Investing.com – During an intervention on CNBC, Changpeng Zhao, alias CZ, the boss of Binance, the largest crypto exchange platform in the world, returned to the FTX affair and the actions of his CEO Sam Bankman-Fried, and also raised the case of economist Nouriel Roubini, who had strongly criticized him the day before.
‘CZ’ was asked to respond to a tweet from Sam Bankman-Fried in which he referred to a ‘sparring partner’, believed to be CZ.
When he tweets about a sparring partner and his house burns down and all this happens, he loses focus. I didn’t know this problem existed in FTX before, otherwise we would have sold these a long time ago,” he told CNBC.
Why did Binance back out of buying FTX?
Zhao also provided details on Binance’s about-face, which announced on November 9 that it was abandoning the plan to buy FTX announced the day before.
“To be perfectly clear, [Bankman-Fried] came to see me. When he came to see me, I knew he was desperate. It’s likely that a number of people refused the deal before us,” Zhao said. “It didn’t take long for us to realize that there were much bigger issues [chez FTX] than we imagined,” he added.
On another CNBC show on Thursday, the decidedly media-heavy Zhao said he was “very shocked” at the way Bankman-Fried behaved. “I’m shocked that he lied to everyone I didn’t know he lied to everyone until a week ago,” Zhao said.
CZ ignores Nouriel Roubini’s criticism and accusations
CZ also raised the case of economist Nouriel Roubini, who fired red balls at Binance, CZ and cryptocurrencies in general on Wednesday.
Recall that Roubini had described Changpeng Zhao as one of the “seven Cs of crypto” – an unflattering list that also included “concealed, corrupt, crooks, criminals, crooks, carnival barkers” (“concealed, corrupt, crooks, criminals, con men, carnival barkers” in English).
Roubini also described crypto and some of its major players as a “totally corrupt ecosystem”. He also deemed Binance a “ticking time bomb”, implying that the platform will follow the same path as FTX.
Faced with these criticisms, Zhao chose simply not to respond. “We don’t care,” he told CNBC Thursday of Roubini’s opinion.
“Negative energies don’t go far in life and these people will generally remain poor,” he said, calling Roubini “very rude.”