In a recent interview, Jordan Belfort, the man whose memoir “The Wolf of Wall Street in 2007” was adapted into a film (released in 2013), shared his thoughts on Sam Bankerman-Fried (aka “SBF”), the disgraced co-founder and former CEO of bankrupt crypto exchange FTX.

Belfort’s comments were made during an interview on “Maria Bartiromo’s Wall Street”, a weekly show on Fox Business Network.

According to a report by The Daily Hodl, Belfort had this to say about FTX :

“It’s not an exchange. It’s like a brokerage firm or a bank that was holding customers’ money, and they were basically siphoning it off. He was using it as his own personal piggy bank, Sam Bankman-Fried. People deposited their money in FTX because they want to trade, like any brokerage firm. It would be the equivalent of going to JPMorgan Chase, deposit your money in your Chase bank account and then you find out that actually [JPMorgan CEO] Jamie Dimon has been taking your money personally and going to Las Vegas and gambling on the weekends because your money, his money – what’s the difference? 

“That was what was really happening. He was using all of these funds that people were depositing in the brokerage firm, FTX, and using it as his own personal piggy bank. They bought condos, whatever else they bought. They were gambling on wild derivative trading, so they were leveraging to the hilt. It had to end badly.“

On 5 June 2022, Belfort, whose view of Bitcoin has really changed in the past couple of years, admitted that he was wrong about the flagship cryptocurrency during an interview on episode 1 of Yahoo Finance’s new show “The Crypto Mile”.  

Belfort said:

“At the time that I really hated crypto. I stand by everything I said about crypto in 2017 except for one thing. I was wrong about Bitcoin going to zero.“

And when asked what he thinks is a better inflation hedge, gold or Bitcoin, Belfort replied:

“I think the issue right now is you have to look at Bitcoin and not take a 12-month or 24-month horizon. With reasonable luck, I think if you take a 24-month horizon, you’ll almost certainly make money, maybe not.

“But I think if you take a three, four, or five year horizon, I would be shocked if you didn’t make money because the underlying fundamentals, I believe, are really strong. There’s a limited supply and as inflation does keep going and going and going, at some point in time, there’ll be enough maturity with Bitcoin where it starts to trade more like a store value and less like a growth stock.“

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Featured Image via Pixabay