“You decided to use Alameda bank accounts to accept FTX customer money, right?” Ms Sassoon requested.

“Yes,” Mr Bankman-Fried stated.

“You didn’t tell your employees, ‘don’t spend the FTX customer deposits’, right?” she requested.

“I didn’t. I deeply regret not taking a deeper look into it,” he replied.

He repeatedly quibbled with the wording of statements, or denied saying them in any respect. One after one other, Ms Sassoon pulled up information tales, interviews and Mr Bankman-Fried’s personal tweets to indicate what he actually stated.

In follow-up questions, Mr Bankman-Fried’s lawyer Mark Cohen tried to restore the injury from cross-examination, permitting his consumer to develop on his solutions to Ms Sassoon.

“I don’t think there was a clear point or decision at which a person or group of people decided to spend particular dollars,” he stated. “There are a lot of things I don’t think I would be able to define about how I would answer that question.”

A jury may resolve Mr Bankman-Fried’s destiny as early as this week after proof within the multi-billion-dollar alleged fraud case concluded. The 31-year-old was the ultimate witness and shutting statements from the prosecution and defence are set for Wednesday earlier than jury deliberations begin.

Financial skilled Gary Tidwell, who attended the 2009 sentencing of fraudster Bernie Madoff, stated exterior court docket that these statements would probably zero in on the idea of “wilful blindness”.

“This is the idea that you can’t turn a blind eye – you can’t be Colonel Klink in Hogan’s Heroes and say ‘I know nothing’,” stated Mr Tidwell, a senior advisor on the International Organisation of Securities Commissions and a former vp on the Financial Industry Regulatory Authority.

“I think the prosecution will focus on this and the judge will give instructions to the jury on this.”

About 80 spectators packed into the court docket’s spillover room on Tuesday to look at the previous wunderkind be subjected to the painstaking cross-examination. Author Michael Lewis, who has simply written a guide on the FTX crypto mogul and spent months with him within the Bahamas, was there.

So too Australian entrepreneur David Tonkin, who instructed The Australian Financial Review exterior the court docket that the trial was “one of the best forms of free entertainment you can get in New York”.

“I have just found it fascinating to watch a young man who lost it all, who didn’t follow good business procedures and will now probably end up in jail for 30 years,” he stated.

Mr Bankman-Fried faces a most 20-year jail sentence for the fees of wire fraud, wire fraud conspiracy and cash laundering conspiracy costs, whereas the commodities’ fraud, securities fraud and marketing campaign finance conspiracy costs every carry a most five-year sentence.