New FTX CEO is getting paid $1,300 an hour, and customers will foot the bill

John J. Ray, chief executive officer of FTX Cryptocurrency Derivatives Exchange, arrives to a House Financial Services Committee hearing investigating the collapse of FTX in Washington, DC, on Tuesday, Dec. 13, 2022.

FTX is paying millions of dollars to a team that John J. Ray has grown to know over the years of restructuring the company.

Ray and his team are not like other employees who work for the company. Unlike bankers and lawyers, the new leadership team are independent contractors. They get paid immediately before any FTX investors get their money back.

The new FTX CEO will be paid $1,300 an hour plus "reasonable expenses" for his work untangling what the U.S. Attorney described as one of the biggest frauds in American history. Assuming Ray works a standard 40-hour workweek for fifty weeks over a year, he can take two weeks of paid leave.

In one bankruptcy case Ray worked on, he billed around 156 hours in a two-month period, earning him $120,000, so his billings for FTX may be higher or lower.

When Ray took over as chairman and CEO of Enron in 2005, he collected less than a million dollars a year.

Ray has a tight team that has worked with him on at least three bankruptcies in the last 30 years, including the restructuring of Enron in the early 2000s, the restructuring of Nortel in 2009, and the overseas shipbuilding group in 2014).

The guns for hire are for bankruptcies.

• Kathryn Schultea, Chief Administrative Officer, who has worked with Ray since Enron. She is also the president and CEO of RLKS, and served at Enron and successor bankruptcy companies from 1999 to 2014, ultimately rising to assist Ray as Chief Administrative Officer in 2008.
• Mary Cilia, Chief Financial Officer
• Raj Perubhatla, Chief Information Officer

LKS is charging $975 an hour per person, or $5.85 million annually, for these other three leaders, who are contracted through a company that specializes in bankruptcy officers. Administrative, financial, and information technology efforts are overseen by the leaders from RLKS.

$4,225 an hour is the total for all four officers.

It could take months or years for FTX to recover all the assets it has. The restructuring of Enron took over a decade to complete. The proceedings are still going on 11 years later.