That's not how I see it. SBF was going after Binance (and other competitors), through regulatory capture. It's not known if the officials implicated knew that SBF was running a ponzi but it's accepted that the oncoming crypto regulations was basically drafted by and for SBF to capture the market (with the chief lobbyist of FTX being an ex-CFTC commissioner regularly meeting with the SEC and the CFTC). This is now everywhere in the news.

CZ from Binance saw this. CZ of course knew SBF was running a ponzi from day (complete with the creation of countless unregulated "securities" SBF would pump then dump on its FTX customers).

It takes a thief to see one.

So CZ, not wanting to go down alone, decided to expose SBF for the total fraud he was. Maybe hoping that the legislation drafted by FTX and coming to regulate Binance out of existence then wouldn't pass?

The angle in the mainstream media is a different story of course: "Evil chinese Binance CEO make SBF's FTX fail by creating a bank run on FTX", without mentioning the pump and dump tokens. Without questioning where the tens of billions went. They're playing the "leverage gone wrong" and not mentioning the political briberies nor the illegal pump of dump of tokens.

As someone wrote in another thread: the coverup exposes the crime (regulatory capture of the entire crypto market by a ponzi scheme).

SBF thought he was a genius and thought he could really pull his gigantic scam and get away with it, but it failed.

Now that it failed, I fully expect SBF to do everything he can to take CZ down.

If only tether/USDT could go down too.