Billionaires lose billions: What's happening with Elon Musk and Sam Bankman-Fried?
In a matter of weeks, two major players in the tech industry have seen their net worth drop by billions of dollars — partly the result of their own business decisions.
Sam Bankman-Fried, the now former CEO of crypto exchange FTX, reportedly had a net worth of roughly $24 billion in March and $16 billion as recently as Nov. 7, but no longer even qualifies for a listing on the Bloomberg Billionaires Index. Some reports suggest that with his stakes in crypto and stock trading platform Robinhood, FTX companies, and Alameda Research, SBF could be facing serious financial difficulties in the days to come.
Many of the ripple effects from liquidity issues at FTX spread throughout the crypto space within a week. Bankman-Fried said on Nov. 7 that “assets are fine” at FTX in a now-deleted tweet, dismissing many of the reports on the firm’s liquidity as “false rumors.” He subsequently announced that FTX was working on a potential arrangement with Binance to address the “liquidity crunch,” but the deal fell apart within 48 hours. SBF resigned and announced FTX was filing for bankruptcy in the U.S. less than two days later.
“FTX now joins the infamous club of centralized crypto entities that went bust this cycle because they took enormous liberties not only with its customers’ funds but also with ethics, integrity, and the very ideals of crypto,” Anto Paroian, CEO and executive director of crypto hedge fund ARK36, told Cointelegraph. “Hopefully, both the industry as a whole and individual crypto users will be able to learn and grow from this experience.”
In contrast, Tesla CEO and still the world’s richest person Elon Musk had been teasing an acquisition of social media platform Twitter for months, leading many to speculate the
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