Hi, I'm Sam Kessler

I was the lead reporter in a Wall Street Journal investigation which revealed that Sheikh Tahnoon bin Zayed Al Nahyan — the UAE's national security adviser and manager of its largest wealth fund, known as the "spy sheikh" — secretly signed a deal to purchase a 49% stake in the Trump family's World Liberty Financial crypto venture for half a billion dollars. The deal was signed by Eric Trump just four days before his father's inauguration.

The report showed that at least $187 million was slated to flow to Trump family entities, with an additional $31 million earmarked for entities affiliated with the family of Steve Witkoff. Months after the deal, the U.S. agreed to give the UAE access to 500,000 of America's most advanced AI chips per year.

The story dominated the national news cycle, sparking congressional probes and widespread scrutiny of conflicts of interest in the Trump administration.

In this investigation for the Wall Street Journal with colleague Julie Jargon, I reported on a murder-suicide in Greenwich, Connecticut, in which a 56-year-old man killed his 83-year-old mother after extensive conversations with ChatGPT that reinforced his paranoid delusions. The case appears to be the first documented murder involving a troubled person who had been engaging extensively with an AI chatbot.

Our reporting showed how ChatGPT validated the man's fears rather than challenging them — assuring him he was "not crazy" and affirming conspiracy theories about poisoning and hidden messages. The man had dubbed the chatbot "Bobby" and relied on it as a confidant as his mental health deteriorated.

The story prompted a wrongful death lawsuit against OpenAI and Microsoft and contributed to growing national concern about AI chatbots and mental health.

In this longform investigation, I discovered more than a dozen instances of crypto companies in the U.S. and abroad hiring undercover North Korean software developers — part of a coordinated scheme by the Kim regime to evade sanctions and funnel money from high-paying foreign tech jobs to the state's nuclear program. Additionally, I used blockchain data to prove North Korean hires were behind the multi-million dollar heist of a major crypto firm.

To identify North Korean developers at crypto protocols, I built custom blockchain tracing software to find pathways between crypto companies and suspected DPRK blockchain wallets. To confirm my reporting, I uncovered FBI emails and conducted interviews with dozens of blockchain founders, employees and researchers.

Eleven companies, including well-known crypto firms, confirmed my reporting on record, publicly disclosing for the first time that they had inadvertently hired North Korean workers.

My report described North Korea's methods in detail, and I published some of the fake IDs, passports, resumes and headshots used by undercover DPRK developers to access to crypto companies.

The investigation sent shockwaves through the industry, showing North Korean developers are far more ubiquitous in crypto than previously recognized.

Through extensive document analysis and source development, I exposed secretive financial arrangements at Movement, a high-profile crypto project in World Liberty Financial's portfolio. My investigation uncovered internal contracts revealing how the project orchestrated a token pump-and-dump scheme through hidden market-making agreements designed to exploit retail investors.

The fallout was immediate and severe: one co-founder was fired, another resigned, and Coinbase delisted the token, triggering a 70% price collapse. The documents I obtained provided unprecedented evidence of how even "legitimate" Silicon Valley-backed crypto startups were manipulating markets.

My reporting dominated the crypto news cycle for days and sparked industry-wide calls for greater transparency. The investigation was particularly significant because it provided concrete documentation of practices that had long been suspected but never before proven with direct evidence.

I was the lead reporter on CoinDesk's investigation into Trump's World Liberty Financial crypto project, obtaining internal company documents that enabled our team break details of the venture—and the controversial cast of characters behind it—to the world for the first time.

Our coverage made waves in industry circles and also broke out into the mainstream, with citations from The New York Times, AP News, Wired, Bloomberg, CBS and many others. Our stories even got a shoutout on Last Week Tonight with John Oliver.

In a series of articles throughout 2024, I used a combination of data reporting techniques and conventional reporting methods to discover conflicts of interest, investor fraud, and ethical lapses at major crypto companies and venture firms.

I found that a partner at Polychain, a top-tier crypto VC, accepted a $13 million bribe from Eclipse, a buzzy crypto startup, in exchange for the fund's pariticipation in a $50 million Series A funding round.

My colleague Danny Nelson and I traced blockchain payments to uncover a major conflict of interest scandal at EigenLayer, 2024's most prominent crypto startup. The company secretly pressured smaller projects to kick back tokens to its employees.

I discovered that the CEO of a crypto casino backed by Galaxy Digital, a big-name crypto VC, secretly gambled away virtually all of the company's funds.

Several of my reports went viral among crypto insiders, sparking an industry-wide reckoning concerning conflicts of interest, and driving policy changes at some major venture firms and companies.

CoinDesk's Ian Allison leaked the internal company balance sheet that led to the collapse of Sam Bankman-Fried's crypto empire, and I earned a 2023 Gerald Loeb Award in Beat Reporting for contributions to our team's coverage of the FTX collapse and its fallout. In addition to publishing scoops, analysis and breaking news in the wake of FTX's collapse, I attended every day of the Sam Bankman-Fried trial and helped lead our agenda-setting court coverage.

CoinDesk's FTX coverage made us the paper of record for one of the largest financial frauds in history, and my own reporting was regularly referenced by many of the largest mainstream outlets.

Terra was the $40 billion stablecoin ecosystem that crashed the entire crypto market when it collapsed in 2023. On the eve of Terra's collapse, I scooped that the project's controversial creator, Do Kwon, had secretly masterminded a previous crypto blowup under a pseudonym. My investigation, co-authored with colleague Danny Nelson, made a huge splash when it was published. Some consider it the final "nail in the coffin" leading to Terra's demise.

I was in the middle of a weeks-long investigation into Terra's founders and flaws in its "algorithm" before it imploded, so I was in a good spot to lead our coverage of the incident as the project fell to zero, its founder was arrested, and the Chicago trading giant Jump was implicated in the fallout.

My Terra stories were cited by New York Magazine, Financial Times and Bloomberg (including Matt Levine's Money Stuff), among others.