- Bankman-Fried has kept a soft ceiling at $100 million but is willing to donate more to keep Donald Trump from becoming President once again.
- The FTX CEO has also pledged donations in an effort to be prepared to fight the next pandemic efficiently.
Cryptocurrency billionaire and founder of crypto exchange FTX – Sam Bankman-Fried – recently said that he could donate up to $1 billion to the U.S. Presidential Election Campaigns. The recent comments came during a podcast interview on Tuesday, May 24, with The Pushkin Industries.
The FTX CEO has kept a “soft ceiling” of $100 million. However, he said that he can spend as much as $1 billion if required to keep Donald Trump from becoming President again. Bankman-Fried said:
I would guess north of $100 million. As for how much more than that, I don’t know. It really does depend on what happens. It’s really dependent on exactly who’s running where for what, and these things are super contingent.
The FTX CEO said that he also might be spreading his donation amount across different organizations. “I think that I’m going to be looking a lot less at political parties from that perspective and a lot more about sane governance and ads for the things that I care the most about,” he added.
Historically, the 30-year-old billionaire has always leaned towards the democrats. He was also among the top 20 donors to Joe Biden’s 2020 U.S. presidential campaign. Bankman-Fried had contributed a total of $5.2 million to help Biden win over former President Donald Trump.
As per government watchdog OpenSecrets, the largest individual political donors so far are the Republican business owners Sheldon and Miriam Adelson, who had spent $218 million in 2020. Thus, a $1 billion in donations would be like breaking all previous records multiple times over.
Sam Bankman-Fried on handling the next pandemic
Apart from politics, Sam Bankman-Fried expressed his concern over handling the next pandemic in the world. He said that preventing the next pandemic should be of utmost importance and that might cost “tens of billions of dollars”.
As per Bankman-Fried, “The United States has both a big opportunity and big responsibility to the world to shepherd the West in a powerful but responsible manner”. He further added that everything that the United States does has “massive ripple effects on what the future looks like”.
Recently, the FTX CEO has donated $10 million to a democratic candidate Carrick Flynn. The donation came as Flynn wanted to focus on the preparedness for the next pandemic. However, his candidate lost by a wide margin. Speaking on it, the FTX CEO said:
I had a lot of takeaways from that, and if I would do it again, I would do it a bit differently than last time. But fundamentally, I think this was a well-thought-out raise. If you’re donating to political races that you think your candidate is 99 percent to win, you’re almost certainly doing something wrong.
FTX has been among the fastest-growing exchanges in the U.S. The crypto exchange is posing a big competition to some of the existing giants like Coinbase.
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