Tiffany Fong stood amidst a crowd of journalists in the gray-tiled plaza of the Daniel Patrick Moynihan Courthouse in downtown Manhattan. Despite the early hour, media members had already formed a line, eager to cover the beginning of FTX founder Sam Bankman-Fried’s criminal trial. Fong, a 29-year-old with a distinct presence, periodically took hits from her vape while engaging in conversations with reporters, sharing her contact information and offering self-deprecating one-liners for their stories.
She exuded the aura of a grown-up version of a former college “it” girl, dressed in a black sweater vest, Nike Air Force One sneakers, and a leather blazer cinched around her petite waist. With her phone in hand, Fong started vlogging, capturing the experience to share with her extensive following of over 90,000 on X (formerly known as Twitter) and 30,000 subscribers on YouTube.
According to her LinkedIn profile, Fong identifies as a “reluctant crypto content creator” (she shies away from the term “influencer”). Her journey brought her to New York City to attend Bankman-Fried’s trial in person at the Southern District courthouse. Bankman-Fried, facing a potential prison sentence of over a century, has been charged with seven counts related to fraud and has entered a not guilty plea.
However, what sets Fong apart from other trial spectators is that she has visited Bankman-Fried on more than ten occasions at his childhood home in Palo Alto, where he was under house arrest. During those visits, the two spent countless hours alone in his parents’ study, and he even introduced her to his cherished childhood stuffed bunny, Manfred. Tiffany Fong stood
During that period, she temporarily moved to San Francisco to be within commuting distance of Bankman-Fried. Fong’s access is perhaps only rivaled by the author Michael Lewis, who spent hundreds of hours with Bankman-Fried for the book “Going Infinite,” an account of the crypto wunderkind’s rise and fall. (Since Bankman-Fried has been jailed and unreachable during his trial, this story of their months-long back-and-forth is told through Fong’s experience. A spokesperson for Bankman-Fried declined to comment.)
“This is the weirdest little detour my life has taken, getting a front row seat to a massive financial fraud scandal,” Fong tells me in her Airbnb studio rental in downtown Manhattan, where I interview her on the eve of the trial. She sits cross-legged on the bed, showing me the new plastic vapes she hoped wouldn’t set off the metal detectors at the courthouse entrance. I first met Fong at a crypto conference in March, during a nightclub afterparty where the ratio of men to women approached that of a men’s locker room. I’d listened to Fong’s November interviews with Bankman-Fried from before his arrest, when he was telling anyone who’d listen that the collapse was due to a colossal failure of risk management, not fraud. “I’m so out of place in this story,” admits Fong. “It’s just like this random fucking chick wandered into this very serious situation.”