Kevin O’Leary, the Chairman of O’Shares and star investor on the TV show Shark Tank, has revealed he is “all at zero” with regard to his FTX investment. His remarks follow the cryptocurrency exchange‘s bankruptcy filing after a shocking collapse in November.
O’Leary was speaking on CNBC’s ‘Squawk Box’ on Thursday, and according to him, he’s lost $9.7 million in crypto on the exchange. All his accounts are also gone, he noted, adding that he considers his investment in the collapsed crypto company as one of his worst investment moves.
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O’Leary was paid $15 million by FTX
As with most of the investors seeking to add crypto to their stocks or other assets portfolio, the Shark Tank star shifted his perception of crypto after initially seeing it as nothing bad ‘garbage.’ O’Leary says he changed tune when he saw the first Bitcoin ETF approved in Canada and as he recognised this was an opportunity to be an investor in a new asset class.
Institutional interest in FTX was similarly high across Wall Street amid the last bull market, the Canadian investor added.
But O’Leary, aka Mr. Wonderful, said he made it clear to all the interested entities that asked him how to get into crypto that he was a paid ambassador. The total deal for his spokesperson’s role at FTX was $15 million, he told CNBC’s Andrew Ross Sorkin.
He did disclose the payment he received for his role at FTX with US Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) as required under law. As for what he’s lost in this very bad investment, he said it was all his money.
“Not a single dollar that I lost is anyone else’s money except for mine. That’s important for me because that’s an issue.”
Apart from the $9.7 million he put into crypto that’s now gone to zero, O’Leary says he also lost about $1 million in FTX equity.
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