we have known and public records show that sam bankman-fried, founder of ftx one one of the biggest donors in the country during the 2022 midterms. he has come out and said that in his estimation, he was also the second or third largest republican donor in the country, but he gave those donations in a way that was kept in his words dark. so generally that means donating through intermediaries or donating to dark money groups that cutouts that pass along money to political campaigns or party committees or super pacs. you know, it happens a lot in general, but, you know, his admission was just really brazen and, you know, it appears caught the attention of federal prosecutors which are now accusing him of criminal violations of campaign finance laws. the s.e.c. actually spelled out some details of it in their civil complaint, where they say he essentially commingled funds from his cryptocurrency trading
they will have to meet in the middle. maybe there is a threshold that you need 20 signatures or you need a third of the conference, it s unclear how they re going to do it but what is clear to me, mccarthy doesn t agree with this, what is clear to me, he will have to move on this in some sway, shape or form. a vote of no confidence. can you quickly tell me, mcconnell, is he okay? he is fighting as leader, and he is a-okay. just like those buttons for kevin mccarthy. like kevin mccarthy. okay. only okay. ok. jake sherman, thank you very much. make sure this gets done because we have stuff to do. coming up, elon musk, what just happened to elon musk s net worth? plus two survivors of the club q shootings testified on capitol hill. what they told lawmakers who accused them of grooming. first up, the attorney who called ftx one of the biggest financial frauds in history and one senator argues regulating
right now, and you might recognize that case, that is the actor ben mckenzie, famous from the oc, and outspoken on cryptocurrency when other celebrities were cashing in, in super bowl ads, taking god knows who knows how much money to hawk this stuff and he is saying it is a big scam and don t get involved. we also saw one of the guys from shark tank testify. what did kevin owe lerry say? mckenzie has been sounding the alarm for cryptocurrency for some time and the debate is what we saw here with ftx, a problem unto itself, or if it is a symptom of a much larger problem, with cryptocurrencies. and that s the argument mckenzie is making, that this was bound to happen, because the industry is so unregulated, and you know, it s difficult to track and a lot of people could lose a lot of money. now kevin o leary is one of these celebrities that really benefitted, at least at one
point from ftx. he received $15 million from ftx, which was largely then invested in the company and now he claims he has lost it all. o leary would argue that crypto still has a future and there is still an opportunity for it to be a viable alternative currency. but he says in this individual case, it was a company that was just really mismanaged. take a listen. after my accounts were stripped of all of their assets, and all of the accounting and trade information, i couldn t get answers from any of the executives in the firm, so i simply called sam bank moon-fried and said where is the money, sam. he said it had been, access to the servers, he no longer knew. and he was a celebrity endorser and claims everything he referred from the company he eventually lost as the company chanced. what about an outright ban?
of lawmakers from both sides of the aisle that want to be a part of this, and this is kind of an ongoing discussion on capitol hill, that s really been sped up by the ftx scandal. and they want specific oversight over the crypto industry in particular, to prevent not only something like this from happening, but also to bring some sort of normalcy to the market. right now, it s, you know, it can largely be a speculative market, not based in everything, and that s part of what this legislation would solve, but you know, there really isn t, even though there is bipartisan sign-on, there isn t bipartisan sign-on, they don t really have momentum specifically behind this piece of legislation, in many respects, both sides have been kind of talking past each other when it comes to these negotiations, and of course, we re running up against the end of the legislative calendar here in 2022. this is likely a conversation that is going to extend into 2023, and beyond. but there s no doubt, somethi