According to Caroline Ellison, Sam Bankman-Fried was interested in acquiring Snap, the parent company of the social network Snapchat. Was this a real project or just another fantasy of the deposed FTX CEO
Sam Bankman-Fried and his desire to buy Snapchat
The trial of FTX’s deposed CEO shows such megalomania that it’s hard to distinguish between fantasies and real plans. In the same vein, Caroline Ellison revealed last night that Sam Bankman-Fried (SBF) would like to buy Snap, the parent company of the social network Snapchat.
The eventuality seems entirely plausible, as the accused has already bought up shares in other listed companies in the past with his clients’ money, notably with Robinhood, who recently got their hands on his shares again.
Caroline Ellison claims that she kept a list on Google Doc called “Things that make Sam panic”. The idea of buying Snapchat was listed alongside other projects, such as raising funds from Mohammed ben Salmane, the Crown Prince of Saudi Arabia.
Another entry was entitled “Getting regulators to crack down on Binance”, which was “the best potential way to improve FTX’s market share” for SBF, according to Caroline Ellison.
Back in April, Binance’s former Chief Strategy Officer claimed that Ellison was constantly portraying Changpeng Zhao (CZ) “as a Chinese villain”:
A great read by @WilliamCohan at @PuckNews One thing they missed, Sam was CONSTANTLY spreading fake rumors about @cz_binance, because shading him as an “evil Chinese” was critical to his scam. You can’t pretend to be Luke Skywalker without Darth Vader.https://t.co/oi9JxsqPyz
– Patrick Hillmann (@PRHillmann) April 20, 2023
On this point, it seems that Sam Bankman-Fried’s strategy has more or less worked in hindsight, given Binance’s regulatory woes this year.
Returning to the question of social networks, let’s not forget that beyond Snapchat, SBF had wanted to fund Elon Musk’s $5 billion takeover of Twitter. Nevertheless, the entrepreneur claims that the ex-CEO of FTX set off his “bullshit detector”
