> he seems to—at least on some level—legitimately believe that all of this is extremely complicated and impossible to understand unless you're someone of his intellectual caliber. It's so complicated, in fact, that even he struggles to keep it all in his head at once

Yeah, I strongly disagree here.

He's just a pathological liar and he's currently on an interview spree where he's lying out of his mouth to try and avoid jail time.

If you want evidence that he a liar, look at the DMs he sent to his friend (apparently he forgot she was a reporter?) that got published to Vox.

He clearly explained his strategy of lying about his left-leaning political views to get brownie points with the media.

He intentionally wanted to defraud people from the start. When he started FTX, they went through multiple jurisdictions (first Hong Kong, then Singapore and finally the Bahamas) to find the country that would give him the least regulatory oversight so he could run his ponzi.

He intentionally had staff message him using Signal with disappearing messages to minimize the paper trail. Same thing with hiring the Ultimate Bet guy.

He had a clear backdoor that allowed him to send customer funds over to Alameda and he put some some BS "FTX collateral" to serve as a veneer. He bought companies like BlockFi to get more customer funds so he could keep the ponzi going. Spent fucktons on advertising in arenas, F1, superbowl, etc. because your customer LTV calculation changes when you can just steal the user's deposits and use them to lever up your hedge fund.

I'm guessing his plan was that he would use the FTX user deposits to take a huge long position on crypto, ride the bull wave and become the richest person in the world. He thought he'd be able to time it right and get out before the bear market with his profits but he timed it incorrectly and Alameda blew up.

Now, he just wants to make it seem like it was an accident and due to poor management by him. No, it was 100% intentional and he knew exactly what he was doing.