Novogratz Wants to Punch Sam Bankman-Fried in the face

Have you heard the name, Sam Bankman-Fried? The answer may be either yes or no. But if you are in the crypto industry then you surely know about Bankman-Fried. He founded FTX, once one of the largest crypto exchanges in the world, in 2019 and became the youngest billionaire at the age of 29 in 2021.

Mike Novogratz — the founder of Galaxy Digital wants to punch Bankman-Fried in his face, according to a Bloomberg report.

The Galaxy Digital founder lost $3 billion and is still a billionaire. He is looking to sort through the wreckage of an industry that’s supposed to be his shot at redemption. Novogratz wants to get something straight: It’s not his fault you lost money on crypto.

Novogratz said the FTX fiasco directly cost Galaxy $77 million. It could have been worse. A billionaire friend who’d talked to Bankman-Fried warned Novogratz that the 30-year-old’s exchange-cum-hedge-fund was missing billions.

“The toxic masculine side of me would like to punch them both in the jaw,” Novogratz says of Bankman-Fried and Silbert. To Bankman-Fried, he says: “You’ve got to be f***ing kidding me. Like, really, you a*****?”

Novogratz says his big regret is not dumping more crypto, both earlier in 2022 and just before FTX collapsed. He managed to secure $1 billion-plus toward the end of 2021.

With the benefit of hindsight, he says he should have sized up Bankman-Fried and Do Kwon, the founder of TerraUSD and Luna. Novogratz insists he always told people to be careful, to pocket profits when they could. That’s what he did. He just didn’t make a lot of noise about it.

According to Bloomberg, “The bad news in crypto, meanwhile, just keeps raining down. Sam Bankman-Fried is on bail and wearing an electronic monitoring bracelet at his parents’ home. Cameron Winklevoss, whose Gemini exchange has been tarnished by links with fledgling crypto lender Genesis, is feuding with Silbert, demanding he step down as head of Digital Currency Group. Coinbase Inc., following in DCG’s footsteps, is slashing huge swaths of its staff. Three Arrows Capital and Celsius are long gone — doomed by the stablecoin Luna tattooed on Novogratz.”

Recently, Bankman-Fried started a Substack and through his recent tweet he added the FTX pre-mortem overview.