FTX’s Sam Bankman-Fried wanted to participate in buying Twitter

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Elon Musk’s intention to buy Twitter earlier this year has been making headlines for weeks, if not months, with everyone keeping a close eye on the development. Recently, however, several text messages emerged, showing that Musk was not the only one interested in buying the so-called birdsite.

Another individual interested in joining musk was FTX’s Sam Bankman-Fried, a well-known figure in crypto circles. Bankman-Fried’s involvement was revealed in texts that emerged during Elon Musk’s legal proceedings against the social media platform.

Bankman-Fried sought partnership with Musk

According to reports, a member of FTX Future Fund, William MacAskill, was trying to arrange a meeting between Bankman-Fried and Musk earlier this year, in March. The goal was for the two entrepreneurs to discuss approaching the purchase of Twitter together, in a joint effort.

The messages were published on Twitter by Kate Conger, a reporter for the New York Times, who pinpointed the exact moment when the idea for Musk to join the Twitter board fell apart, and when he decided to make an offer to take Twitter private.

Read along here: https://t.co/kTLj10PBkX

— kate conger (@kateconger) September 29, 2022

According to the messages, MacAskill apparently noted that Sam Bankman-Fried was willing to join the acquisition of the platform with around $8-$15 billion. However, this may have been an over-exaggeration, or Bankman-Fried changed his mind, as Michael Grimes — Morgan Stanley’s Head of Global Technology Investment Banking — later said that Bankman-Fried would only be willing to contribute $5 billion.

The deal is now unlikely to happen

Additional information emerged, revealing that Michael Grimes praised SBF to Musk, calling him an “ultra genius and doer builder.” However, with all that has happened since, and particularly Musk’s subsequent aversion to Twitter’s practices, it is highly unlikely that the partnership between the two tech billionaires will take place.

Musk himself noted that the Twitter deal could not progress because he believes that up to 90% of all the comments on Twitter are coming from spam accounts and bots. With 238 million active users each day, this would mean that most of the activity on the platform is coming from bots and not real users, who make Twitter a worthwhile platform to own and use.

According to Musk’s representatives, the platform has been making false and misleading claims regarding the number of actual human users, which is a “material breach of multiple provisions” of the agreement that they came to. This was specifically mentioned in the SEC filing from July 2022. After Musk backed away from the offer to buy Twitter for $44 billion, the platform filed a lawsuit against him, arguing that he was not allowed to “trash the company, disrupt its operations, destroy stockholder value, and walk away.”

On his end, Musk responded with an August filing, citing a whistleblower report that said that half of the company’s staff has access to “sensitive systems” which, as he argued, poses a security risk.

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