Mark Cuban Is Mad About What’s Happened with FTX

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Nick Marinoff
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Mark Cuban is not happy about what’s happened with FTX, and he’s taking to social media and other online platforms to express his disappointment.

Mark Cuban Isn’t Happy About the FTX Fall

The FTX collapse rocked the crypto world. What was long considered one of the biggest players in the digital currency world has suddenly come crashing down without notice, and its fall from grace has led to several repercussions.

Allegedly experiencing a liquidity crunch, the company approached Binance for help, though the latter firm said “no,” claiming that the problems FTX was facing were too big for it to handle.

Binance explained:

As a result of corporate due diligence, as well as the latest news reports regarding mishandled customer funds and alleged US agency investigations, we have decided that we will not pursue the potential acquisition of FTX.com. In the beginning, our hope was to be able to support FTX’s customers to provide liquidity, but the issues are beyond our control or ability to help.

Now, the company has filed bankruptcy and the founder – Sam Bankman-Fried – has stepped down from his post. Cuban believes that the company was very poorly managed, and he doesn’t doubt that there were many shady things happening behind closed doors.

In an interview, Cuban commented that what FTX pulled is quite common in the world of stocks, and he says that all who fell for the ploy were not investors, but rather “suckers.” He mentioned:

The stock market is a platform where companies pretend that their shares of stock represent ownership in their enterprise. Using this pretense, they actively market their shares to buyers, attempting to drive up the price, often buying shares themselves, to make up for lack of demand… Leveraging real or artificial demand, they issue shares to themselves to accelerate their compensation, rarely doing the same for all but the employees who are already highly compensated.

He went on with:

The myth of shares representing ownership falls apart when shareholders attempt to influence operations of the enterprise through recommendations or active participation in shareholder meetings where these efforts are summarily dismissed as annoyances. How am I doing so far? Their only value comes from selling to someone believing that the share will go up in value. To increase demand, the company will market their stocks to funds and brokers in hopes they will buy their stocks and recommend them to their clients. One tool is quarterly earnings calls. Another is by creating modified reporting structures like EBITDA and other invented metrics.

Investors or Suckers?

He concluded with:

Unfortunately for suckers, I mean investors, there are thousands of SEC approved companies that trade off the major exchanges for which there is little regulation, less information or liquidity, and where we often see BANKRUPT companies trade millions of shares.