FTX Founders Traced an Arc of Brotherhood and Betrayal

They’d come a long way together, from teenage mathletes to MIT frat brothers to crypto billionaires.

Now the feds were closing in on both — and one was going to turn on the other.

“We can make this work,” Sam Bankman-Fried said over Signal, an encrypted messaging app.

Gary Wang didn’t reply.

The time: mid-November, days after FTX collapsed. The place: a $40 million penthouse in the Caribbean — last stop, US authorities say, on a trail of lies stretching back to the very beginning of the men’s FTX cryptocurrency empire.

Wang, FTX’s software savant and ultimate secret-keeper, was holed up in ...