After the epic collapse of Sam Bankman-Fried’s whole crypto empire this week, even Elon Musk took a second from his extraordinarily chaotic week on the helm of Twitter to declare that he by no means trusted SBF, who stepped down as CEO of FTX on Friday when the corporate filed for Chapter 11 chapter.
Bankman-Fried reached out to Musk again in March by way of their intermediaries (in SBF’s case it was William MacAskill from FTX’s Future Fund philanthropic arm, which shut down on Friday) to specific his curiosity in investing in Musk’s bid for Twitter. That information got here out in September when Musk’s textual content messages leaked by way of a authorized continuing.
Musk’s banker on the Twitter deal, Michael Grimes from Morgan Stanley, informed Musk on the time that SBF was providing “not less than $3 billion” to assist Musk purchase Twitter, and needed to speak concerning the potential for “social media blockchain integration.”
Musk requested Grimes, “Does Sam even have $3B liquid?”
On Friday night time, as Crypto Twitter continued to have a discipline day re-circulating current historical past involving SBF, a preferred account that shares inner tech trade emails tweeted out the alternate once more. Musk replied, “Correct. He set off my bs detector, which is why I didn’t suppose he had $3B.”
Grimes had talked up Bankman-Fried’s provide to Musk, texting, “He is into you… I do consider you’ll like him. Extremely genius and doer builder like your formulation. Constructed FTX from scratch after MIT physics.”
Bankman-Fried was enthusiastic about serving to to engineer a blockchain model of Twitter. Musk, regardless of being a crypto advocate, shot that proposal down, telling Grimes matter-of-factly, “Blockchain twitter is not attainable.” He added he would solely meet with SBF “as long as I haven’t got to have a laborious blockchain debate.”
Grimes informed Musk that even absent the blockchain part, Bankman-Fried needed to speculate. Musk handed.
After all, in gentle of the monetary malfeasance behind the scenes at FTX—which was utilizing buyer funds and its personal FTT token to prop up SBF’s hedge fund Alameda—everybody is raring to distance themselves from the stench.
On October 27, Musk took management of Twitter.
The following two weeks noticed FTX go up in flames after Changpeng “CZ” Zhao, CEO of rival alternate Binance, introduced his firm would liquidate its holdings of FTX’s FTT token. That tanked the value of FTT and prompted $5 billion of buyer withdrawals from FTX, which did not have the liquidity to cowl.
Musk, even by way of the general public mess of Twitter’s faux account disaster this week, actually had a greater week than Bankman-Fried.