Did Sam Bankman-Fried write a post on X, offering Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez money in bitcoins to fund a 2028 presidential run? No, that's not true: As of this writing, there was no such post on his account. No credible media organizations published reports about the purported entry.
The claim appeared in a post (archived here) published on February 24, 2026. It showed what looked like a screenshot of another social media entry that read:
@SBEFTXHa, hope you guys enjoyed that thing where I pretended to be a Republican. Pretty fun bit, huh? Lol. I was joking. Anyway, AOC-or should I say 'Future Ms. President'?--if you check your DMs I have sent you a VERY interesting sequence of alphanumeric characters that I think you'll find handy when your 2028 campaign (which I wholeheartedly support) finds itself a BIT light when it comes to having enough COIN to pay for ads. Anyway.
This is how the shared image appeared on X at the time of writing:
(Image source: Lead Stories screenshot of post at x.com/ByrneHobart)
What is seen above was presented as a reply to an entry (archived here) about the White House's refusal (archived here) to issue a presidential pardon to Sam Bankman-Fried, the founder of the cryptocurrency exchange FTX sentenced to 25 years in prison earlier for misuse of his customers' funds (archived here).
The account whose name appeared in the supposed screenshot, @SBF_FTX, is Bankman-Fried's account. According to its self-description, it is currently maintained by "others" told through "BOP-approved phone calls" "what to post on our socials" (archived here).
Yet, the account showed no posts from February 24, 2026, the entry's supposed publication date.
Searches on X for terms "AOC" (archived here), "Future Ms. President" (archived here) and "VERY interesting sequence of alphanumeric characters" (archived here) across that account showed no matches.
A Google search (archived here) for the same phrases across Bankman-Fried's account on X using the "site:" search operator returned no results, indicating that Google didn't recently index such a post (archived here).
A search across Google News (archived here) for Bankman-Fried's and AOC's full names between the post's supposed publication date and this writing showed no news coverage discussing the purported entry.
Furthermore, all screenshots of the supposed post showed exactly the same view count and background. If the post had been real, the expectation would be that there would be variations showing different view counts and/or layouts (e.g. night vs. day mode, mobile vs. web interface).
Lead Stories manually reviewed recent posts on Bankman-Fried's account on X and did not find any suggestions that he would be willing to donate specifically to U.S. Rep. Ocasio-Cortez (archived here) in 2026. Contrary to the claim reviewed in this article, Bankman-Fried wrote on February 20, 2026 (archived here):
9) Myth: After Biden's SEC throttled crypto & Biden's DOJ railroaded me, I remained center-left.
Truth: By late 2022, I was a Republican & giving more to the Right than the Left.
