Bankman-Fried: The Tragedy America Is Now Paying to Watch on Stage
Once hailed as the boy genius of crypto, Sam Bankman-Fried has officially joined the ranks of American tragedy; not in court, but on stage.
In a twist that even Silicon Valley couldn’t have predicted, the disgraced founder of FTX is now a fictional inmate in Luigi: The Musical, a satirical stage production that reimagines him sharing a cell with none other than Sean “Diddy” Combs and Luigi Mangione, the alleged killer of a health insurance CEO.
Yes, that’s a sentence we just wrote in 2025.
Staged in a modest 49-seat San Francisco theater, the dark comedy was intended as a fringe experiment. Instead, it sold out in under 24 hours. Apparently, nothing says “must-see” like a crypto villain delivering TED Talk-style monologues from a prison bunk bed.
And that’s exactly what SBF does, through the actor André Margatini, who plays him as a cross between a Palo Alto trust-fund philosopher and an oblivious tech cult leader.
Tokenizing Regret, Literally
Of course, no crypto satire is complete without some blockchain mockery. At one point, Margatini’s SBF offers to “tokenize incarceration” as a bribe to a prison guard. The audience laughed, but you just know somewhere, a DAO founder took notes.
The show’s timing might raise a few eyebrows. While Combs and Mangione await trial, Bankman-Fried is appealing his conviction. But that didn’t stop the audience from giving standing ovations.
From Hero to Meme
Bankman-Fried once graced Forbes covers, rubbed elbows with politicians, and donated millions in what he considered “effective altruism.” Now, he’s comic relief in a musical where his defining traits are unwashed hair, questionable ethics, and the inability to read a room—or a balance sheet.
If this all feels surreal, that’s because it is. But so was watching FTX unravel in real time.
The musical’s creator, Jonny Stein, told CNN the show explores “systems at large”, healthcare, tech, entertainment. But let’s be honest: the system it critiques most effectively is the one that let Bankman-Fried go from crypto messiah to financial arsonist, with barely a speed bump in between.
Coming Soon: The Netflix Deal?
“Luigi: The Musical” now has a sixth performance scheduled at The Independent, a venue five times the size of the original theater. If the crypto community needed a symbol of irony to mark its post-SBF era, this might be it: the man who tokenized everything, now reduced to a punchline in a play about consequences.
As for SBF? He’s currently serving time in a low-security prison in Los Angeles. No word yet on whether his cellmates have seen the show. But if they have, I hope they laughed because the rest of us certainly are.
Jokes aside, beneath the humor and musical numbers, lies a darker truth:
One of the most sacred responsibilities in life is being trusted with someone else’s money because it’s never just money.
It’s years of work, sacrifices, missed vacations, side hustles, and sleepless nights. It’s parents trying to save for their children’s future, retirees counting on stability, young people taking their first leap into investing. And when that trust is broken, it doesn’t stop at financial loss. It spirals into anxiety, depression, broken families, and lost dreams.
People don’t just lose money; they lose time and effort they’ll never get back. So no matter how witty the monologues or how catchy the songs, fraud is not a plot twist. It’s real harm. And it’s never okay.
