Bloomberg Denied a Story About FTX Troubles in July Saying “It Was Bad For Business”
Five Bloomberg journalists were presented with a story about all the mess at FTX back in July, but they denied it saying “it was bad for business.”
Marc Cohodes, a short seller who’s made his career betting against fraudulent companies, said in a recent interview with popular internet detective Coffeezilla that he presented a story about FTX to Bloomberg crypto team four months before the platform’s meltdown, but they denied the story.
“I went to Bloomberg with my pal, who I was working on this thing with, and we laid it out to five ladies on the crypto team. And they passed it and said it would be too much work; we’d lose access; it’s bad for business,” Cohodes said.
When Stephen Findeisen, better known as Coffeezilla, asked Cohodes when did this happen, he said “in early July.”
Cohodes was one of the few skeptics that didn’t buy the story of how a 30-year-old guy who had not spent any serious time at a major Wall Street institution could make millions by buying Bitcoin in the US and selling it in Japan.
For context, Bankman-Fried claims that he figured out a way to buy bitcoin in the U.S., where it was cheaper and easier to get, and then sell it in Japan and Korea, where prices were higher and there were more barriers to foreigners, and make millions in profit.
However, there were too many other questions that Cohodes, who’s been an investor for decades, couldn’t square.
“Where’d you get the couple hundred million to do this trade, which is a complex trade?” Cohodes said in an interview with the New York Magazine. The fact that Bankman-Fried didn’t have a mentor and spent no serious time at a major Wall Street institution heightened his suspicions. “There was nothing ever specific about him that he could articulate that made me think, Ah, that makes sense.”
A video of Cohodes declaring, about a month before FTX blew up, that Bankman-Fried was likely “dirty and rotten to core” has been making the rounds on Twitter as proof that there were some financial observers who saw the signs:
Speculations around the health of FTX and Alameda increased in early November after reports revealed that the investment firm’s balance sheet is loaded with FTT tokens, the native token of FTX.
By the end of that week, FTX announced that it had filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy in Delaware. Notably, FTX US was also included in the proceedings, despite claims by the former CEO that their US exchange was fine.
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