Regulation
SkyBridge’s Anthony Scaramucci on Donald Trump, Gary Gensler and Bad Press
Antonio Scaramucci: I think that’s a great question. I think that question, the answer to that question has evolved since we talked about it. You know, when you were, and by the way, you were doing your job, which I respect. It was a tough situation. I think one of the things I like to do in tough situations is to face the music. I just want you to imagine me on CNBC telling you that I’m now a hero. Sam, who is a brilliant guy. He’s the Mark Zuckerberg of cryptocurrency. He bought 30% of my business. We need to have this generational transfer of knowledge and we’re going to help him grow his business, grow our business, et cetera. A great feeling. Nine short weeks later, I’m back on television and I have to tell people that, unfortunately, I sold my business to someone who we didn’t know at the time, but he was convicted of fraud. I mean, he was convicted of fraud and he’s serving time in prison. Being in prison is a very, very painful experience. So I went from a hero to a zero in a nine-week period. And it was a terrible situation for me. But I think one, you have to face the music, you have to tell people what happened, how it happened, why you were involved. Number two, I think you have to live your life with integrity because I believe if you live your life with integrity, there are always opportunities for you. I can’t tell you how many good things happened to me after that debacle. And so when I sit here and reflect on it now, I guess the good news is that it looks like investors are going to get their money back. Now, a lot of those investors, you’re a cryptocurrency journalist, so you know a lot of those investors are angry. Why are they angry? They’re angry because they owned one bitcoin or they own two bitcoins. It was dollarized to $17,000 a coin. Those coins went up to $60,000. So technically they should have $120,000, but they don’t. They have $34,000. But I think, life being what it is, we adjust our expectations. And I think people will be happy to have that money back because in November 2022, they probably thought, man, I’m probably not going to get much money back. And so that’s number one. So stay in the loop. Don’t get too disillusioned. And I think the other thing, the other big lesson, from all of this is that there was a lot of fraud in the industry, a lot of leverage in the industry. Know that people in the industry don’t like Gary Gensler. I was at an event yesterday in Washington, DC with several legislators and Anita Dunn from the White House talking about why we in the industry need positive bipartisan legislation on cryptocurrency. We shouldn’t let one party hijack it at the expense of the other. And you, Mark Cuban, and he said, I could say this, I will say this, Mark Cuban said, Just make sure that if you leave this room and people report what happened in this room, make sure that people know that I have publicly stated that I want Gary Gensler fired. And I said, OK, I will make sure that I share that with people, especially people like Jenn at CoinDesk. The point about, yeah, yeah, well, I will ask him, but you know, the point I’m making here is that Gary has strangely helped the industry.