Billionaire VC Chamath Palihapitiya on Former FTX CEO’s “Sophisticated Con”

Recently, billionaire venture capitalist Chamath Palihapitiya, who is the founder and CEO of investment firm Social Capital, shared his thoughts on Sam Bankerman-Fried (aka “SBF”), the disgraced Co-Founder and former CEO of now-bankrupt crypto exchange FTX.

While speaking on the episode of the “All-In Podcast” released on 3 December 2022, the billionaire VC accused SBF of manipulating the media with his “apology tour.” Palihapitiya outlined SBF’s rather fortunate trajectory and privileged upbringing, taking him from an “elite private school” to one of the country’s most prestigious universities at MIT. 

As reported by The Daily Hodl, he said:

He took customer funds and all of this money, he made tens of millions of dollars of political donations, he wrapped himself in this blanket of a progressive, left-leaning cause called ‘effective altruism’ and all of the mainstream media fell for it and embraced him, as well as some politicians, because it met everything that they themselves also bought into. 

Palihapitiya called FTX’s bankruptcy a “cataclysmic event” and a “multi-deca-billion dollar fraud,” and noted that millions of FTX customers have been harmed by having their accounts frozen in the fallout, and robbed of “tens of millions to hundreds of millions to billions” of dollars. 

Palihapitiya accused SBF of architecting a “sophisticated con,” that ultimately led to the collapse of the crypto exchange. He also noted that FTX had faced little to no pressure from members of the media and government regulators due to the charismatic founder saying “all of the right things.”

Earlier today,  Catherine Wood, the Founder, CIO, and CEO of ARK Investment Management, LLC (aka “ARK” or “ARK Invest”) explained why the disgraced Co-Founder and former CEO of now-bankrupt crypto exchange FTX “didn’t like Bitcoin.”

Wood told her 1.5 million Twitter followers that in her opinion Sam Bankerman-Fried (aka “SBF”) did not like Bitcoin because he could not control it:

The Bitcoin blockchain didn’t skip a beat during the crisis caused by opaque centralized players. No wonder Sam Bankman Fried didn’t like Bitcoin: it’s transparent and decentralized. He couldn’t control it. https://t.co/pV8UPT7cnm

— Cathie Wood (@CathieDWood) December 11, 2022

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