FTX has filed for bankruptcy and the crypto company also announced that founder Sam Bankman-Fried has resigned as CEO.

---

FTX, Bankman-Fried's trading firm Alameda Research, and roughly 130 affiliated companies have begun bankruptcy proceedings “to begin an orderly process to review and monetize assets for the benefit of all global stakeholders,” the company announced on Twitter Friday.

The filing includes FTX.US, a separate operation Bankman-Fried had previously claimed was isolated from the parent group's woes. FTX.US had recently warned customers that it would have to stop trading in the coming days.

John J. Ray III, a lawyer who helped run Enron post-bankruptcy, has been named CEO of the FTX Group. Bankman-Fried, often known as SBF, will remain “to assist in an orderly transition,” the company said.

FTX's fall was a sudden, jarring collapse of a crypto powerhouse, evident in Ray’s initial statement as CEO. He appealed to stakeholders to “understand that events have been fast-moving and the new team is engaged only recently.”

“I want to assure every employee, customer, creditor, contract party, stockholder, investor, governmental authority and other stakeholder[s] that we are going to conduct this effort with diligence, thoroughness and transparency,” Ray said in a statement.

The announcement capped a wild week for FTX and the entire crypto industry.

FTX had been one of crypto’s largest exchanges. But disclosures about its questionable finances triggered a meltdown. Binance announced early this week that it had agreed to buy the company but then announced that FTX had financial issues that were “beyond our control or ability to help.”

Even before its filing, FTX's woes were having spill-on effects on other companies. BlockFi, a crypto lender FTX had agreed to backstop earlier this year with a credit line and an option to buy the company, said Thursday it could not conduct "business as usual" and had stopped customer withdrawals.

The broader crypto market, which was already reeling from a dramatic crash that wiped out $2 trillion in value, took another hit as the market value of issued tokens fell below $900 million. The price of bitcoin dipped below $17,000.

Laid-off tech workers: There’s a potentially lucrative opportunity waiting for you in climate tech, if you want it.

That’s the message the burgeoning industry is sending to many of those affected by the massive layoffs at major tech companies like Meta, Twitter, and Stripe in recent weeks.

Former senior leaders at Lyft, Stripe, and Twitter who now work in climate have been coordinating over the past week with workforce development groups including Climate Draft, Terra.do, and Work on Climate to help support laid-off tech workers, as well as provide job and learning resources for transitioning to the climate sector.

The result is a slew of job fairs, boot camps, coordinated social posts, and email blasts, as well as a non-exhaustive but growing job board of over 4,000 jobs in climate tech specifically geared toward those with traditional tech skills like software engineering and product management.

Alex Roetter was an early Twitter leader and the company’s former head of engineering. Today he’s a managing director and general partner at Moxxie Ventures, which invests heavily in climate tech startups, as well as the founder of Terraset, a nonprofit that funds carbon removal.

He is, to put it mildly, bullish on climate tech. “This is going to be bigger than the internet,” he said, and he’s been getting the word out to former Tweeps in the Twitter alumni Slack community about resources like Climate Draft and opportunities in the industry overall.

In his view, climate tech isn’t just a vertical, but “a redoing of the entire economy,” with the potential to transform entire industries like transportation, buildings, and agriculture. “The people who achieve this are going to be fantastically rich,” Roetter said.

He’s not alone. Influential techies-turned-climate warriors like Chris Sacca, Katie Jacobs Stanton, and Peter Reinhardt have been tweeting out support for laid-off workers and pointing them to opportunities in climate tech.

Raj Kapoor, a co-founder and managing partner at climate tech VC firm Climactic (and Lyft’s former chief strategy officer), has a similar message for those affected by recent layoffs. For some people, “This is a blessing in disguise for them to go in and do something with impact that they care about,” he told Protocol.

Kapoor said he has been working with Lyft CEO Logan Green on sending a message to former Lyft employees, including the almost 700 who were laid off, about opportunities in climate tech and linking them to Climate Draft resources.

This is a blessing in disguise for them to go in and do something with impact that they care about.”

“He’s a huge proponent of climate. That’s why he started the company. And he’s so loyal, and every CEO feels really bad about having to lay off people,” Kapoor said of Green.

