According to several reports, FTX CEO Sam Bankman-Fried had a $50 million to $100 million interest in Twitter.
The CEO and founder of the cryptocurrency exchange FTX, Sam Bankman-Fried, stands to gain up to $100 million from Elon Musk’s acquisition of Twitter.
Before the transaction closed on Thursday, the exchange executive had shares of the social media behemoth valued between $50 million and $100 million, a source with intimate knowledge of the situation told The Block.
Bankman-stake Fried’s in Twitter would be between 0.1% and 0.2% after Musk spent $44 billion to take the company private.
After months of negotiations, Musk, the multibillionaire CEO of Tesla and SpaceX, finally closed on his acquisition of Twitter last week.
He made an instant impact on the business by letting go of the CEO Parag Agrawal and other key figures, tweeting to advertisers that “Twitter aspires to be the most respected advertising platform in the world” in the process. The trading of Twitter’s stock was halted on Friday, and on November 8 it was formally delisted.
According to the source, Bankman-Fried had intended to invest in the Musk-Twitter agreement but decided against it. After speaking with Musk on the phone, the FTX CEO reportedly informed Musk early this month that he was no longer interested.
As per a series of texts made public last month as part of Twitter’s lawsuit to compel Musk to complete the acquisition, SBF, as the crypto executive is called, had pledged to put up as much as $15 billion.
