Prosecutors are allowing former FTX CEO Sam Bankman-Fried to stay at his parents’ home in Palo Alto, California.
The disgraced entrepreneur was released Thursday on a $250 million bail; he will be required to wear an electronic monitoring bracelet, participate in mental health counseling, and remain within the Northern District of California before his next hearing on January 3.
Joseph Bankman and Barbara Fried, both of whom are well-connected Democrats and professors at Stanford Law School, purchased the home on the edge of the elite university’s campus for $700,000 three decades ago, equivalent to $1.5 million in today’s dollars, according to a report from the New York Post. The home is now worth approximately $4 million.
The 105-year-old house spans more than 3,000 square feet and has four bedrooms, three baths, wall-to-wall windows, a study, a gated pool, and a lawn lined by palm trees. The home was briefly placed on the rental market in June 2013; Bankman-Fried’s parents were asking for roughly $14,000 per month, later downwardly revised to $12,000 per month before its removal from the rental market in January 2014.
FTX filed for bankruptcy last month after users learned that the company was intertwined with sister firm Alameda Research; both were controlled by Bankman-Fried and other young executives working from a luxury penthouse in the Bahamas. The former billionaire’s more recent pad was Fox Hill Prison, the only government detention center in the island nation, which is subject to “overcrowding, poor nutrition, inadequate sanitation, and inadequate medical care,” according to a report from the State Department.
Bankman-Fried, who had previously been denied bail due to the flight risk he poses, may be imprisoned for as many as 115 years in the United States if he is convicted on all counts, which include conspiracy to commit commodities fraud, conspiracy to commit securities fraud, and conspiracy to commit money laundering. Bahamian authorities extradited Bankman-Fried earlier this week to the Southern District of New York.
Mark Cohen, a lawyer for Bankman-Fried who previously defended Jeffrey Epstein confidant Ghislaine Maxwell, said in court on Thursday that his client was not a flight risk because he “voluntarily consented to come to face these charges.”
Bankman and Fried are securing their son’s $250 million bond using their equity in the property, which was the childhood home of novelist David Leavitt. The quarter-billion-dollar bond came as a surprise since Bankman-Fried had claimed he lost all but $100,000 after the collapse of FTX.
Previous reports indicated that Bankman and Fried were staying in the Bahamas with their son ahead of his extradition. FTX had purchased a home in the Bahamas where the couple often stayed when visiting the 30-year-old.
Bankman, who has drafted legislation for Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-MA), one of the most ardent skeptics of cryptocurrency in the federal government, served for nearly one year as a paid employee at FTX, primarily overseeing the company’s charitable activities. Fried, who recently resigned as chairwoman of Democratic fundraising organization Mind the Gap, was never formally involved with the company.
The comfortable conditions in which Bankman-Fried currently finds himself also garnered controversy given that he and other executives behind the defunct cryptocurrency empire may have lost some $8 billion in customer funds.