Shark Tank star Kevin O’Leary has exposed a cell phone conversation he had with former FTX CEO Sam Bankman-Fried following the crypto exchange misplaced client money.
Speaking beneath oath ahead of the US House of Representatives Financial Services Committee, the former FTX spokesman described a conversation he had with Bankman-Fried final month following realizing his dollars was no longer in his FTX account. mine.
O’Leary mentioned,
“After my accounts were stripped of all my assets and all accounting and transactional information, I didn’t get any reply from any of the executives in the company, so I just called Sam Bankman-Fried and said, ‘Where’s the money, Sam? He said he was denied access to the server, he can’t remember. I said ‘okay, let’s step back’. This is a simple case in my mind of ‘where did the money go?’ I said, ‘Sam, take me back 24 months, tell me the use of the proceeds of your company’s assets. Where did you spend it?’”
According to the venture capitalist, Bankman-Fried exposed to him that Binance had bought a twenty% stake in FTX in the previous and that he was getting back these shares from Binance for $two to $three billion.
“I didn’t know it at the time, but at some point, [Changpeng Zhao]The Binance exec bought a 20% ownership interest in Sam Bankman-Fried’s startup, and then over time — and I asked him ‘what made you spend $2 billion? … Then in a follow-up conversation about 24 hours later, he told me that it could take up to $3 billion to buy back shares of the company. [Zhao]. I asked him ‘what would force you to do that? Why not keep your assets on the balance sheet and why only give it to one shareholder?’”
According to O’Leary, Bankman-Fried mentioned Zhao would not give the needed regulatory information from pertinent jurisdictions to FTX, forcing the business to obtain Binance, resulting in a huge blow to the stability sheet. accounting counterpart.
Apparently, in accordance to Sam Bankman-Fried, [Zhao] will not comply with the necessities of regulatory authorities in these a variety of jurisdictions to give information which will indemnify them for licensing. He held back… the only solution left for management and Sam Bankman-Fried was to obtain him back at an extraordinary valuation… strip the stability sheet of assets.”
In O’leary’s see, the demise of FTX was largely due to Binance’s actions in a possibly aggressive marketplace action.
“My point of view, my personal view, these two giants who jointly own the unregulated market and these amazingly developed companies have been at war with each other and one side has purposely eliminated the other. remaining. Now, there may be nothing wrong with that, there may be nothing wrong with love and war, but Binance is now a huge, unregulated global monopoly. They declared FTX bankrupt.”
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