Elon Musk Recounts the Conversation Between Sam Bankman-Fried

Elon Musk became involved in the controversy on Twitter after hundreds of millions of dollars were withdrawn from company-controlled wallets with the hacking of the bankrupt cryptocurrency startup FTX. Just hours after the attack, which started late Friday night, Musk tweeted that “The FTX crash is being followed in real time on Twitter.”

On Saturday morning, Musk attended a Twitter Spaces session with over 60,000 listeners to discuss the hacking of FTX and share his thoughts on Bankman-Fried. In the session he attended, Musk said the following about FTX CEO Sam Bankman Fried:

“Honestly, I had never heard of him. But then a lot of people told me that he had, you know, a large amount of money he wanted to invest in the Twitter deal. I talked to him for about half an hour. And I realized that my bullshit meter was getting too high. Then I said, mate, everybody, including the big investment banks, was talking about him like he was walking on water and had trillions of dollars. That wasn’t my impression… There’s something wrong with this guy, he has no capital and he’s not going to be able to handle it. That was my guess.”

Musk also told listeners that they should keep their crypto in cold wallets, not exchanges.

“I would like to reiterate that if you have cryptocurrency, you should keep it in a directly accessible cold wallet. Not in a stock market. That would be wise.”

Until this week, the spectacular collapse of FTX, one of the largest and apparently best regulated exchanges in the world, did not alienate Musk from crypto as a whole:

“I think there is probably a future for Bitcoin, Ethereum and DOGE. I can’t really talk about the others. But if you keep one of these three in a cold wallet and an exchange, I guess it will do well.”