Popular Shark Tank star Kevin O’Leary and Binance CEO Changpeng Zhao, aka CZ, engage in a verbal conflict over O’Leary’s statements about Binance regarding the FTX crash. CZ ended up calling Kevin O’Leary ’a Liar’ for his statements.
At a United States Senate committee hearing on FTX’s demise, FTX paid spokesperson O’Leary revealed details of meetings with Sam Bankman-Fried in the days before FTX declared bankruptcy.
Senator Patrick Toomey inquired as to why FTX failed, and O’Leary responded, “I have an opinion. I don’t have the records,” and went on a rampage on how Binance is responsible for FTX’s doom.
O’Leary claimed that when he inquired about SBF’s usage of customer funds over the last 2 years, he was informed that approximately $3 billion had been spent on repurchasing shares of FTX that Binance held.
Also Read: Kevin O’Leary says He lost all of the $15M that FTX paid him
O’Leary stated, “Apparently, according to Sam Bankman-Fried, CZ would not comply with regulators’ requests in different jurisdictions to provide the data that would clear them [FTX] for a license […] The only option the management and Sam Bankman-Fried had was to buy him out at an extraordinary valuation close to $32 billion.”
According to O’Leary, the share purchases and Zhao’s decision to sell off Binance’s FTX token (FTT) holdings at the beginning of November damaged FTX’s balance sheet.
O’Leary slammed Binance by saying, “In my view, my personal opinion, these two […] in an unregulated market […] with this incredible business in terms of growth were at war with each other, and one put the other out of business, intentionally. Now, maybe there is nothing wrong with that, maybe there is nothing wrong with love and war, but Binance is a massive unregulated global monopoly now, and they put FTX out of business.”
While speaking at the CNBC pre-market news show Squawk Box, CZ said he was startled that O’Leary made these remarks.
CZ stated, “Kevin O’Leary is making a bunch of nonsense claims. They don’t make sense, they don’t make any logic.”
“I think Kevin is a liar. I think he’s lying about a bunch of stuff,” CZ added.
CZ called O’Leary a liar mostly because he claimed to have invested in FTX without knowing Binance was a shareholder. He was, however, very detailed in recalling the terms of a deal CZ completed two years earlier.
Recently, Kevin O’Leary invited criticism for saying he would again support SBF. O’Leary continued by explaining how the next time, he would invest in Bankman-Fried “in a different context.”
“You can love him or hate him given what’s happened, but I think we can all admit he was one of the most brilliant traders in the crypto universe,” O’Leary stated in the interview.
