Bankman-Fried says FTX prepared to spend billions on acquisitions: Bloomberg

Crypto exchange FTX is ready to spend billions of dollars for stakes in other companies, Chief Executive Officer Sam Bankman-Fried told Bloomberg in an interview.

The billionaire CEO, who’s also a co-founder of FTX, said on Friday that recent fundraising of more than $2 billion by the company and its US entity may be used for the investments aimed at expanding its range of services to its customers.

“FTX is a profitable company,” he said. “You can look at the amount that we’ve raised over the last year or two — it’s a few billion dollars. That gives maybe a sense of where we are in terms of cash that was explicitly viewed from a potential acquisition angle.”

In January, FTX raised $400 million at a $32 billion valuation, bringing the total raised in the prior half year to near $2 billion, Bloomberg said, adding that its US entity separately raised $400 million. 

This story has been corrected to remove a reference to a report from May 2021.