Elon Musk and Mark Cuban leave it to Sam Bankman-Fried. The heavyweight tech billionaires slammed the 30-year-old former CEO of crypto exchange FTX, who resigned yesterday as the company filed for bankruptcy – and as customers grappled with the possibility they may never get their money back.
Musk, the CEO of Tesla and SpaceX, tweeted Friday night, “The FTX meltdown/looting is being followed in real-time on Twitter.”
As Fortune reported in late September, Musk appeared to be covering up an offer of up to $15 billion from Bankman-Fried’s advisors while he sought partners for his $44 billion acquisition of Twitter. At the time, Musk appeared to have doubts about Bankman-Fried’s financial position.
Earlier today, Musk added the following to his doubts in a Twitter space, as reported by CoinBase:
“To be honest, I had never heard of him. But then I got a lot of people telling me [that] he has huge sums of money he wants to invest in the Twitter deal. And I talked to him for about half an hour. And I know my bullshit meter was redlining. It was like, this guy is bullshit – that was my impression.
“Then I was like, man, everyone, including the big investment banks, everyone was talking about him like he was walking on water and he had a million dollars. And the [was] not my impression…this guy is just – there’s something wrong and he has no capital and he’s not going to pull through. That was my prediction.”
Cuban, a shark tank star and investor in crypto and blockchain-related platforms, has been no less tough. Speaking Friday at a conference hosted by Sports Business Journal, the Dallas Mavericks owner had harsh words for Bankman-Fried:
“First you have to understand crypto. There’s speculation – that’s all the noise. Then there are things that happened to me [crypto platform] Voyager, and now with FTX – that’s someone running a company that’s as stupid as it is bloody greedy. So what does Sam Bankman do? He just gives me more, gives me more, gives me more, so I borrow money, loan it to my affiliate and hope and fool myself that the FTT tokens that are there on my balance sheet will get their worth.”
Cuban was accused in a court case in August of tricking investors into signing up for accounts with Voyager Digital, a crypto platform that filed for bankruptcy in July.
He tweeted about the on Saturday morning Demise of Crypto Entities:
“These explosions weren’t crypto explosions, they were banking explosions. Lending to the wrong company, mispricing of collateral, arrogant arrogance followed by depositors. See long-term capital, savings and loans, and subprime blowups. All different versions of the same story.”
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