Sam Bankman-Fried (SBF), the founder and CEO of the FTX cryptocurrency exchange, has revealed he intends to spend anywhere between $100 million and $1 billion to help influence the 2024 United States presidential election campaigns.
It has been reported that in a podcast interview on Tuesday, Bankman-Fried was asked how much money he might donate during the next presidential election cycle, answering he’d give “north of $100 million” with a “soft ceiling” of $1 billion if he were to bankroll the person running against former president Donald Trump.
He said:
“I would hate to say hard ceiling because who knows what’s going to happen between now and then.”
However, according to the government watchdog OpenSecrets, which tracks data on campaign finance and lobbying, a $1 billion donation would break existing records multiple times over. The largest individual political donors are currently the Republican business owners Sheldon and Miriam Adelson, who spent $218 million in 2020.
The report said that Bankman-Fried continued by saying the amount he donates is “super contingent” and “really dependent on exactly who’s running where and for why,” adding it’s likely he would spread the money across multiple organizations.
He added:
“I think that I’m going to be looking a lot less at political parties from that perspective and a lot more about sane governance and ads for the things that I care the most about.”
Likewise, he said one of the most important issues to him is preventing the next pandemic, which he thinks would cost “tens of billions of dollars.” Bankman-Fried has donated millions to politicians in the past contributing $5.2 million in donations to now-President Joe Biden’s 2020 election campaign.
Thus, he also backs the political action committee (PAC) Protect Our Future, set up in January 2022. In April, the PAC spent $9 million supporting Democratic candidates. Earlier in May, the PAC spent in the range of $8 to $10 million backing Carrick Flynn who failed to win the Democratic primary election for the newly created Oregon 6th District seat in the US House of Representatives.
Source: Cointelegraph