After the epic collapse of Sam Bankman Fried’s entire crypto empire this week, even Elon Musk is taking a moment from his empire. A very messy week at the head of Twitter to declare that he never trusted SBF, who resigned as CEO of FTX on Friday when the company was Filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy.
Bankman-Fried reached out to Musk back in March through intermediaries (in the case of SBF, William MacAskill was from the charitable arm of FTX’s Future Fund, which Closed on Friday) to express his interest in investing in the Musk Show on Twitter. This news came in September when Musk’s text messages leaked through a legal procedure.
Michael Grimes, the Musk banker on the Twitter deal from Morgan Stanley, told Musk at the time that SBF was offering “at least $3 billion” to help Musk buy Twitter, and wanted to talk about the possibility of “blockchain integration for social media.”
Musk Grimes asked, “Does Sam actually own $3 billion worth of liquid?”
On Friday night, as Crypto Twitter continued to re-circulate recent history involving SBF, a popular account sharing internal tech industry emails to Twitter once again. Musk replied, “Accurate. He fired my detector, which is why I didn’t think he had $3 billion.”
precise. He fired my detector, which is why I didn’t think he had $3 billion.
– Elon Musk 12 November 2022
Grimes spoke of Bankman-Fried’s offer to Musk, in a text message, “He’s in you…I think you’ll love it. Very genius and an efficient builder like your formula. Built FTX from scratch after MIT physics.”
Bankman-Fried was interested in helping engineer the blockchain version of Twitter. Although Musk is an advocate of cryptocurrency, he rejected this suggestion, telling Grimes that it is realistic, “Twitter Blockchain is not possible.” He added that he would only meet with the SBF “as long as I don’t have to have a hard discussion about blockchain.”
Grimes told Musk that even in the absence of a blockchain component, Bankman-Fried wanted to invest. Musk passed.
Of course, in light of the financial irregularities behind the scenes at FTX – which it was Using customer funds and its own FTT token To support SBF Alameda’s hedge fund – everyone is eager to distance themselves from the stench.
On October 27, Musk took control of Twitter.
The next two weeks saw FTX catch on fire after Changpeng “CZ” Zhao, CEO of rival Exchange Binance, announced that his company would Liquidate your FTX FTT Token. This drove down the price of FTT and prompted clients to withdraw $5 billion from FTX, which they did not have the cash to cover.
Musk, even during the general chaos of this week’s fake Twitter account crisis, did better than his Bankman Fried week.
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