From his prison cell at FCI Lompoc, Sam Bankman-Fried (SBF) is running the same Donald Trump-cheerleading play that Pam Bondi ran right before Trump fired her. He’s joined Bondi on team “Dow 50K.”
The convicted FTX fraudster’s proxy-run X account posted on Wednesday that the S&P 500 had hit a record level of 7,365. The index, the ex-FTX CEO claimed, had rallied an impressive 22.8% since Trump’s second inauguration.
At the corresponding time during Joe Biden’s presidency, it was up just 7%.
The post pulled more than 1.5 million views and tagged @realDonaldTrump, as nearly all of SBF’s recent posts do.
It is a near-perfect echo of the rhetorical move that turned Bondi’s glaze into a meme.
At her February 2026 House Judiciary hearing on the Department of Justice’s handling of the Jeffrey Epstein files, the then-US attorney general abruptly pivoted away from questions about the files.
Instead of responding, she started reciting stock index prices instead, reminding lawmakers that the Dow Jones Industrial Average index was over 50,000, the S&P near 7,000, and that Americans’ 401(k) retirement accounts were “booming.”
The clip of her desperate attempt to defend Trump went viral.
Dow 50K became a meme
Despite her attempts to defend Trump amid a Congressional inquiry into her own mismanagement, Trump fired her on April 2.
SBF is serving 25 years for stealing roughly $8 billion from FTX customers. Despite Trump’s repeated denials to pardon him, he’s apparently undeterred, including by Bondi’s cautionary tale.
The former FTX head’s post yesterday isn’t a one-off occurrence.
For weeks, he’s been posting similar Trump-Biden comparisons. On April 27, his account wrote that the S&P had hit 7,174. The breakdown was 19.6% under Trump versus 8.6% at the same point under Biden.
The format was identical to yesterday’s post. So was the implicit pitch.
Read more: Sam Bankman-Fried had a plan to get out of prison, and he’s following it
Like Pam Bondi, SBF glazes to an audience of one
That pitch is, of course, for a presidential pardon.
SBF’s parents, both former Stanford Law professors, have reportedly lobbied figures in Trump’s orbit for a pardon or clemency since last year. The president declined that proposition in a January New York Times interview, and a White House spokesperson restated his denial to Fortune a month later.
Lawmakers from both parties have described the plea as dead on arrival.
None of these headwinds have slowed SBF’s proxy-posts to his 1 million followers, however. The output of his comments from prison, since February, has converged on a single editorial line. Namely, that everything is better under Trump.
SBF still has 18 years left to serve of his sentence.
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