Sam Bankman-Fried (SBF) , founder and CEO of cryptocurrency exchange FTX, could cash out as much as $100 million from Musk’s acquisition of Twitter.
“The Block” quoted people familiar with the matter as saying that before Musk completed the acquisition, SBF held about $50 million to $100 million worth of Twitter shares, and Musk paid $44 billion to take Twitter private, meaning SBF held about $44 billion in shares. 0.1% to 0.2% stake.
In response to the above news, FTX declined to comment, and Twitter did not respond to a request for comment.
The source also said that SBF had intended to participate in Musk’s acquisition of Twitter, but ultimately did not invest, and SBF told Musk after the two calls that he was no longer interested in participating in the acquisition of Twitter.
According to a series of documents released last month , SBF adviser William MacAskill tried to arrange a meeting between the two in March of this year, but Musk seemed to be skeptical about “whether SBF’s pockets are deep enough” and even asked “whether SBF has huge funds.”
William MacAskill responded at the time, saying that the FTX co-founder and CEO was worth about $24 billion and was willing to invest $8 billion to $15 billion, but changed his words a month later to invest $5 billion.
Musk, however, seemed less interested in the deal because he didn’t want to engage in “a tough blockchain debate” with SBF.
On the other hand, FTX competitor Binance has now officially taken a stake in Twitter. Binance founder and CEO Changpeng Zhao (CZ) said last week that Binance had contributed $500 million to the deal. At the acquisition price of $44 billion, Binance currently owns about 1.1% of Twitter.
Changpeng Zhao noted that as part of its investment, Binance will contribute to the convergence of social media and Web3 to expand the application and acceptance of cryptocurrencies and blockchain technology