Anthony Scaramucci, founder of SkyBridge Capital and short-term communications director in the Trump administration, spoke Friday morning on CNBC’s “Squawk Box” about friend and business partner Sam Bankman-Fried, CEO of the crumbling crypto exchange FTX.
FTX, which took a 30% stake in Scarmucci’s SkyBridge Capital in September, is facing potential bankruptcy after a “bank run” on the crypto exchange left it about $8 billion short. Bankman-Fried says he was unaware of the extent of consumer leverage because of poor internal labeling of bank-linked accounts.
Scaramucci was hesitant to attribute the failure of the exchange to malice.
“I don’t want to call it fraud right now because that’s actually a legal term,” Scaramucci said. “I would implore Sam and his family to tell the truth to their investors, to get to the bottom of it.”
Bankman-Fried tweeted Thursday morning that he was “sorry,” admitting he “screwed up” and “should have done better.”
Bankman-Fried said his first mistake was poor internal labeling of accounts linked to the bank, which meant he was “significantly out of step” with his sense of consumer margin. “I thought it was a lot lower.”
Scaramucci speculated that Bankman-Fried may have made mistakes during the height of the crypto bear market, specifically when Three Arrows, a massive cryptocurrency hedge fund, was liquidated in June 2022.
“When Three Arrows went down, it’s possible, Andrew, that Sam was having a hard time then and then he made some decisions that turned out to be disastrous for him and for both parties in this business,” he said on Friday, speaking to Andrew by CNBC’s Ross Sorkin.
Scaramucci told “Squawk Box” that he went to Bankman-Fried at his home in the Bahamas as an investor and a friend. When he got there, he says, it seemed like everything went beyond just bailing out liquidity.
Binance seems to have made the same assessment. The world’s largest cryptocurrency firm struck a non-binding deal to rescue FTX following due diligence and the news “regarding mismanaged client funds and alleged investigations by US agencies.”
Scaramucci said he saw no evidence of this abuse when he and other investors first vetted FTX as a potential business partner.
“Lieved, I guess is the right word, but I’m very disappointed because I really like Sam,” Scaramucci said. “I don’t know what happened because I wasn’t an insider at FTX.”
“There’s a lot of difficulty in the markets and a lot of my friends think this is the worst week in the history of cryptocurrencies,” Scaramucci said.
He said he plans to buy back his equity in SkyBridge from FTX, noting that his firm did not hold assets in FTX because of a potential conflict of interest.