Zuckerberg, Tom Brady Lose Billions in FTX Crypto Collapse
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A cryptocurrency exchange crash has wiped out nearly $2 billion in investor cash, affecting high-profile celebrities, pension funds and lesser-known Bay Area billionaires.
The FTX exchange caught the eye of many prominent investors and individuals before it crashed on Tuesday.
FTX counted celebrities like NFL star Tom Brady and ex-wife Gisele Bundchen as investors, PitchBook data shows. They also had San Francisco-based Iconiq Capital, which manages money for Mark Zuckerberg and Jack Dorsey, on their books — not to mention all the consumers whose deposits aren’t currently available for withdrawal. Other big losers included the Canadian Teachers Pension Fund in Ontario, which invested $95 million.
The firm was founded by Bay Area native Sam Bankman-Fried in 2019 and is based in the Bahamas.
High-profile investors are already writing off their entire investments. Sequoia Capital, which had invested over 200 million dollars at values between 18 and 25 billion dollarstweeted that it assumed the investment was now worthless.
In its latest funding round completed in January 2022, FTX was valued at over $32 billion, and Bankman-Fried’s net worth was said to be $26 billion.
Below are all the FTX investors in one chart, according to PitchBook data. While PitchBook only discloses total funding rounds, it’s a good guess that B-stage or later investors lost anywhere between $10 million and hundreds of millions of dollars.
The list includes many prominent venture capital funds such as Sequoia, NEA and Lightspeed Venture Partners. Some of the biggest losers in the collapse were likely investors who had invested in multiple rounds at high valuations, including SoftBank, New York-based Insight Partners, Singapore-based Temasek Holdings and Tiger Global Management.
Before the collapse, 30-year-old Bankman-Fried was considered a prodigy. An MIT graduate with a major in physics, he was known to be committed to spending his entire fortune on philanthropy. He was a prominent donor to Joe Biden and had paid $135 million for naming rights to the Miami Heat stadium. He ran ads in The New Yorker magazine that featured him and Gisele Bundchen with quotes like, “I’m in crypto because I want to have the biggest impact for good.”
Sequoia Capital Partner Michael Moritz is a co-founder and investor in The San Francisco Standard.
Are you a person affected by the FTX collapse? Please get in touch.
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