To Kapoor, the transferability of skills is obvious. What climate tech needs right now is “experience in commercializing and scaling,” he said. “These people, whether it’s Lyft or Facebook or Salesforce, have experience in that.”

Kapoor pointed out that an increasing number of major companies have net zero pledges, which means they’ll require tools and software to help them get there. Folks with experience at places like Salesforce, which laid off hundreds of employees on Monday, “are amazing people to bring on, because they understand how to sell and deal with the enterprise,” he said.

There’s sometimes a perception among tech workers that they don’t have the skills to work in climate tech, which is an industry that often deals with hard sciences like chemistry and materials engineering. While that is sometimes the case, what people fail to realize is that these startups still need software engineers, and they still need product managers, said Anshuman Bapna, the founder and CEO of climate jobs and learning platform Terra.do.

Of the approximately 2,000 active jobs on Terra.do, 30% are for traditional deep tech roles, like industrial process automation and chemical engineers; 30% are in software, data science, and product management; and 40% are in fact traditional business roles like marketing, enterprise sales, legal, and public relations, said Bapna.

Even in such a short amount of time, those affected by layoffs are responding. Climate Draft co-founder Jonathan Strauss said he’s seen over 2,000 new profiles created on the platform since last Friday, when he and others started coordinating to get the word out.

Bapna said Terra.do has seen a similar jump in interest, with over 1,400 people attending its online climate tech job fair Wednesday, its largest ever. (Typically, anywhere from 300 to 400 people attend.) During the two hours of the job fair alone, companies that participated saw over 200 applications come in on the Terra.do portal.

Climate tech has, in some ways, been relatively shielded from the recessionary wave hitting the mainstream tech industry. It’s exploded as an area for venture capital in recent years and has stayed high, even while the rest of the market and public tech companies alike are getting pummeled.

Industry insiders say the reason is twofold. One is the obvious moral imperative: People and businesses alike are realizing there’s no time to waste in confronting the climate crisis, and people feel compelled to act. The other is that, as a result, companies large and small are starting to make bold climate commitments that require breakthrough, industry-disrupting tech solutions to make them achievable.

Strauss said he’s heard from some tech workers who are excited about climate tech but have raised understandable concerns about pay, job security, and benefits, but those inside the industry are quick to assuage those concerns. “The equity upside can be massive,” he told Protocol, and base compensation in climate tech is comparable to that of any similarly staged tech company.

Bapna started his career in tech a few decades ago, and he said this period reminds him of previous recessionary cycles like those in 2001 and 2008. “Every time there is a bit of a recession or the markets take a downturn, that is an opportunity for people to also reassess their lives,” he said.

And right now climate tech is well positioned for those people. “What’s happening in climate is we have the perfect storm of political will, capital, and the maturity of technology all happening simultaneously, especially in the U.S.,” he said.

In other words, it’s the perfect time for people to get in on the ground floor on something that could be huge.

Updated: Nov. 13, 12:52 p.m. EST

Following in the footsteps of Voyager and Three Arrows Capital, FTX is the latest example of crypto’s volatility: In just a week, it went from the industry’s potential savior, leading rescues of failing firms, to needing a bailout itself. Revelations that the powerful-seeming crypto exchange was far flimsier than it let on have led it to the verge of collapse.

Here’s a breakdown of everything that’s happened to FTX this week.

Nov. 2: It begins.

Based on a leaked balance sheet for Alameda Research, FTX CEO Sam Bankman-Fried’s trading firm, CoinDesk reported that much of its reserves were based on FTT, “FTX’s own centrally controlled and printed-out-of-thin-air token,” Swan Bitcoin CEO Cory Klippsten told CoinDesk. FTX uses FTT as a reward currency for trading discounts, and Alameda held far more of the tokens than traded on the market, suggesting its stake would be hard to liquidate at current prices.

Nov. 6: Binance says it plans to pull out of FTT.

Binance CEO Changpeng “CZ” Zhao said his company, the largest crypto exchange, planned to sell its FTT holdings, which dated back to an early investment by Binance in FTX. CZ compared FTT to the imploded luna token, which Binance also previously backed. FTT’s price started to wobble after this announcement.

Nov. 6: CZ and SBF have a tiff.

The warring crypto CEOs engaged in an exchange of barbs on Twitter, with Bankman-Fried ultimately imploring Zhao and others to “Make love (and blockchain), not war.”

