Shark Tank’s Kevin O’Leary Shocks By Saying He Would ‘Still Back’ Sam Bankman-Fried: He’s a ‘Great Trader’
Venture capitalist and Shark Tank star Kevin O’Leary shockingly said he would still invest with Sam Bankman-Fried, who oversaw the spectacular collapse of FTX and the wiping out of billions of dollars in crypto, calling him a “great trader.”
FTX, a cryptocurrency exchange, filed for bankruptcy on Friday, and the repercussions have been astounding. Over 130 companies under the FTX Group, including Alameda research, are part of the massive filing, which caused a market panic and a massive crash in the value of crytocurrencies, with estimates putting the value lost in markets in the billions. And crypto has already lost around $2 trillion this year.
Millions of accounts have been frozen, with billions in customer funds “missing”, and the cascade effect has spread to other companies and crypto exchanges. Even more shockingly, the group’s filing may involve or affect over a million creditors — that’s holders of debt owed by any of the 130 companies in the FTX group.
In just the last two hours, Genesis, a major crypto lender, suspended withdrawals. The company made the announcement in a bleak Twitter thread.
Reports on Wednesday indicated the United States and the Bahamas are working together to possibly bring Bankman-Fried in for, um, questioning.
The fallout cannot be overstated, from charities to debtors to customers to markets to even celebrities who have pushed FTX. Celebrities like Kevin O’Leary, who has been a paid spokesman for the company.
Speaking on the YouTube show Crypto Banker on Tuesday, “Mr. Wonderful” called Sam Bankman-Fried (SBF) brilliant and a “good person.”
Host Ran Neuner asked O’Leary, if SBF “knocked on your door again and said, ‘look I failed in my last venture, I have a new crypto venture, I need money.’ Would you back him?”
“I think we can all admit — you can love him or hate him, given what’s happened — but he was one of the most brilliant traders in the crypto universe. He also built one of the most robust platforms. We used FTX actively. It was a very robust platform that allowed us to get information on a compliant basis, so I really liked what he built,” said O’Leary.
“Would you back him?” Neuner asked again.
“The answer would be yes,” said O’Leary.
A clip of that moment went unflatteringly viral from several social media accounts on Wednesday.
Gizmodo on Wednesday said that, in addition to the mismanagement and misleading customers, investors, and debtors, Bankman-Fried may have violated the law. And that O’Leary is treating that “incredibly illegal and fraudulent act as some kind of oopsie-daisy”:
SBF used at least $10 billion in FTX customer funds to prop up his hedge fund Alameda Research, according to Reuters, a move that’s very much against the law. And that’s to say nothing of what FTX was counting as assets, which have to be counted as fraud by any plain reading of the word. FTX was using fake money it created in the form of two tokens, FTT and Serum, and passing those off as real money.
Watch the clips above, via Crypto Banker on YouTube.
