Following an exchange revealed this morning between Elon Musk and his banker in the purchase of Twitter, the CEO of Tesla and SpaceX said he never had any confidence in Sam Bankman-Fried. Indeed, the former CEO of FTX had proposed to Elon Musk to participate in the purchase of Twitter to the tune of $ 5 billion, which the latter had then refused.
Elon Musk would never have trusted Sam Bankman-Fried
The various FTX revelations have caused such a stir that Elon Musk himself wanted to give his opinion on the situation and his share of revelations about Sam Bankman-Fried.
Responding to a tweet revealing an exchange last April between Elon Musk and his banker in the purchase of Twitter, Tesla and SpaceX CEO Michael Grimes said Sam Bankman-Fried had “set off his bullshit detector”.
Accurate. He set off my bs detector, which is why I didn’t think he had $3B.
– Elon Musk (@elonmusk) November 12, 2022
The exchange in question reveals that Sam Bankman-Fried, then CEO of FTX, was showing significant interest in Elon Musk’s purchase of Twitter. The ex-billionaire was reported to have raised the possibility of investing “at least $3 billion” and helping Elon Musk with “the technical part of integrating blockchain into the social network”.
On this subject, the Tesla CEO replied that “blockchain Twitter” was impossible for reasons of bandwidth and latency.
In addition, Elon Musk explicitly questioned his banker about the veracity of Sam Bankman-Fried’s statements, even going so far as to question the cash he would have actually owned. Later in the morning, Elon Musk posted a meme that was explicit to say the least about his view of the former FTX CEO.
Elon Musk speaks out in a Twitter Space
In a Twitter Space launched this morning and still ongoing at the time of writing, Elon Musk spoke by invitation about the FTX hack and Sam Bankman-Fried in front of over 60,000 people. Here is a transcript of the dialogue about his contact with SBF:
“To be able to speak to you about the FTX hack
To be honest, I’d never heard of him. But then I had a ton of people telling me that he had, you know, huge amounts of money that he wanted to invest in the Twitter business. And I talked to him for about half an hour. And I know my bullshit detector was on red. It was like this guy was bullshit, that was my impression. “
Elon Musk then reveals that the former FTX CEO had a reputation that he didn’t trust:
“Then I thought, man, everybody, including the big investment banks, everybody was talking about him like he walked on water and had billions of dollars. And that’s not what I thought… this guy is just… there’s something wrong with him, and he has no capital, and he’s not going to make it. That was my prediction “
Finally, the now Twitter owner advised cryptocurrency holders to store their cryptocurrencies on a cold wallet rather than a cryptocurrency exchange. He also expressed confidence in the future of Bitcoin (BTC), Ether (ETH) and Dogecoin (DOGE):
“I think there’s probably a future for Bitcoin, Ethereum, and DOGE. I can’t really talk about the others. But if you have any of those three in a cold wallet, and outside of an exchange, I think it will work out well.”
