- Anthony Scaramucci has rebuffed claims that Binance CEO Changpeng Zhao torpedoed FTX
- Scaramucci said that Sam Bankman-Fried was the master of his own downfall with his actions
- Scaramucci sold a 30% stake in his company Skybridge Capital to FTX Ventures just eight weeks before the exchange went bust
SkyBridge Capital founder Anthony Scaramucci has rebuffed claims that Binance CEO Changpeng Zhao torpedoed FTX, saying that Sam Bankman-Fried was the master of his own downfall. Scaramucci, who sold a 30% stake in his company to FTX Ventures just eight weeks before the exchange went bust, told Consensus 2023 that the suggestion that Binance was somehow responsible for the collapse of FTX is wide of the mark, with his visit to see Bankman-Fried in early November telling him all he needed to know.
Scaramucci Met With Bankman-Fried During Collapse
Scaramucci told Consensus that he first heard that FTX was in trouble on November 7, with Bankman-Fried’s father telling him that the company faced an “asset-liability mismatch” of roughly $1 billion, but that all that was needed was time to liquidate some illiquid assets to continue meeting redemptions.
However, in a matter of hours that number exploded to $4.5 billion, which prompted Scaramucci to fly to the Bahamas to personally meet with Bankman-Fried and get a first-hand account of what was going on, which was when he realized that something big was going down:
The war room looked despondent. It was clear to a few people that there was a very small group of people that had done something that they didn’t let the other group of people into.
We now know of course that Alameda and FTX were sitting in billions of dollars of risky FTT tokens and that the two companies had been commingling and misappropriating funds, leading to the exchange being insolvent.
Scaramucci said that he still “likes Sam,” but recognized that his actions amounted to a betrayal. He disagreed with the assessment of Kevi O’Leary that Binance pulling out of a deal to buy FTX was the cause of its collapse, saying that this is “not the case,” which most reasonable people agree with.
