- Sam Bankman-Fried and Anthony Scaramucci went on a Middle East fundraising tour in October.
- Scaramucci told Insider he bought SBF a suit so the FTX CEO wouldn't wear a T-shirt with investors.
Weeks before FTX's downfall, Anthony Scaramucci was worried that Sam Bankman-Fried's famously casual dress sense could backfire on a fundraising trip to the Middle East. Scaramucci told Insider he bought the then-FTX CEO a suit from Bloomingdale's to help impress investors.
Insider talked to Scaramucci over Zoom about his relationship with Bankman-Fried, ahead of the launch of $4
The SkyBridge Capital founder, $4 decided that Bankman-Fried needed to scrub up for their tour to Abu Dhabi and Dubai in the United Arab Emirates, and the FII Institute in Saudi Arabia. "I didn't certainly like elements of the way he was dressed," he said.
"I bought him a suit, frankly, to take him to the Middle East with me and told him he can't dress with a T-shirt in the Middle East," Scaramucci told Insider. "When you're in Rome, do as the Romans do."
On a $4 Scaramucci said he had thought Bankman-Fried "was the Mark Zuckerberg of crypto — I did not think he was the Bernie Madoff of crypto." He told Insider he made the Zuckerberg comparison because the Meta CEO walked around Davos in a hoodie and T-shirt "and I probably was slightly offended by him, but he went on to create a trillion-dollar company."
Scaramucci said he was trying to help Bankman-Fried raise capital for FTX in the Middle East.
An FTX lawyer recently said Bankman-Fried's hedge fund, Alameda, had access to a $65 billion credit line from FTX. Bankman-Fried directed staff to code a $4which let Alameda draw from customer funds on the crypto exchange, the lawyer said.
The FTX cofounder has $4 and $4 to eight criminal charges. Referring to the allegations, Scaramucci said: "I didn't realize, unfortunately, that he had an accounting backdoor. And the numbers that he was showing me and other venture capitalists and potential capital allocators $4."
"Somebody was like: 'Well, look at the way he was dressed and the way he handled himself, didn't you think he was a bozo?' And I'm like, OK, the hindsight test? Yes, of course, he's a bozo."
While $4 show Bankman-Fried dressed in a long-sleeve shirt and suit trousers, there were no images of him in a suit jacket. It's not clear whether the suit he's worn $4 is the same one Scaramucci said he bought for him, though it is a different style from the one he was last photographed in during a Congressional hearing last May.
Bankman-Fried's tour came just weeks before FTX's bankruptcy, and the SkyBridge Capital CEO directly linked the two, saying, "Our trip to the Middle East led to his immediate downfall."
As evidence, he said Bankman-Fried had bad-mouthed his rival crypto CEO Changpeng "CZ" Zhao of Binance. $4 in November that Bankman-Fried had also criticized Zhao in private meetings in Washington.
Scaramucci told Insider that Bankman-Fried "was saying some nasty things about CZ" in Saudi Arabia and that it had prompted the Binance CEO to sell much of his $4.
"So in some ways, I'm happy that we took that trip because we could still be living in a world of FTX," Scaramucci said. "He could have continued to cover it up, and I could have erroneously helped him do that by helping them raise money and building other corporate relationships."
"I had a relationship with Sam — I liked and I trusted him," he added. "And so when somebody betrays your trust like that, it's upsetting. Hopefully, he'll serve some time in jail for what he did, and the industry can move on and grow and hopefully heal from it."
Representatives for Bankman-Fried declined to comment.