Sam Bankman-Fried and Elon Musk weighed joint efforts” to take over Twitter

Sam Bankman-Fried and Elon Musk weighed joint efforts” to take over Twitter

When Elon Musk offered to buy Twitter for $44 billion, a number of tech personalities scrambled to push the deal forward. One of them was FTX CEO Sam Bankman-Fried, newly released text messages revealed this week.

A series of private texts, first reported by Business Insider showed that Bankman-Fried's employee Will MacAskill told Musk that the FTX CEO was "potentially interested" in taking over Twitter and suggested a "joint effort" with the Tesla boss.

MacAskill, a consultant at the FTX Future Fund said March 30 that Bankman-Fried said it could contribute between $3 billion and $8 billion to the deal Message history found on the internet.

Morgan Stanley banker Michael Grimes, who also tried to suggest a deal between the two, separately told Musk that Bankman-Fried could close $5 billion and facilitate engineering for social media blockchain integration.

Musk seemed to doubt whether the crypto bigwig actually had billions available for such a venture.

“Does Sam actually have $3 billion in liquid?” Musk asked Grimes.

The Tesla CEO is currently the richest person in the world with a net worth of $240 billion Bloomberg Billionaires Index. Bankman-Fried's net worth was most recently $9.4 billion.

Musk also dismissed the blockchain integration proposal, saying: "Blockchain Twitter is not possible because the bandwidth and latency requirements cannot be supported by a peer-to-peer network unless those 'peers' are absolutely gigantic, defeating the purpose of a decentralized network."

Nevertheless, Musk seemed to want to build a social media platform using blockchain. In a message to his brother Kimbal Musk, he said he had an idea for a blockchain social media system that “does both payments and short text messages/links like Twitter.”

“You have to pay a tiny amount to register your message on-chain, which excludes the vast majority of spam and bots,” Musk claims 90% of the comments His tweets feature bots talking about his idea.

The last text they shared, according to the exhibits, was on May 5, when Musk asked Bankman-Fried, "Excuse me, who is sending this message?"

Representatives for FTX and MacAskill did not respond to Blockworks' request for comment by press time.

Bankman-Fried is “excited” to fix social media with Musk

The FTX boss previously said in a Bloomberg interview in April that he was eager to talk to Musk about technologies used in what he called the "broken model" of social media.

He explained how he believes blockchain could solve the problem of interoperability between platforms like Facebook and WhatsApp. At the time, he said he hadn't spoken directly to Musk about the matter but was "looking forward to it."

The texts they exchanged were in early April.

Musk's Twitter statement threatens

The text message exhibits were released as part of the court battle between Twitter and Musk, which ended its acquisition on July 8. He claimed the company failed to provide adequate information about the number of spam and fake accounts on the site.

Twitter Chairman Bret Taylor praised a legal dispute over the enforcement of the merger agreement.

musk is be questioned under oath from Twitter lawyers on Oct. 6 and 7 about its move to walk away from the $44 billion takeover. The five-day trial, which could be one of the biggest legal battles on Wall Street, will see lawyers prove that the billionaire abandoned the deal because of falling stock market prices.

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The post “Sam Bankman-Fried, Elon Musk Weighed ‘Joint Effort’ to Acquire Twitter” is not financial advice.