Quote · PBD Podcast
The $110 Billion Dollar Man - Binance Founder Opens Up | PBD #797
Where this was said
FTX, SBF & the Tweet That Helped Sink an Empire
At 1:55:08 · chapter starts 1:20:00
CZ and SBF met perhaps ten times total, and CZ initially declined to invest in FTX after their first private dinner — despite finding SBF to have remarkably high EQ. [1] — Changpeng Zhao "A tweet cannot destroy a great business. No healthy business can be destroyed by a tweet." 1:55:08 Binance eventually invested a few million dollars early on and exited at close to $2 billion. Then came November 2022: a CoinDesk report revealed FTX's balance-sheet vulnerabilities, Binance's finance team moved FTT tokens on-chain, questions arose, and CZ wrote a tweet publicly announcing the sale — making clear he was selling slowly to minimize market impact. Caroline Ellison's reply, offering to buy all of Binance's FTT at $22, gave away Alameda's floor price and may have done more damage than anything CZ said. What followed was the thread where CZ characterized SBF as 'one of the greatest fraudsters in history' — language he partially disavows now but acknowledges he wrote in the heat of a moment when he was defending himself against accusations that his tweet alone had caused FTX's collapse. His core position remains: no healthy business can be killed by a tweet.
Binance paid a $4.3 billion fine as part of its DOJ settlement — the largest corporate fine of its kind at the time.
CZ had exactly one private dinner with Sam Bankman-Fried and walked away thinking he had very high EQ — knowing exactly what to say in every room. Binance initially declined to invest in FTX, then eventually put in a few million and got close to $2 billion back on exit. Then the tweet, the collapse, and the lawsuits.
Six months after CZ's tweet helped expose FTX's insolvency and ended SBF's $100M+ political donation machine, the DOJ sued Binance. CZ stops short of calling it a conspiracy but says the timing is 'very coincidental.' His lawyers told him they'd never seen a BSA case pursued so aggressively.
