“A thief who takes his loot to Las Vegas and successfully bets the stolen money is not entitled to a discount on the sentence by using his Las Vegas winnings to pay back all or part of which he stole when he finally gets caught.”
Judge Lewis Kaplan gave Bankman-Fried 300 months and an $11 billion forfeiture. FTX customers lost $8 billion. The defense asked for six and a half years on the theory that a rising crypto market and a stake in Anthropic would make everyone whole. Kaplan found he tampered with witnesses and perjured himself. Expected value was the whole philosophy, and the judge did the math on the cost of getting caught.