Investors haven’t been able to get their money out of Anthony Scaramucci’s crypto fund. As of Thursday, Bloomberg reports that over two-thirds of the shareholders of his $1.6 billion crypto fund had filed for redemption of their shares — and were still waiting to get their money out.
Private wealth clients at Morgan Stanley made a large number of those redemption requests.
His fund delivered flat performance from April 1, 2019, through March 31, 2024. Over that same five-year period, bitcoin rallied 10X.
So, how is it possible for SkyBridge to have delivered near-zero annualized returns for five years while bitcoin returned 60%?
FTX invested in SkyBridge; SkyBridge bought FTX’s token
Scaramucci was heavily invested in Sam Bankman-Fried’s empire through its final week in business. In a quintessentially Bankman-Fried quid pro quo, FTX Ventures invested in SkyBridge and sponsored Scaramucci’s SALT conference. To draw that full circle, SkyBridge bought millions of dollars of FTX’s proprietary token, FTT.
FTX manipulated and controlled the vast majority of the supply of FTT, which it used to artificially inflate the value of its assets.
The relationship between FTX and SkyBridge was so tight that Scaramucci even received a special phone call from Bankman-Fried’s father, Joseph Bankman, to give him early warning of the exchange’s collapse.
Just days prior to its bankruptcy, Scaramucci flew to the Bahamas where he sat in Bankman-Fried’s Bahamian ‘War Room’ while FTX was losing hundreds of millions of dollars in equity and crypto by the hour.
However, FTX was just one of SkyBridge’s problems.
Read more: Joseph Bankman warned Scaramucci about FTX
Redemption requests rise amid Scaramucci’s underperformance
SkyBridge has been struggling to attract capital for a decade. The latest round of redemption requests from Morgan Stanley clients and elsewhere only adds to Scaramucci’s woes.
SkyBridge’s assets under management have declined by over three-quarters since 2015 — and there are redemption requests outstanding for hundreds of millions more.
As of March 31, the majority of Scaramucci’s crypto fund was deployed into crypto assets. It also had minority exposure to structured credit, equity, and other funds.
In the end, SkyBridge is one of the worst-performing funds of the past five years ending March 31, underperforming the S&P 500 by over 12% annually over that period.
Protos reached out to Scaramucci for comment. His press team responded that he had no further comment on Bloomberg’s July 11 article. Scaramucci claims he has written permission to limit redemption requests per the fund’s prospectus.
