The FTX founder claimed he’d invest “north of $100 million” with the “soft ceiling” of $1 billion. He added that “who knows what’s going to happen between now and then.”
The billionaire CEO and founder of FTX currency exchange Sam Bankman Fried, has announced that he plans to spend between $100 million to $1 billion in the 2024 United States presidential election campaign.
Interview on a podcast Tuesday Bankman-Fried was asked the amount of money he would give during the next presidential election, and he said he’d donate “north of $100 million” with the “soft ceiling” of $1 billion should he decide to finance the candidate against the former President Donald Trump:
“I would hate to say hard ceiling because who knows what’s going to happen between now and then.”
According to the watchdog of the government OpenSecrets which collects data on lobbying and campaign finance The $1 billion amount could break records several times over.
The biggest individual political contributors are currently Republican entrepreneurs Sheldon as well as Miriam Adelson, who spent $218 million in 2020.
Bankman-Fried went on to say that the amount he gives away will be “super contingent” and “really depends on exactly who’s running where and for why,” saying it’s likely that to spread the funds across several 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 also said that one of the biggest concerns for him is to prevent the next outbreak that he believes will take “tens of billions of dollars.”
“The United States has both a big opportunity and big responsibility to the world to shepherd the West in a powerful but responsible manner,” and said that whatever that the country performs is a source of “massive ripple effects on what the future looks like.”
Bankman-Fried has made donations to politicians over the years, making $5.2 million to the Biden 2020 presidential campaign.
He also endorses his political action committee (PAC) Protect Our Future created in January 2022. In April the PAC invested $9 million in Democratic candidates.
In May, the PAC was able to spend between $8 and $10 million to support Carrick Flynn, who was unable to get the Democratic primary to win this newly-created Oregon 6th District seat in the U.S. House of Representatives.
But, there could be an event where Bankman-Fried makes the decision not to make any donation in the first place, even though Bankman-Fried believes the probability of this is “very low:”
“There’s a world which ends up being close to zero if things just work out such that there isn’t much I’m excited about.”
The FTX CEO did not specify in his interviews what policy he would advocate for. In the case of another rival exchange, Coinbase the efforts are increasing in the form of lobbying for policies that favor crypto, following the announcement last week of the creation of a “crypto native” think tank known as coinbase institute. Coinbase Institute.
It will release research on cryptocurrency and Web3 to aid its lobbying effort. In 2021, the company was the largest spending blockchain-related company in terms of lobbying with more than $1.3 million in lobbying expenditures.