Nov. 8: Binance offers a bailout.

FTX stopped paying back customers, its first visible sign of weakness. The love seemingly arrived quickly, with Binance signing a nonbinding letter of intent to buy its smaller rival. CZ said in a tweet that FTX “asked for our help” as it faced a “significant liquidity crunch.” FTT plummeted by another 75% on Tuesday after CZ revealed his takeover plan.

Nov. 9: NVM! Binance backs out.

Love didn’t last. Binance quickly reversed course and backed away from the deal after a “corporate due diligence” review revealed issues in FTX’s financial situation that Binance said were “beyond our control or ability to help.”

Nov. 9: U.S. regulators reportedly begins investigating FTX.

Along with its liquidity crisis, the Securities and Exchange Commission and the Commodity Futures Trading Commission started investigating the company's relationships with sister entities Alameda Research and FTX US, as well as allegations that the company mishandled customer funds.

Nov. 9: FTX’s bad luck spreads to the rest of the crypto industry.

Crypto.com stopped withdrawals of USDC and USDT on the Solana blockchain Wednesday out of an “abundance of caution,” CEO Kris Marszalek wrote on Twitter, citing FTX’s role in trading Solana-based stablecoins and operating a Solana bridge. Solend, one of the larger Solana lending protocols, reported it was having problems liquidating part of a large loan Wednesday morning. It also disabled all borrowing, according to its website.

Nov. 10: Alameda Research falls.

Bankman-Fried announced that Alameda Research would wind down trading on Thursday as a hail-Mary effort to save FTX. “I fucked up, and should have done better,” he said in a Twitter thread announcing the move. “[R]ight now, we're spending the week doing everything we can to raise liquidity. I can’t make any promises about that.” The company was also weighing bankruptcy.

Nov. 10: FTX scrambles for cash.

According to a Reuters report, FTX sought around $9.4 billion in rescue funds from investors, seeking liquidity as many users pulled out their holdings. Bankman-Fried was reportedly in talks to raise cash from rival exchange OKX and stablecoin issuer Tether. He also sought a cash infusion from current FTX investors, including Sequoia Capital. He did manage to strike a deal with Justin Sun, the founder of blockchain network Tron, to allow holders of Tron-related tokens to withdraw their holdings from FTX.

Nov. 10: FTX US warns of potential trading pause.

Despite Bankman-Fried saying in a Twitter thread that FTX US “was not financially impacted by this shitshow” and was “100% liquid,” a banner on the top of FTX US website reads “trading may be halted on FTX US in a few days. Please close down any positions you want to close down. Withdrawals are and will remain open.”

Nov. 11: FTX files for bankruptcy and Bankman-Fried steps down.

FTX filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy. The company also announced that Bankman-Fried resigned as CEO. FTX, Alameda Research, and roughly 130 affiliated companies started bankruptcy proceedings "to review and monetize assets for the benefit of all global stakeholders,” the company announced on Twitter. The filing includes FTX US, despite Bankman-Fried previously stating that the operation was isolated from the financial chaos of FTX as a whole. John J. Ray III, a lawyer who helped run Enron post-bankruptcy, has been named CEO of the FTX Group. Bankman-Fried will remain “to assist in an orderly transition."

Nov. 12: Customer funds go missing.

According to a report by Reuters, at least $1 billion in funds from FTX customer accounts has gone missing. After Bankman-Fried moved $10 billion of customer funds from FTX to Alameda Research, a large chunk of that sum (between $1 and $2 billion) vanished. Separately, FTX said it's investigating "unauthorized transactions" after blockchain analytics firm Elliptic said $473 million in assets were "moved out of FTX wallets in suspicious circumstances early this morning." In a tweet that morning, FTX US general counsel Ryne Miller said the company "initiated precautionary steps to move all digital assets to cold storage."

Nov. 13: Bahamian authorities get involved.

Police in the Bahamas, where FTX is based, said they are working with the Bahamas Securities Commission on a investigation of the company to determine if "any criminal misconduct occurred." FTX co-founder Sam Bankman-Fried was interviewed by Bahamian police and regulators on Nov. 12, Bloomberg reported.

