• D.C.
  • BXL
  • Lagos
  • Dubai
  • Beijing
  • SG
rotating globe
  • D.C.
  • BXL
  • Lagos
Semafor Logo
  • Dubai
  • Beijing
  • SG


Updated Nov 13, 2022, 7:00pm EST
businessNorth America

Sam Bankman-Fried had plans for a Matt-and-Nate-heavy Substack competitor

Max’s stories appear in Semafor’s Sunday evening media newsletter where we explore the news behind the news. .

Liz is Semafor’s Business & Finance Editor, joining us from The Wall Street Journal. to get her scoops in your inbox twice a week.

TweetEmailWhatsapp

Sign up for Semafor Business: The stories (& the scoops) from Wall Street. Read it now.

Title icon

The News

Former FTX CEO Sam Bankman-Fried
Getty Images/Tom Williams

The spectacular collapse of Sam Bankman-Fried’s crypto exchange FTX has rippled into the news business, ending a stream of funding that backed nonprofit news organizations including ProPublica and the Law and Justice Journalism Project.

AD

It also means the end of Bankman-Fried’s plan for a Substack competitor populated by his favorite writers. The Substack writer Matt Yglesias confirmed that he had spoken to Bankman-Fried about the project, saying he was “flattered but not interested.” The 538 founder Nate Silver told Semafor that he spoke to an FTX executive about the project, and was similarly not interested. Other names Bankman-Fried floated included Bloomberg’s Matt Levine.

Bankman-Fried had also become an investor in at least one for-profit organization: This one. The former crypto billionaire invested in Semafor earlier this year.

“We closed our seed round in May and received all investments in full in USD. While we are monitoring the evolving situation closely, we don’t anticipate an impact on our financial outlook or our business,” Semafor spokesperson Meera Pattni said.

Semafor Logo
AD