Sam Bankman-Fried, the CEO of FTX, has changed his mind about his plan to spend up to or even more than $1 billion on political donations before the 2024 US presidential election.
Back in May, the 30-year-old billionaire said he planned to give “north of $100 million” in the next presidential election and had a “soft ceiling” of $1 billion to fund the US Democratic Party’s 2024 presidential election campaign.
But in a surprising turn of events, Bankman-Fried called his statement a “dumb quote” and said he was careless. This week, Bankman-Fried said on Politico’s Morning Money podcast, “That was a dumb quote.” “I think some of my messages were sloppy and didn’t make sense.”
This year, Bankman-Fried has already spent almost $40 million on political action committees and campaigns, with most of that money going to the Democratic party and its candidates. He was one of the people who gave the most money to help Joe Biden run for president in 2020.
“Once you’ve told voters what you want to say, there’s not much else you can do” Bankman-Fried said. “You can spend more time, money, messages, or anything else on it, but you won’t get anything more done.”
Bankman-Fried had previously said that if Donald Trump ran for president again, he would spend up to $1 billion to stop him from getting back into the White House. He did not say if he would donate again in the run-up to the 2024 election.
After a recent rush of investments, Bankman-Fried Backdrops
During the recent crypto meltdown, which began with the crash of the Terra ecosystem, Bankman-Fried became known as the king of bailouts. In the past few months, the CEO has spent a lot of money to keep the digital asset industry going strong.
He has saved more than one crypto company to stop a wider spread of the problem. Among other things, he bought a 7.6% stake in the top stock trading app Robinhood and bought Canadian crypto trading platform Bitvo and Embed Financial Technologies.
His exchange, FTX, just said that it would buy the assets of crypto lender Voyager Digital for $1.4 billion. Voyager Digital filed for bankruptcy in July.