The week that FTX collapsed in 2022, the father of Nishad Singh, one of the crypto exchange’s top executives, arrived at the airport to pick him up.
His son, who had just turned 27, appeared suicidal. “Nishad was a shell of himself, completely destroyed by his guilt,” Gururaj Singh, a veteran tech executive, recalled in a recent court filing.
For the next five months, the elder Mr. Singh, now 63, put his career on hold to focus on his son’s mental health. “Every minute I was not next to him, I worried that I would be told by someone that he had just ended his life,” he wrote.
He also had to come to terms with an alarming fact: His son, a talented software engineer who had graduated with the highest honors from the University of California, Berkeley, was a criminal. Nishad Singh had helped oversee a sweeping conspiracy that erased $8 billion from FTX’s books, plunging the company into bankruptcy, draining customers’ savings and prompting a slew of criminal investigations centered on Sam Bankman-Fried, the founder of FTX.
The younger Mr. Singh pleaded guilty to fraud last year. On Wednesday, he is scheduled to be sentenced for his role in FTX’s implosion, making him the third of the company’s top leaders to receive a punishment.
Each of those cases has illustrated an emotional subplot of the FTX drama: the plight of the conspirators’ parents, a group of wealthy academics and high-achieving immigrants who were heavily involved in their adult children’s lives. Before the crypto exchange failed, they had all lived versions of the upper-middle-class dream, raising children who coasted from selective schools into high-paying jobs. Now they are consumed by sadness and disbelief, struggling to understand how such a fate could have befallen families like theirs.
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