- Sam Bankman-Fried told Axios he doesn't know what happened to his $100 million stake in Twitter.
- He said he thought Alameda planned to rollover at least $20 million to a new holding company.
Sam Bankman-Fried, the co-founder and former CEO of collapsed crypto exchange FTX, says he isn't sure what happened to his $100 million stake in Twitter.
"I believe that that it was intended for Alameda to rollover at least $20 million or more," Bankman-Fried told Axios on Monday, referring to Alameda Research, the trading firm he also co-founded. "I don't know for sure whether that ultimately happened."
Bankman-Fried added that some of the stake may have been sold before Twitter went private in late October but couldn't confirm this.
In a text message viewed by Axios, Bankman-Fried told new Twitter owner Elon Musk that the stake Alameda owned was worth around $100 million. The report doesn't say when the message was sent.
Axios' interview with the crypto mogul came just days after Musk claimed that Bankman-Fried hadn't invested in the social-media company since it went private. Musk's comments came in response to an article by Semafor which said that Musk had invited him to roll over his public Twitter shares into a stake in Musk's privately-held company, shortly after he offered to buy Twitter.
The Financial Times reported that an FTX balance sheet dated November 10 listed that it had shares in Twitter, which it described as an "illiquid" asset.
"As I said, neither I nor Twitter have taken any investment from SBF/FTX," Musk tweeted last Wednesday in response to the Semafor article.
In another tweet, he said: "He may have owned shares in Twitter as a public company, but he certainly does not own shares in Twitter as a private company."
Text messages released as part of a lawsuit Twitter filed against Musk showed that Bankman-Fried had considered purchasing the social-media giant, too, and was open to potentially working with Musk. But shortly after FTX collapsed, Musk told his Twitter followers that the pair had once had a meeting to discuss a potential investment in Twitter and that he had got a bad impression from Bankman-Fried.
During his interview with Axios on Monday, Bankman-Fried said that he had "no idea" about the status of his personal finances and that he had $100,000 in his bank account the last time he checked.
Earlier this month his net worth dropped from $15.6 billion to $1 billion in a single day, according to estimates by Bloomberg, after FTX failed to secure a bailout and filed for bankruptcy.
Bankman-Fried's fortune once peaked at an estimated $26 billion. The poster child for the effective altruism movement, he had said that he was building up his fortune with the plan to give almost all of it away.