Sam Bankman-Fried may spend $1 billion in 2024 to stop Trump comeback

Billionaire Sam Bankman-Fried, founder and CEO of cryptocurrency exchange FTX, has revealed he intends to spend $100 million to $1 billion to help influence the 2024 U.S. presidential election.

In a podcast interview on May 24, Sam Bankman-Fried was asked how much he might give away during the next presidential election, and he replied that if he was going to fund a campaign against former President Donald Trump Given the funding, he would donate "more than $100 million," with a "soft cap" of $1 billion.

"I don't want to say what the hard cap is because who knows what's going to happen between now and then."

According to OpenSecrets, a government watchdog that tracks campaign finance and lobbying data, a $1 billion donation would shatter existing records several times over.

The largest individual political donors are now Republican business owners Sheldon and Miriam Adelson, who donated $218 million in 2020.

Bankman-Fried went on to say that the amount of his donation is "super contingent" and "really depends on who is running where and why." He added that he would likely spread the money across multiple organizations.

"I think I'll focus less on the parties from that angle and more on sane governance, and advertising for the things that matter most to me."

One of the issues most important to him, he said, is preventing the next major outbreak, which he believes will cost "tens of billions of dollars."

"The United States has both a great opportunity and a great responsibility to the world to lead the West in a strong and responsible way," adding that everything the United States does "will have a huge knock-on effect for the future."

Bankman-Fried has donated millions of dollars to politicians in the past, including $5.2 million to President Joe Biden's 2020 campaign.

He also supported political action committees (PACs) to "protect our future." Established in January 2022, the committee had spent $9 million through April supporting Democratic candidates.

In early May, political action committees spent $8 million to $10 million in support of Carrick Flynn. Flynn failed to win a House seat in the newly created 6th District of Oregon in the Democratic primary.

It's also possible, however, that Bankman-Fried decides not to donate any money, although he thinks the chances of that are "very low."

The FTX CEO did not say in the interview what cryptocurrency-related policies he would be promoting. Rival Coinbase, which announced last week the launch of the "crypto-native" think tank, the Coinbase Institute, is stepping up its lobbying efforts in support of cryptocurrency policy.

Coinbase will publish research on cryptocurrencies and Web3, supporting the exchange's lobbying efforts. In 2021, Coinbase spent more than $1.3 million on lobbying, making it the largest blockchain company to spend on lobbying.