Anthony Scaramucci, the founder of SkyBridge Capital, shared his account of the final days of failed cryptocurrency exchange FTX during a panel discussion at Consensus 2023. Scaramucci claimed that most FTX employees were unaware of what the company’s executives were doing behind closed doors until it was too late. He recalled hearing negative comments made by FTX CEO Sam Bankman-Fried about Binance CEO Changpeng Zhao, which prompted CZ to sell his share of FTX Tokens.
However, Scaramucci argued that CZ was not to blame for FTX’s collapse, stating that if Bankman-Fried had run the business appropriately, it would have survived. Scaramucci wanted to help FTX when he learned of a liquidity problem but later realized that there was something more serious going on. He described FTX as a fraud and not just a victim of liquidity crises brought on by market events, with three of the four implicated executives having already pled guilty.