![]() Bankman-Fried resigned as chief executive. On Friday, FTX, facing a cash shortfall of $8 billion and scrambling to drum up money, filed for bankruptcy. “You can look like a genius making successful big bets,” he said, “but sooner or later you’ll crash spectacularly if you weren’t doing real diligence.” The events showed that even the top investors - whose money in FTX has vaporized - can wildly miss the mark, said Kevin Werbach, a professor of business at the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania. It was the most dramatic example in recent history of what happens when so-called visionary founders are given lots of money with few strings attached. ![]() Now investors are under scrutiny, too, for enabling Mr. Yet more than 80 investors went along with his vision, pouring nearly $2 billion into FTX in just two years. Bankman-Fried, 30, who had cultivated a reputation as an iconoclastic wunderkind who could multitask effortlessly and slept on a beanbag at the office. FTX had collapsed overnight, putting billions of dollars in customer funds in jeopardy, setting off a slew of government investigations and thrusting the crypto markets into chaos. ![]() Bankman-Fried met with investors again - but with a different tone. They responded by giving him $500 million early this year, valuing the privately held FTX at $32 billion. Interested investors should “support him and observe,” one investor who heard the pitch said. Bankman-Fried told them, and he planned to run it with little oversight. ![]() In meetings to raise money for his cryptocurrency exchange FTX over the last year, the entrepreneur left little room for negotiation, two investors said. Sam Bankman-Fried’s pitch to investors was not much of a pitch: It was a take-it-or-leave-it offer. ![]()
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |