John Ray III, FTX’s Cleanup Guy
Since taking over the job from disgraced cryptocurrency mogul Sam Bankman-Fried, Ray has helped locate more than $2 billion of assets that will eventually be given back to customers of the bankrupt exchange.
Photo illustration: 731; photo: Eric Lee/Bloomberg
The bankruptcy of FTX is one of the biggest corporate collapses since the Great Recession: The company owes at least $10 billion to what may be more than a million people. FTX’s founder, Sam Bankman-Fried, ceded control after customers—spooked by unsettling comments about the company from the head of a rival exchange—raced to withdraw deposits and found FTX couldn’t cover the withdrawals.
John Ray III, an executive best known for overseeing the liquidation of Enron Corp., stepped into the job in the early morning hours of Nov. 11. What he found would make even the most grizzled accountant queasy. “Never in my career have I seen such a complete failure of corporate controls and such a complete absence of trustworthy financial information,” he said in court testimony. Still, he and his team tracked down more than $1 billion of digital assets and $1.2 billion in cash at various financial institutions shortly following the meltdown. (The source of these funds is unclear.) Ray’s work is just beginning, but he’s no stranger to drawn-out cleanup jobs. He returned more than $20 billion to Enron creditors in the years after its accounting scandal was made public.