My bet is that he lost his back country. He was until recently the front-person for a hugely successful enterprise who donated money extremely broadly. Back then he could have yelled "I run a goddamn ponzi scheme" into the loudspeaker of huge credible news outlets and they would have edited to "Master genius is going to revolutionize everything through revolutionary crypto". He's speaking into the same loudspeaker because he still thinks the message that got through back then was due to his skills as a communicator and not because... they where all on the receiving end of the cash flow he was throwing around every which direction. But obviously anyone who was receiving money back and writing favorable about him back then will do their best to distance themselves now.
Case in point, quote from article: (Disclosure: This August, Bankman-Fried’s philanthropic family foundation, Building a Stronger Future, awarded Vox’s Future Perfect a grant for a 2023 reporting project. That project is now on pause.)
Which basically says they where on the payroll. Obviously they aren't going to pay the money back. You have to wonder what great articles about SBF they would have printed in a completely unbiased fashion if not for the implosion.
Why would skilled manipulator effective altruist SBF do this? He made a big gamble using customer funds to try and keep his business running. This is kind of like his coinflip thought experiment where he would risk the world to gain a second world. His gamble blows up and he loses everything. What's the most effective thing he can do now? Fall on his own sword, discredit himself as an evil charlatan, in an attempt to try and save face for the philosophy he actually believes in.
"No, I'm not really an effective altruist. I'm actually just evil and dumb. Hehe."
I would assign very low probability to this - but it is an explanation that explains, to some extent, his actions here.
Maybe all those stimulants have taken their toll. Or he's totally given up.