SBF Fallout: Anthony Scaramucci Confronts His “Colossal Mistake” About the Crypto Mogul

Ashley Cullins
·10 min read
10

As Sam Bankman-Fried stands trial for fraud after the 2022 high-profile collapse of his cryptocurrency exchange FTX, Anthony Scaramucci is sharing the story of how he got into business with the young billionaire.

In Tales From The Crypto: The Rise and Fall of FTX, a newly launched podcast from Audio Up, the financier who became a household name during a brief stint as communications director for former president Donald Tump tells his story warts and all. His company, SkyBridge Capitol, sold a one-third stake to SBF’s FTX Ventures in 2022 — not long before the house of cards collapsed. The podcast dropped its first two episodes on Oct. 9 and will roll out weekly on Mondays.

More from The Hollywood Reporter

Instead of picking up when the two met a few years ago, the story starts with Scaramucci’s background as a middle-class kid from Long Island, explaining how he landed at Goldman Sachs after graduating from Harvard Law School and where his career has gone from there. Of course, there’s plenty of Trump fodder (including a quip about Scaramucci’s wife hating the real estate mogul-turned-politician “almost as much as Melania hates him”) and stories from his time on Wall Street, sometimes peppered with self-deprecating humor.

“Nothing was off limits. The person interviewing me could ask me anything about anything,” Scaramucci tells The Hollywood Reporter. Even more importantly, he notes, “I did not edit it one bit.”

Scaramucci is well aware that some parts of the podcast don’t exactly make him look good, but he’d rather people know “what you see is what you get” with him than try to present an airbrushed version of reality. “I think that’s what makes it genuine,” he says. “If I’m sitting there trying to have a beauty contest and paint over things that we did wrong, the listener is smart enough to say, ‘Okay, this is a bunch of bullshit. He’s trying to put lipstick on a pig.’ I don’t want to do that. I don’t think that’s necessary.”

Ahead of the podcast’s release, Scaramucci talked with THR via Zoom about his relationship with SBF, why he doesn’t hide from his mistakes, and why Tales From the Crypto should be required listening for business school students.

What made you want to do this podcast?

When you make a colossal mistake — like going into business with Sam Bankman-Fried, or making an investment in Theranos, or being an investor in Bernie Madoff — you have two choices. You can listen to your crisis management PR people, hide your head in the sand and be like an ostrich. Wait for the thing to blow over and then revise history and pretend that it never happened to you. Or you can confront it and admit the mistakes that were made and lay out for people what actually happened.

Remember, we received money from Sam’s business. So I think there’s a distinction there, but I decided that I would be open about it because I think it would provide people with perspective. We’re not perfect. We get things wrong in life. I’ve got five children, and I think it’s super important for me to show them the good, bad and the ugly.

For people who are going into this podcast without being familiar with your connection to Sam, how would you summarize the story?

We made a decision back in 2020 to get more active in the cryptocurrency and Web 3.0 space. I see tremendous growth in that space. Sam was one of the larger public figures in crypto. We met, liked each other and went into business together. It turned out he was a fraud. That’s my opinion. He deserves his day in court. I guess the joint statement from the defense and the prosecutors [asked] do any of these potential jurors know me? People [thought] I’m going to be testifying, but I’m not going to be testifying. If you’re the defense counsel, you don’t want people on the jury that know me personally because I’ve said very publicly that I think what Sam did was fraudulent and wrong, and I think he’s guilty.

I thought that the structure was really interesting because they backed up so far, and included a lot of your background, to really tell the story from your perspective.

When I met with these guys and they said, “We’d like you to do this.” I said, “I’m willing to do this, but I want to give the whole story. I don’t want to just talk about the trial or talk about Sam himself. I want to talk about the whole thing, the evolution of how we ended up in business with him and why I like him.” I’m not going to pretend that I didn’t like him. I’ve had this conversation with my friend Kevin O’Leary. Kevin and I have two different takes. Kevin thinks, he’s sort of in the Michael Lewis camp, that Sam is this sort of errant young man who was well-intentioned and not a criminal. I don’t see it that way. I think this was very premeditated. I think it was very nefarious.

