Sam Bankman-Fried was able to get a bunch of the world’s most famous faces to promote his now collapsed cryptocurrency exchange FTX. Celebrities who endorsed FTX included Gisele Bündchen, Tom Brady, Shaquille O’Neal, Stephen Curry, and in one especially infamous Super Bowl ad, Larry David. But at least one star declined to lend her support to the company. And in doing so, walked away from a massive potential payday. That, in retrospect, brilliant celebrity was Taylor Swift. The pay day she turned down?
$100 million
With a net worth of $400 million, Taylor Swift might be the only celebrity on the planet with the nerve and the net worth to reject a $100 million offer. That’s exactly what she did with FTX, and in doing so, she dodged a major bullet.
Dimitrios Kambouris/Getty Images
Earlier this year, when FTX had not quite collapsed but was still struggling to cope with a crypto sell-off, Bankman-Fried was facing increasing pressure from the rest of the FTX executives to right the ship. In their minds, that involved, at least in part, getting Bankman-Fried to stop spending hundreds of millions of dollars in company cash on getting celebs like the above to endorse FTX. But to him, it meant signing one last big check to one of the biggest stars on Earth:
$100 million to get Taylor Swift to promote FTX.
Had Swift accepted the deal, she reportedly would have been paid $100 million over three years. According to sources close to the deal, it came close to happening before eventually falling apart sometime in the spring of this year.
(Photo by Jamie McCarthy/Getty Images for MTV)
This massive deal was part of a pattern in Bankman-Fried’s management style: Ignoring his fellow executives (who said spending so much money on one celebrity endorsement would have been disastrous) and “going it alone.”
Now, of course, FTX is bankrupt, and some of its celebrity spokespeople have lived to regret their relationship to the company. Star investor Kevin O’Leary recently revealed he’d lost virtually all of the almost $15 million he was paid to promote FTX, partially because he chose to invest almost $10 million of that back into cryptocurrency. One must assume that whatever money Gisele, Tom, Shaq, Steph Curry and Larry David accepted, also went to zero. And with FTX in no position to honor any three-year endorsement deal, Swift is probably pretty happy that the deal between herself and the company was never finalized.
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