Welcome back to our Workplace newsletter. This just in: More Twitter execs are reportedly leaving the company, including head of trust and safety Yoel Roth and human resources leader Kathleen Pacini. The post-Elon Musk Twitter story is developing, but you can follow along here. Plus, is this the end of an era for cushy tech jobs? Also in the newsletter: Salesforce just made it easier to fire employees for their performance with less involvement from HR; Musk just banned remote work at Twitter, effective today; and Meta’s layoffs in Reality Labs — the AR and VR unit — may signal that Mark Zuckerberg is caving on his conviction to keep investing in what he sees as the “holy grail” of social networks: the metaverse.

— Allison Levitsky, reporter (email | twitter)

After Big Tech’s layoff massacre, is the 'cushy tech job' over?

Silicon Valley is reeling. In just over a week, over 17,000 workers have been laid off from Twitter, Meta, Salesforce, Coinbase, Stripe, Lyft — the list goes on.

• For years, Big Tech has been paying high salaries and supplying generous perks to pick up as much talent as it could while retaining even workers who were underperforming.
• Now, companies are buckling under that rapid growth, making deep cuts, and turning up the heat on performance. In preparation for as many as 2,500 layoffs, Salesforce’s HR team scrambled last week to update its policies around termination, giving managers more power to put employees on performance improvement plans and fire them with little HR oversight.
• Even Twitter, half the size it was before Elon Musk took over, is now banning remote work and warning employees that the “economic picture ahead is dire.”

Is this the end of the cushy tech job? Maybe. The tight labor market put more power in the hands of workers, which — at least in Big Tech — has led to a shift away from hustle culture and toward work-life balance, self-care, and, some would argue, “quiet quitting.”

• “It hasn’t been trendy to talk about hard work,” said Nolan Church, co-founder and CEO of Continuum, a people-leader talent marketplace. “People call it hustle porn. It has been bad-mouthed for the last five, 10 years.”
• There’s nothing wrong with having a life outside of work, Church said, but as a by-product of more worker empowerment, hard work became “demonized” over the last decade.

If a return to hustle culture is bubbling up from this week’s bloodbath of layoffs, Esther Crawford may be that movement’s poster child. A photo of Crawford — a director of product management at Twitter — sleeping on the floor of the office went viral on Twitter last week as Musk prepared to lay off half the company. Her report, product manager Evan Jones, captioned it “when you need something from your boss at Elon Twitter.”

• The photo sparked a debate around hustle culture, with some replies labeling office all-nighters as would-be “labor violations” and fodder for “trauma bonding,” while others commended Crawford for her dedication.
• “This is how great new things are built, more often than anyone has been willing to say during the last decade’s cultural revolution in Silicon Valley,” former GitHub CEO Nat Friedman tweeted on Saturday.

This attitude is likely more common among entrepreneurs than rank-and-file workers, but not all founders think this way. Friedman’s co-founder from Xamarin, the developer tool maker they sold to Microsoft in 2016, disagreed with that assessment.

• “At Xamarin I left every day at 5pm and I prioritized a healthy work/life balance — and hope I lead my people that way,” Xamarin co-founder Miguel de Icaza tweeted. “I think that asking people to work extra hours just [gives] you low quality output. And in the context of these layoffs is crass.”
• And Crawford herself addressed the commenters who were “losing their minds” over the photo.
• “Doing hard things requires sacrifice (time, energy, etc.),” Crawford tweeted. “We are less than one week into a massive business and cultural transition. People are giving it their all across all functions: product, design, eng, legal, finance, marketing, etc.”

Big Tech culture may get more intense as workers feel less secure in their jobs, but this won’t last long, according to Church and Flo Crivello, an entrepreneur who spent 4.5 years at Uber before founding the remote office startup Teamflow.

• “I actually think [the power is] still going to be on the employee's side for the foreseeable future,” Church said. “But I do think it has swung back slightly, in the sense that now, CEOs can be a little bit more realistic with how businesses are run — they need to drive profits, and money is no longer free, and sometimes we need to work on weekends.”
• Crivello predicted that engineers’ lives would become 20% more intense for a year or so before going back to normal. It’s “just economics,” he said.

“Historically, there has been infinite demand for engineers and very little supply,” Crivello said. “These companies have very little leverage.”

Easy come, easy go

Salesforce just updated its policies to allow easier terminations without involving HR, Protocol writer-at-large Joe Williams reported Thursday. The company’s employee relations team used to be “heavily involved” in PIPs and firing employees for not hitting metrics, including before formal talks with the workers themselves.

Now, HR will be less involved, and managers were recently asked to sign a document agreeing to treat employees fairly under the new system, Williams learned from sources.

Read the full story.

​Sponsored content from Conga

Automation also ensures consistency and standardization. The more automated the process is, the more you ensure that it’s going to be consistent every single time, whereas with a manual process, three different people may do it three different ways.

Learn more

No more remote

Typically, companies that decide to mandate in-office work announce these decisions months in advance to give employees time to adjust their routines — or maybe look for a more flexible job. But does Elon Musk do anything typical?

On Wednesday, Musk sent his first signed email to Twitter employees since taking over the company and laying off half its workforce with an email signed “Twitter.” In the email, Musk told employees they were expected back at the office starting Thursday, with exceptions for those who were “physically unable” to get to the office or had a “critical personal obligation.”

But going forward, Musk himself will review long-term remote work requests. Welcome back to the office, and maybe the job search, Tweeps.

Read the full story.

Twitter brain drain

Twitter’s chief privacy, information security, and compliance officers have all resigned. This is a particularly bad sign for Twitter because the company is subject to a Federal Trade Commission consent decree, most recently updated in May over past privacy and security practices.

The agency expressed its concern with the latest developments, including in comments to The Washington Post. Protocol cybersecurity reporter Kyle Alspach has more on who left and why, who will take over for them, and what this means for Twitter.

Read the full story.

Metaverse troubles

More than 11,000 layoffs hit employees both in Meta’s “family of apps” division — Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp — and Reality Labs, which works on AR and VR. Mark Zuckerberg’s decision to make cuts in Reality Labs is a “telling sign of just how difficult the road ahead might be” for Zuckerberg as he strives for the “holy grail” of social networks, Protocol reporter Nick Statt writes.

Reality Labs is Meta’s most expensive big bet, and investors have urged Zuckerberg to stop pouring so much money into it. As Zuck told employees in his layoff memo this week, his decision to “significantly increase our investments” during the pandemic “did not play out the way I expected.”

Read the full story.

Some personnel news

Here’s where we keep up with which tech companies are growing, shrinking, floating, or sinking.

⬇️ Amazon is reviewing its devices unit, which works on Alexa, and other unprofitable divisions to potentially make cuts, The Wall Street Journal reported.

⬇️ FTX CEO Sam Bankman-Fried apologized Thursday for his company’s collapse, which resulted in his own more than $15 billion net worth tumbling to around $1 billion, CNN reported.

⬇️ Coinbase is making cuts to its recruiting and institutional onboarding teams, The Information reported.

For more news on hiring, firing, and rewiring, see our tech company tracker.

​Sponsored content from Conga

Amid current economic uncertainty, every business is moving to a stage where we need to do more with less through improved efficiency and automations. When you move to a life cycle management solution, your organization gains the predictability that it needs all the time, and especially right now.

Learn more

Around the internet

A roundup of workplace news from the farthest corners of the internet.

For sale: Your vacation time. (WIRED)

Tech layoffs could get worse before getting better. (TechCrunch)

An argument for a safe, “boring” job. (Forbes)

Thoughts, questions, tips? Send them to workplace@protocol.com.

Elon Musk has never shown much regard for regulators: not the ones in Alameda County who ordered Tesla’s Fremont plant to shut down in the early days of the pandemic, not the ones at the SEC who said he couldn’t just make up stuff about Tesla’s finances on Twitter, and not the ones at the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration who keep investigating all those pesky Autopilot crashes.

If his brief, tumultuous tenure at Twitter is any indication, he’s not too worried about the Federal Trade Commission either.

Over the last week, Twitter has appeared undeterred by a new consent decree it reached with the FTC in May, which requires the company to carefully consider and document the risks new products pose to privacy and security on the platform before they launch. At Musk’s insistence, Twitter has, instead, raced to open up new revenue streams, including its $8 Twitter Blue subscription product, with seemingly little regard for its legal mandate to consider the risk.

