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Anthony Scarammuci also noted that there was clearly fraud in the SBF and FTX debacle, while Mike Novogratz said theres a side of him that would like to punch SBF in the face. 8867 Total views 47 Total shares Listen to article 0:00 News Own this piece of history

Collect this article as an NFT SkyBridge Capital CEO Anthony Scaramucci said that his firm can buy back the stake of the company it sold to FTX back in September last year. Meanwhile, Galaxy Digital CEO Mike Novogratz has indicated that he would be tempted to punch SBF right in the jaw. SkyBridge and FTX

FTX Ventures acquired a 30% stake in the alternative asset manager SkyBridge for an undisclosed fee on Sept. 9, just a couple of months before FTX filed for bankruptcy in November.

Speaking to CNBC on Jan. 13, Scaramuci noted that in light of FTXs troubles, SkyBridge is making progress in buying back that stake but suggested the move wouldnt be able to get sorted until probably the end of the first half of this year.

Were waiting for the clearance from the bankruptcy people, the lawyers and the investment bankers to figure out exactly what were going to be buying back, and when, the CEO said, adding that, I think it will resolve itself favorably.

Speaking on former FTX CEO and founder Sam Bankman-Fried, Scaramucci outlined his thoughts that there has likely been some foul play there.

I think its very clear now that there was fraud. Well of course have to let the legal system determine all of those things. But for Sam, he’s got three of four of the principles that have worked alongside him have already pled guilty, and explained to prosecutors what they did, Scaramucci said.

Caught up with @Scaramucci today. FTX and Sam Bankman-Fried bought a 30% stake in Scaramucci's SkyBridge Capital before FTX collapsed. Now Scaramucci says that he's confident he'll be able to buy that stake back. Given new facts, he also alleges SBF committed fraud pic.twitter.com/jxltXdjCKW— Arjun Kharpal (@ArjunKharpal) January 13, 2023

The CEOs comments provide a stark contrast to his previous statements to CNBC from November, in which Scaramucci refused to use the fraud word due to its legal ramifications and urged Sam and his family to tell the truth to their investors, get to the bottom of the whole debacle.

According to SkyBridges website, it had $2.2 billion worth of assets under management as of Sept. 30, 2022, with roughly $800 million of the figure comprised of digital-asset-related investments. Galaxy CEO looking for a smackdown

Galaxy Digital CEO Mike Novogratz says there is a side of him that would like to punch both SBF and Digital Currency Group CEO Barry Silbert for their reported antics during crypto winter.

In an interview with Bloomberg posted on Jan. 13, Novogratz noted that the FTX ordeal ended up directly costing Galaxy around $77 million. As such, hes not a huge fan of SBF and other alleged misbehavior in the space over the past year.

The toxic masculine side of me would like to punch them both in the jaw, he said of SBF and Silbert, before adding specifically on SBF: Youve got to be f—ing kidding me. Like, really, you a——?

Related: Crypto community unimpressed by SBFs lengthy Substack letter

Novogratz ultimately admitted that he is still a crypto proponent despite 2022 being such a wild year for the industry.

He did note, however, that he wished he had taken more capital off the table earlier in 2022 before FTX and even the Terra/LUNA ecosystem went bust. Still, he says he managed to get more than $1 billion out before that year began. #Business #Bankruptcy #Asset Management #Mike Novogratz #FTX Related News What is impermanent loss and how to avoid it? Sam Bankman-Frieds charitable donations sought by FTX: Report FTX asset sales challenged by U.S. Trustee: Report FTX units on auction block draw 117 interested buyers: Court filing Miami-Dade gains right to remove FTX name from Heat arena

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Technology

Peter Thiel’s Founders Fund closes $4.6 billion growth fund

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Peter Thiel's Founders Fund closes .6 billion growth fund

Peter Thiel, co-founder of PayPal, Palantir Technologies, and Founders Fund, holds hundred dollar bills as he speaks during the Bitcoin 2022 Conference at Miami Beach Convention Center on April 7, 2022 in Miami, Florida.

Marco Bello | Getty Images

Founders Fund, the venture capital firm run by billionaire Peter Thiel, has closed a $4.6 billion late-stage venture fund, according to a Friday filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission.

The fund, Founders Fund Growth III, includes capital from 270 investors, the filing said. Thiel, Napoleon Ta and Trae Stephens are the three people named as directors. A substantial amount of the capital was provided by the firm’s general partners, according to a person familiar with the matter.

Axios reported in December that Founders Fund was raising about $3 billion for the fund. The firm ended up raising more than that amount from outside investors as part of the total $4.6 billion pool, said the person, who asked not to be named because the details are confidential.

A Founders Fund spokesperson declined to comment.

