SkyBridge’s Anthony Scaramucci on Donald Trump, Gary Gensler and Bad Press

Anthony Scaramucci: I think it’s a great question. I think that question, the answer to that question has evolved since you and I were talking about it. You know, when you were, and by the way, you were doing your job, which I respect. It was a tough situation. Think one of the things I like to do in tough situations is face the music. I just want you to imagine me reporting that I am now a hero on CNBC. Sam, who’s a brilliant guy. He’s the Mark Zuckerberg of crypto. He’s bought 30% of my business. We’re to have this generational transfer of knowledge and we’re going go out and help him grow his business, grow our business, et cetera. Such great excitement. Nine short weeks later, I’m back on television having to tell people, unfortunately, I sold my business to somebody that we didn’t know it at the time, but he was guilty of fraud. Mean, he was convicted of fraud and he’s serving in jail cells. In a jail cell is a very, very painful experience. So I went from hero to zero in a nine week period of time. And it was a terrible situation for me. But I do think one, you have to face the music, you have to tell people what happened, how it happened, why you were involved with it. Number two, I think you have to live your life with integrity because I believe if you live your life with integrity, there’s always opportunity for you. I can’t tell you the number of positive things that happened to me after that debacle. And so when I sit here and reflect upon it now, I guess the good news is it looks like the investors are going to get their money back. Now, a lot of those investors, you’re a crypto journalist, so you know a lot of those investors are sore. Why are they sore? They’re sore because they owned a bitcoin or they own two bitcoin. It got dollarized at $17,000 a coin. Those coins went to $60,000. So they should technically have $120,000, but they don’t. They have $34,000. But I think, life being what it is, we adjust our expectations. And I think people are gonna be happy that they got that money back because back in November of 2022, they were probably thinking, man, I’m probably not gonna get much money back. And so that’s number one. So stay in things. Don’t get yourself overly disillusioned. And I think the other thing, the other big lesson, of all this is there was lots of fraud in the industry, lots of overleverage in the industry. Know, people in the industry don’t like Gary Gensler. I attended an event yesterday in Washington, D .C. with a number of legislators and Anita Dunn from the White House talking about why we in the industry need bipartisan positive crypto legislation. We shouldn’t let one party hijack it versus the other. And, you, Mark Cuban, and he said, I could say this, I’ll say it, Mark Cuban said: Just make sure if you leave this room and people are going to report about what happened in this room, make sure people know that I’m on record saying that I want Gary Gensler to be fired. And I said, OK, I’ll make sure I share that with people, particularly people like Jenn at CoinDesk. The point about, yeah, yeah, well, I’ll ask him to, but you know, the point that I’m making here is that weirdly Gary helped the industry.