“Shark Tank” star Kevin O’Leary said that FTX paid him $15 million to be the company’s spokesman but he lost nearly all of it when the crypto exchange went bust.
In an interview with CNBC on Thursday, O’Leary said he put about $9.7 million of his spokesman check into crypto tokens with his FTX account, which has dropped to zero after the exchange collapsed last month.
He had $1 million tied up in FTX equity, which also is now worthless. O’Leary said the remaining $4 million from the deal went to taxation and agent fees.
“The total deal was just under $15 million all in — It’s all at zero,” he said. “It was not a good investment.
The man known as “Mr. Wonderful” told CNBC that he spoke to former FTX CEO Sam Bankman-Fried last weekend about his missing funds.
O’Leary said he told the disgraced crypto tycoon, “Look Sam, I am just one investor, but my account has a zero in it, and there are no accounting records. Where did the money go? I need to find where the money went.”
O’Leary admitted that he fell into the “groupthink” pitfall, drinking the Kool-Aid on institutional investors’ frenzy to get in on crypto exchanges.
“We all look like idiots. We relied on each other’s due diligence,” he said.
Despite losing millions of his own money, the billionaire has stopped short of condemning Bankman-Fried in a legal sense, saying that he is waiting for a full audit of the company before anybody can call the FTX founder guilty of anything.
FTX filed for bankruptcy on Nov. 11. In one recent interview, Bankman-Fried claimed to have “misaccounted” a whopping $8 billion on FTX’s balance sheet just before it imploded.
[Written in collaboration with other media outlets with information from the following sources]