Thiel, best known for co-founding PayPal before putting the first outside money in Facebook and for funding defense software vendor Palantir, started Founders Fund in 2005. In addition to Palantir, the firm’s top investments include Airbnb, Stripe, Affirm and Elon Musk’s SpaceX.

Founders Fund is also a key investor in Anduril, the defense tech company started by Palmer Luckey. CNBC reported in February that Anduril is in talks to raise funding at a $28 billion valuation.

Hefty amounts of private capital are likely to be needed for the foreseeable future as the IPO market remains virtually dormant. It was also dealt a significant blow last week after President Donald Trump’s announcement of widespread tariffs roiled tech stocks. Companies including Klarna, StubHub and Chime delayed their plans to go public as the Nasdaq sank.

President Trump walked back some of the tariffs this week, announcing a 90-day pause for most new tariffs, excluding those imposed on China, while the administration negotiates with other countries. But the uncertainty of where levies will end up is a troubling recipe for risky bets like tech IPOs.

SpaceX, Stripe and Anduril are among the most high-profile venture-backed companies that are still private. Having access to a large pool of growth capital allows Founders Fund to continue investing in follow-on rounds that are off limits to many traditional venture firms.

Thiel was a major Trump supporter during the 2016 campaign, but later had a falling out with the president and was largely on the sidelines in 2024 even as many of his tech peers rallied behind the Republican leader.

In June, Thiel said that even though he wasn’t providing money to the campaign for Trump, who was the Republican presumptive nominee at the time, he’d vote for him over Joe Biden, who had yet to drop out of the race and endorse Kamala Harris.

“If you hold a gun to my head, I’ll vote for Trump,” Thiel said in an interview on stage at the Aspen Ideas Festival. “I’m not going to give any money to his super PAC.”

WATCH: Anduril founder Palmer Luckey talks $32 billion government contract

Anduril Founder Palmer Luckey talks $22 billion government contract

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Meta adds former Trump advisor to its board

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Meta adds former Trump advisor to its board

From left, U.S. President Donald Trump, Senator Dave McCormick, his wife Dina Powell McCormick and Elon Musk watch the men’s NCAA wrestling competition at the Wells Fargo Center in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, on March 22, 2025.

Brendan Smialowski | Afp | Getty Images

Meta on Friday announced that it was expanding its board of directors with two new members, including Dina Powell McCormick, a part of President Donald Trump’s first administration.

Powell McCormick served as a deputy national security advisor to Trump from 2017 to 2018. She is also married to Sen. Dave McCormick, a Republican from Pennsylvania who took office in January.

“He’s a good man,” Trump said of McCormick in an endorsement last year, according to the Associated Press. Powell McCormick and her husband were photographed in March beside Trump and Tesla CEO Elon Musk, a current advisor to the president, at a wrestling championship match in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania.

Additionally, Powell McCormick was assistant Secretary of State under Condoleezza Rice in President George W. Bush’s administration.

Besides her political background, Powell McCormick is vice chair, president and head of global client services at BDT & MSD Partners. That company was founded in 2023 when the merchant bank BDT combined with Michael Dell’s investment firm MSD. Powell McCormick arrived at the firm after 16 years at Goldman Sachs, where she had been a partner.

Her appointment represents another sign of Meta’s alignment with Republicans following Trump’s return to the White House.

In January, the company announced a shift away from fact-checking and said it was bringing Trump’s friend Dana White, CEO of Ultimate Fighting Championship, onto the board. The changes follow Trump dubbing the company behind Facebook and Instagram “the enemy of the people” on CNBC last year.

Also on Friday, Meta said Patrick Collison, co-founder and CEO of payments startup Stripe, was also elected to the board. Stripe was valued at $65 billion in a tender offer last year.

“Patrick and Dina bring a lot of experience supporting businesses and entrepreneurs to our board,” Meta co-founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg said in a statement.

Zuckerberg visited the White House last week, after attending Trump’s inauguration in Washington in January. Politico last week reported that the Meto CEO paid $23 million in cash for a mansion in the nation’s capital.

Powell McCormick and Collison officially become directors on April 15, Meta said.

WATCH: Mark Zuckerberg lobbies Trump to avoid Meta antitrust trial, reports say

Mark Zuckerberg lobbies Trump to avoid Meta antitrust trial, reports say

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Environment

Great news: IMO agrees to first-ever global carbon price on shipping

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Great news: IMO agrees to first-ever global carbon price on shipping

The International Maritime Organization, a UN agency which regulates maritime transport, has voted to implement a global cap on carbon emissions from ocean shipping and a penalty on entities that exceed that limit.

After a weeklong meeting of the Marine Environment Protection Committee of the IMO and decades of talks, countries have voted to implement binding carbon reduction targets including a gradually-reducing cap on emissions and associated penalties for exceeding that cap.

Previously, the IMO made another significant environmental move when it transitioned the entire shipping industry to lower-sulfur fuels in 2020, moving towards improving a longstanding issue with large ships outputting extremely high levels of sulfur dioxide emissions, which harm human health and cause acid rain.

Today’s agreement makes the shipping industry the first sector to agree on an internationally mandated target to reduce emissions along with a global carbon price.

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The agreement includes standards for greenhouse gas intensity from maritime shipping fuels, with those standards starting in 2028 and reducing through 2035. The end goal is to reach net-zero emissions in shipping by 2050.

Companies that exceed the carbon limits set by the standard will have to pay either $100 or $380 per excess ton of emissions, depending on how much they exceed limits by. These numbers are roughly in line with the commonly-accepted social cost of carbon, which is an attempt to set the equivalent cost borne by society by every ton of carbon pollution.

Money from these penalties will be put into a fund that will reward lower-emissions ships, research into cleaner fuels, and support nations that are vulnerable to climate change.

That means that this agreement represents a global “carbon price” – an attempt to make polluters pay the costs that they shift onto everyone else by polluting.

Why carbon prices matter

The necessity of a carbon price has long been acknowledged by virtually every economist. In economic terms, pollution is called a “negative externality,” where a certain action imposes costs on a party that isn’t responsible for the action itself. That action can be thought of as a subsidy – it’s a cost imposed by the polluter that isn’t being paid by the polluter, but rather by everyone else.

Externalities distort a market because they allow certain companies to get away with cheaper costs than they should otherwise have. And a carbon price is an attempt to properly price that externality, to internalize it to the polluter in question, so that they are no longer being subsidized by everyone else’s lungs. This also incentivizes carbon reductions, because if you can make something more cleanly, you can make it more cheaply.

Many people have suggested implementing a carbon price, including former republican leadership (before the party forgot literally everything about how economics works), but political leadership has been hesitant to do what’s needed because it fears the inevitable political backlash driven by well-funded propaganda entities in the oil industry.

For that reason, most carbon pricing schemes have focused on industrial processes, rather than consumer goods. This is currently happening in Canada, which recently (unwisely) retreated from its consumer carbon price but still maintains a price on the largest polluters in the oil industry.

But until today’s agreement by the IMO, there had been no global agreement of the same in any industry. There are single-country carbon prices, and international agreements between certain countries or subnational entities, often in the form of “cap-and-trade” agreements which implement penalties, and where companies that reduce emissions earn credits that they can then sell to companies that exceed limits (California has a similar program in partnership with with Quebec), but no previous global carbon price in any industry.

Carbon prices opposed by enemies of life on Earth

Unsurprisingly, entities that favor destruction of life on Earth, such as the oil industry and those representing it (Saudi Arabia, Russia, and the bought-and-paid oil stooge who is illegally squatting in the US Oval Office), opposed these measures, claiming they would be “unworkable.”

Meanwhile, island nations whose entire existence is threatened by climate change (along with the ~2 billion people who will have to relocate by the end of the century due to rising seas) correctly said that the move isn’t strong enough, and that even stronger action is needed to avoid the worse effects of climate change.

The island nations’ position is backed by science, the oil companies’ position is not.

While these new standards are historic and need to be lauded as the first agreement of their kind, there is still more work to be done and incentives that need to be offered to ensure that greener technologies are available to help fulfill the targets. Jesse Fahnestock, Director of Decarbonisation at the Global Maritime Forum, said: 

While the targets are a step forward, they will need to be improved if they are to drive the rapid fuel shift that will enable the maritime sector to reach net zero by 2050. While we applaud the progress made, meeting the targets will require immediate and decisive investments in green fuel technology and infrastructure. The IMO will have opportunities to make these regulations more impactful over time, and national and regional policies also need to prioritise scalable e-fuels and the infrastructure needed for long-term decarbonisation.

One potential solution could be IMO’s “green corridors,” attempts to establish net-zero-emission shipping routes well in advance of the IMO’s 2050 net-zero target.

And, of course, this is only one industry, and one with a relatively low contribution to global emissions. While the vast majority of global goods are shipped over the ocean, it’s still responsible for only around 3% of global emissions. To see the large emissions reductions we need to avoid the worst effects of climate change, other more-polluting sectors – like automotive, agriculture (specifically animal agriculture), construction and heating – all could use their own carbon price to help add a forcing factor to drive down their emissions.

Lets hope that the IMO’s move sets that example, and we see more of these industries doing the right thing going forward (and ignoring those enemies of life on Earth listed above).

The agreement still has to go through a final step of approval on October, but this looks likely to happen.


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