughly $500 million, would be worth approximately $80 billion today had it not been liquidated in bankruptcy. Bankman-Fried himself rejects any redemptive framing: he insists he doesn't want to emerge from prison a humbler, quieter man. He wants out so he can resume trying to change the world.