(Daily Mail) Elon Musk has revealed he rejected crypto mogul Sam Bankman-Fried’s offer to help finance his Twitter takeover last spring, saying the now-disgraced FTX founder set off his ‘bulls**t meter’.
‘To be honest, I’d never heard of him,’ Musk said of the embattled crypto mogul, while speaking in a Twitter Spaces audio chatroom early on Saturday, according to CoinDesk.
‘But then I got a ton of people telling me [that] he’s got, you know, huge amounts of money that he wants to invest in the Twitter deal,’ recalled Musk, who secured billions in outside financing to support his $44 billion Twitter buyout.
And I talked to him for about half an hour. And I know my bulls**t meter was redlining. It was like, this dude is bulls**t – that was my impression,’ he added.
Bankman-Fried resigned as the CEO of FTX on Friday, as the crypto exchange filed for bankruptcy and reports emerged that up to $2 billion in client funds had vanished from the company’s books.
Elon Musk has revealed he rejected crypto mogul Sam Bankman-Fried’s offer to help finance his Twitter takeover last spring, saying the FTX founder set off his ‘bulls**t meter’
Musk also shared a crude meme that depicted Bankman-Fried as the star of a pornographic film titled ‘Man F***s 5 Million People At Once’
Musk added: ‘Then I was like, man, everyone including major investment banks – everyone was talking about him like he’s walking on water and has a zillion dollars.’
‘And that [was] not my impression…that dude is just – there’s something wrong, and he does not have capital, and he will not come through. That was my prediction,’ Musk added.
Tweeting late into the night, Musk also shared a crude meme that depicted Bankman-Fried as the star of a pornographic film titled ‘Man F***s 5 Million People At Once.’
Musk’s text messages, which were previously revealed in court filings, back up his recollection.
They show that on April 25, when Musk first revealed his agreement to buy Twitter, his personal banker Michael Grimes shared Bankman-Fried’s offer to fund the venture.
Musk appears skeptical in the text messages, dismissing Bankman-Fried’s plans to use blockchain technology for Twitter and questioning whether he had the funds to back up his financing offer.
Meanwhile, collapsed crypto exchange FTX said on Saturday it had seen ‘unauthorized transactions’, with analysts saying millions of dollars worth of assets had been withdrawn from the platform.
FTX founder and CEO Sam Bankman-Fried allegedly shuffled $10billion in funds to his trading firm Alameda Research, with about $2billion now going missing
Bankman-Fried denied making the secret transfers to his crypto trading firm, which is run by his girlfriend, Caroline Ellison (above)
Blockchain analytics firm Elliptic said that around $473 million worth of cryptoassets were ‘moved out of FTX wallets in suspicious circumstances early this morning,’ but that it could not confirm that the tokens had been stolen.
FTX U.S. general counsel Ryne Miller said in a tweet shortly after 0700 GMT on Saturday that the firm had ‘expedited’ the process of moving all digital assets to cold storage ‘to mitigate damage upon observing unauthorized transactions.’
Cold storage refers to crypto wallets that are not connected to the internet to guard against hackers.
Earlier on Saturday, Miller said in a tweet that he was ‘investigating abnormalities with wallet movements related to consolidation of FTX balances across exchanges.’
In a separate development, about $2 billion of customer funds have vanished from collapsed crypto exchange FTX, according to two people familiar with the matter.
Founder and CEO Sam Bankman-Fried secretly transferred $10 billion of customer funds from FTX to the trading company Alameda Research, which is run by his girlfriend Caroline Ellison, Reuters reports.
A large portion of that total has since disappeared, they said. One source put the missing amount at about $1.7 billion. The other said the gap was between $1 billion and $2 billion.
