Anthony Scaramucci lays bare his dealings with ‘sociopathic’ Sam Bankman-Fried in new podcast

Anthony Scaramucci, the onetime Trump administration White House communications director and founder of SkyBridge Capital, is ready to dish on his disastrous business relationship with Sam Bankman-Fried, the founder of the cryptocurrency exchange FTX on trial for orchestrating one of the biggest financial frauds in recent history.

Scaramucci is releasing an eight-part podcast series called Tales From The Crypto: The Rise and Fall of FTX, which does a deep dive into the often chaotic world of crypto.

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“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,” he told The Hollywood Reporter. “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.”

The venture arm of FTX had taken a 30% stake in Scaramucci’s hedge fund for $45 million about two months before the exchange collapsed and its top executives were arrested for defrauding investors and customers out of billions of dollars. 

SkyBridge’s deal with FTX came when its crypto investments were taking a nose dive and triggering a mass exodus. FTX had come to the rescue of a lot of businesses during the downturn and in the process expanded its own empire. 

Scaramucci became a household name and fodder for late-night comics after becoming the shortest-serving White House communications director in history. Though he was appointed to the role by former President Donald Trump for 11 days, he only held the position for six.

He told The Hollywood Reporter that some parts of the podcast don’t show him in the best light but that he’s OK with it.

“I think that’s what makes it genuine,” he said. “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, ‘OK, this is a bunch of bull****. He’s trying to put lipstick on a pig.’ I don’t want to do that. I don’t think that’s necessary.”

Scaramucci said he thought Bankman-Fried viewed the alleged con as “a game.”

“I don’t think he saw it as him doing anything bad,” he said. “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.”

Scaramucci told another outlet that Bankman-Fried “bamboozled a lot of smart people — including myself,” adding that the alleged fraud “broke my heart.”

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“I thought he was the Mark Zuckerberg of crypto, the revolutionary,” Scaramucci told Opto Sessions. “It is very sad.”

New episodes of his podcast drop every Monday.