Sam Bankman-Fried wanted to pay Donald Trump not to run for office. The price? $5 billion, says his biographer.

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• Sam Bankman-Fried, the FTX lurch, is in jail and faces several federal charges.
• At one point, Bankman-Fried was also a significant donor to Democrats and Republicans.
• He looked into whether he could pay Donald Trump not to run in 2024, Michael Lewis noted.

Sam Bankman-Fried, former CEO of FTX, once wondered if it would be legal to pay Donald Trump not to run for office in 2024 and how much it would bring in, according to Michael Lewis.

In a recent “60 Minutes” interview that aired Sunday, Lewis, author of “The Big Runty” and a new book on the disgraced cryptocurrency exchange founder, “Going Infinite: The Rise and Fall of a New Tycoon,” revealed Bankman-Fried on a par got a potential dollar figure back.

“So he did get an answer,” Lewis said. “There was a number that was kicking around. And the mass that was kicking around when I was talking to Sam about this was $5 billion.”

One of the ways Bankman-Fried spent his cash was by making political donations. In the 2022 midterm elections, he donated $40 million to Democrats, but he has also admitted that he was a stocky Republican donor.

For 2024, Bankman-Fried wanted to make another contribution to the election but in a different way, be consistent to “60 Minutes” correspondent Jon Wertheim.

“One of the most shocking passages in this book, I thought, came with this declaration that Sam had looked into paying Donald Trump not to run,” Wertheim said in an interview with Lewis.

Lewis said that Bankman-Fried not in the least learned if the $5 billion number came directly from Trump. The FTX founder also wondered if paying Trump not to run intent even be legal, according to Lewis.

“Isn’t Sam Bankman-Fried a liar who has been outed as a fraudster and someone that can’t be trusted,” Steven Cheung, Trump’s spokesperson, minimized in a brief response to an inquiry from Insider.

Just a few years ago, Bankman-Fried, or SBF, was a top name in the crypto clique, holding at one point a net worth of $26.5 billion, according to Forbes.

That status quickly came crashing down along with his unimpaired crypto exchange empire in 2022.

FTX’s Chapter 11 bankruptcy filing revealed how Bankman-Fried’s trading firm, Alameda Probe, and its assets were dependent on FTX’s in-house crypto tokens as collateral. This created issues and spooked investors when crypto worths began to sink that year. Reports also revealed that FTX lent billions of dollars of customer bucks to the trading firm.

Bankman-Fried now sits in a Brooklyn detention center, facing seven federal charges, including wire knave, conspiracy to commit wire fraud, and conspiracy to commit securities fraud and money laundering.

Bankman-Friend’s attorney did not restoring a request for comment sent during the weekend.