Sam Bankman-Fried, a leading crypto personality and founder of FTX crypto exchange, had previously suggested he would spend over $100 million and up to $1 billion on political donations.
Crypto billionaire Sam Bankman-Fried, who’s the founder of major cryptocurrency exchange FTX, is not going to splash hundreds of millions of dollars on political donations.
This comes after the crypto billionaire looks to have spent about $40 million in the current election cycle – the midterms set for November.
Bankman-Fried makes U-turn on campaign spending
According to Politico’s financial newsletter Morning Money, the FTX chief has changed tune on how much he is going to spend.
The publication quotes Bankman-Fried as saying that his earlier comments about donating $100 million and up to $1 billion in the lead up to the 2024 US election was a huge slip on his part.
In May, Bankman-Fried said he was open to spending heavily into the US midterms – only weeks away now – and that he would put more into super political action committees and other campaign vehicles starting with the current election cycle.
But speaking to MM in a recent podcast, he noted the intention was to always reach a given limit despite widespread belief that the 30-year-old billionaire would go full blast as the campaigns heat up.
Explaining his U-turn, he said his $1 billion quote was “dumb” on his part. “I think my messaging was sort of sloppy and inconsistent in some ways,” he added in a quote MM cited on Friday.
According to Morning Money, Bankman-Fried’s flipping on this one doesn’t augur well for Democrats, the biggest beneficiaries of the crypto billionaire’s donations.
Indeed, the FTX founder has spent about $40 million on PACs and other campaign contributions in 2022, most of which has reportedly been to the Democratic Party. In 2020, Bankman-Fried was among the largest single political donors for Democratic Party candidate Joe Biden.
As CoinJournal recently covered, Bankman-Fried is open to moving his crypto company to the US once registration with the US Securities Exchange Commission is secured.