Yahoo Finance

SkyBridge Capital Founder Anthony Scaramucci acknowledges former FTX CEO Sam Bankman-Fried’s recent fraud conviction while sitting down with Yahoo Finance's Anjalee Khemlani at the Yahoo Finance Invest conference.

The former White House Communications Director commented on his business relationship with SBF, saying outright the disgraced FTX co-founder "did something very malevolent” in his series of fraud that was enabled and encouraged by "groupthink." FTX still owns a 30% stake in SkyBridge Capital.

Scaramucci advises investors to do their due diligence when researching private companies, later commenting investors would be "very foolish not to own crypto" despite all the scandals and investigations into fraudulent behavior.

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Video Transcript

ANJALEE KHEMLANI: I've heard some commentary that the Sam Bankman-Fried issue is just a very US-centric issue and crypto has kind of moved on.

Do you think the industry is recovering from that?

ANTHONY SCARAMUCCI: OK.

So I got to spend 30 seconds on him.

ANJALEE KHEMLANI: More You can go.

ANTHONY SCARAMUCCI: Because I know we're running out of time.

And then I'll answer that because you-- so I like Sam.

I want to be very, very clear on that.

Did Sam commit a fraud?

Yes, he did.

OK.

I'm not in the Michael Lewis category or my very good friend Kevin O'Leary category.

I saw what he did firsthand.

And he committed a crime.

And he committed fraud.

And he's going to go to jail for a very long time.

But I'm not going to revise history, ladies and gentlemen, and pretend I didn't like him, didn't know him, got to know his family.

Mike Novogratz said last week on the eve of his conviction that he liked him as a person.

He thought he was a nice guy.

He was a nerdy, introverted, nice human being.

But he did something very malevolent.

And I'm just going to say to you the reason I talk about it is I don't want to be that guy that runs from things when you make a mistake.

I want to be the guy that can talk to my clients, or my family, or the journalist, or whoever, very honestly about it.

And here's the mistake that we made.

And you should really think about this as an investor.

There was some groupthink we had, venture capitalists and sovereign wealth funds, and billionaires that lost money.

I'm not going to mention their names.

They get so mad at me when I mentioned their names because they're all hiding from it, trying to pretend it didn't happen to them.

But it did happen to them.

So there was some groupthink.

The second thing that happened is there were four people that controlled the money at FTX, Alameda.