I think Sam has a tendency to disassociate himself from people and everything is sort of like a game to him. I don’t think he saw it as him doing anything bad. I think in his mind, because of the whole Messianic thing, is I’m going to save the world and if I have to borrow money from your account temporarily to do that, to make myself several hundred billion dollars, I’m going to do that. Then, when the time is right, I’m going to move the money back to your account. That’s sort of sociopathic behavior. You have money in someone’s account, and you move it into your account. That’s like bank robbery, except it’s done electronically.

Look, I’m sad about it. I’m already over the loss and the embarrassment for SkyBridge and the hit to our reputations, but I’m sad about it. I see it as the human tragedy that it actually is.

How would you describe the arc of the story that you’re telling in Tales from the Crypto?

There’s tragedy and comedy in our lives. I think there’s some comedy in the story, and it ends in tragedy. Some people lost money and other people lost reputation, [but] everyone will survive this. The story arc is excitement, youth and experience meeting to try to create success. Obviously, the youth is flying too close to the sun and is making misjudgments and not handling things appropriately and crashes. Then there’s an aftermath of that where people have to be on cleanup, myself included.

I think you asked the most important question first. Why do a podcast like this? Why don’t I just slink away? It’s not my personality. I got fired from the White House. I had crisis comms people telling me, “Oh, you got fired from the White House. You can never be seen again. Ever.” I’m like, that’s not going to happen. I went right on [The Late Show With] Stephen Colbert and talked about it. I don’t care. You’re going to succeed and fail, but in the totality of my life I’ve done reasonably well. I’ve had this very interesting, reasonably exciting and pretty affluent life and coming from very little. That comes with risk taking.

There’s an episode where you get into describing the nature of the market and how it’s ascending, but not at a neat 45-degree angle. It’s a jagged line ascension. It sounds like that’s been your trajectory too.

Absolutely. Look, I could have come out of Harvard and stayed at a place like Goldman Sachs and had a very interesting financially successful 35-year career. Or I could have gone out as I did at age 32 and built a business, sold a business, started SkyBridge, had a fray in politics, written books, done a couple of reality television shows, traveled the world, lived in the Big Brother house, backflipped out of a helicopter in Jordan for the Special Forces reality show. Those are choices, right? I could have had this very prosaic and successful life on Wall Street, or I could have done the different things that I’ve done in my career.

If you’re going the way I went, you can’t expect everything to go perfectly well. You’re out there on the limb, and you’re going to fall off the tree once in a while. It’s important for me to let my kids know it’s not a big deal. It’s not a health issue. You’re going to survive it. A central thesis of all this is maintain your integrity — because if you maintain your integrity there’s always countless opportunities.

Who should be listening to this podcast?

Anybody that wants to hear a cautionary tale and learn from people that have made mistakes. If I was 22 years old in business school and I saw a podcast describing this calamity, I would want to pay attention to it. When I was in school back in the late 80s, Michael Milken was being accused of insider trading. It was important for me to understand that, understand the government’s case, understand his side of the story, and see how the thing unfolded.

I think it’s mandatory for a younger person that wants to be in the business world. Unfortunately, every sector of the economy is infected by fraud. This, to me, is not a crypto case as much as it is a plain and simple fraud case. One of the negatives about this is it hurts the cryptocurrency markets and it makes people perceive that there’s a lot of bad actors. It’s definitely negatively impacted the way Washington is regulating crypto, but the flip side is that it will pass and people will have learned from it. It’s very similar to the banking crisis in the late 1920s, and what happened eventually with the formation of the SEC to protect small investors from treachery and fraud. A lot of that stuff has to happen now in the crypto space and, if this situation expedites that, then that’ll be a good thing for everybody.

Is there anything about the podcast, anything you didn’t get to say in it, that you want potential listeners to know?

That’s a good question. Not really, because I think the whole thing comes across. I was working with Jeb Bush on his campaign before the whole Trump debacle, and he was very concerned about in debate if he was going to get every one of his talking points in. I’m like, you’re smart enough. If you get 60 percent of it in, people will get the feeling of what you’re saying and that’s probably more valuable than the actual content. What does Maya Angelou say? We rarely remember what people say, but we do remember how they make us feel. So, when you’re leaving a podcast or a book or a presentation or a speech, you’re like, okay, I got that. I understand them. You may not remember every single fact that came out of Tales for the Crypto, but you’ll be like that was an honest story and it was well told, the good, bad and the ugly. If you feel that way, then mission accomplished.

Interview edited for length and clarity.

Best of The Hollywood Reporter

Click here to read the full article.