“Please note that Twitter will do lots of dumb things in coming months,” Musk tweeted Wednesday — the same day Twitter unveiled a new verification badge for certain accounts, only to kill it again a few hours later. “We will keep what works & change what doesn’t.”

An internal Slack message posted late Wednesday, reviewed by Protocol and reported earlier by The Verge, seemed to confirm the situation was even more legally dicey than it at first appeared. One Twitter lawyer claimed that the company might soon ask engineers — not legal or privacy experts — to “self-certify compliance with FTC requirements and other laws.” The message came amid a mass exodus of privacy and cybersecurity leaders Wednesday, which included Twitter’s chief information security officer, its chief privacy officer, and its chief compliance officer. The exits were first reported by Protocol.

According to the Slack message, the employee claimed to have heard Twitter’s new head of legal, Alex Spiro, say that Musk is “not afraid of the FTC.” Protocol was not able to confirm that any engineers have actually been asked to “self-certify” legal compliance, and Spiro did not respond to Protocol’s request for comment.

Still, Slack message or no Slack message, Musk’s fickle, frenzied approach to shipping new products already suggests he is utterly unfazed by the threat of FTC enforcement. But should he be?

On the one hand, Musk isn’t just the richest person in the world, capable of paying off even a hefty fine; he’s a devoted heckler of government authority figures who’s repeatedly laughed in the face of just about every regulator that’s crossed him — and gotten away with it. This is a man with a court-ordered Twitter sitter who turned around and just bought Twitter.

It’s not just Musk who’s gotten away with a lot either. Just three months back, Twitter whistleblower Peiter “Mudge” Zatko alleged in a complaint to the SEC that “Twitter had never been in compliance” with its initial 2011 consent decree due to lax internal security practices and the mishandling of user data. Among the violations Zatko observed was Twitter taking users’ email addresses and phone numbers, which they’d provided for security purposes, and using them for marketing — the action that led to the FTC modifying Twitter’s consent decree and fining the company just $150 million.

It wasn’t the first time the FTC had levied a nominal fine on a tech company that violated an order. Even its $5 billion fine of Facebook in the wake of the Cambridge Analytica scandal in 2019 was met with downright delight by Facebook shareholders, who sent its stock price soaring.

On the other hand, the FTC has been in more of a fighting mood lately when it comes to CEOs behaving badly. Just last month, the commission personally named James Cory Rellas, the CEO of alcohol delivery company Drizly, in an order over a data breach. The order will dictate not just Drizly’s security practices, but the security practices of every future company where Rellas works.

In a statement, FTC spokesperson Douglas Farrar told Protocol the commission was “tracking the developments at Twitter with deep concern” and said that the FTC’s revised consent order gives it "new tools to ensure compliance, and we are prepared to use them.”

Also working against Musk is the departure of so many top privacy and security leaders at Twitter, which puts the company at enhanced risk of a data breach that could potentially lead to significant fines, said William Kovacic, former FTC commissioner and professor at George Washington University Law School. “You can get into the billions of dollars in a hurry,” Kovacic told Protocol. “Now, does [Musk] care? I would think at some point it’s not irrelevant to him.” That may be especially true given the financial risk Musk has personally taken on in acquiring Twitter — and what it’s cost his other companies.

Kovacic added that the FTC could come up with an especially big number “if they thought the company was thumbing its nose at them.”

But by far the biggest personal risk to disobeying the FTC may be borne by whichever Twitter employees are asked to step in and certify that Twitter is complying with the FTC’s orders going forward. A federal court recently made an example of Uber security chief Joe Sullivan, holding him criminally accountable for failing to disclose a breach to government officials.

Under the FTC consent decree, Twitter is required to have a senior leader or team of senior leaders who are personally accountable for making security and privacy decisions and a senior officer who certifies compliance with the FTC annually. If anything, it’s this grave risk to these people — not Musk himself — that may force Twitter to abide by the FTC’s rules.

“Why would anyone take the fall for him?! This isn't the mob. Some execs would [definitely] face personal liability for illegal acts,” tweeted Riana Pfefferkorn, a research scholar at the Stanford Internet Observatory and former outside counsel to Twitter. “He’s shown he’s not afraid of the SEC. But regular mortals *do* worry about jail and lawsuits. And he needs regular mortals.”

Lizzy Lawrence and Ben Brody contributed reporting.