'The war room was despondent' — Scaramucci recounts FTX collapse at Consensus
On April 27, SkyBridge Capital founder Anthony Scaramucci revealed what the final days of FTX were like, claiming that most employees of the failed crypto exchange probably didn’t know what its executives were doing behind closed doors until it was too late.
In a panel discussion called “FTX: What Happened?” at Consensus 2023, Scaramucci gave a detailed narrative of what happened from his perspective. The SkyBridge founder said he remembers hearing that FTX CEO Sam Bankman-Fried had commented negatively about Binance CEO Changpeng “CZ” Zhao.
Scaramucci claimed that CZ responded by selling his share of FTX Tokens. However, CZ's stated reason for unloading FTX Tokens was “post-exit risk management,“ likely because he reviewed a leaked balance sheet of the company showing a concerning connection between FTX and sister company Alameda Research. However, Scaramucci was emphatic in stating that CZ did not cause the bankruptcy of FTX, explaining:
Scaramucci said that on Nov. 6 or 7, he had just returned from giving a speech in Florida. After speaking to Bankman-Freid’s father, he learned that there was some kind of liquidity problem at FTX. He thought the exchange had the assets to repay depositors but that these assets could not be sold quickly, threatening to force the exchange to halt withdrawals.
Scaramucci wanted to help the exchange, he said. But “later in the evening, that number went from 1 billion to 4.5 billion,” referring to the dollar amount of the liquidity shortfall. This convinced him that something more serious was going on at the exchange. He immediately booked a flight to the Bahamas to visit FTX headquarters and discover what was happening. When he arrived, “The war room was despondent, and I would say that it
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