Taylor Swift is apparently as fluent in finance as she is in songwriting. In the fallout of the FTX collapse, Swift, who was offered $US100 million (which is about $140) to promote the crypto exchange, dodged a bullet by asking about unregistered securities according to a lawyer waging lawsuits against other celebrity spokespeople.
Swift’s financial prowess was revealed by Adam Moskowitz, one of the lawyers behind a class action lawsuit waged against FTX celebrity spokespeople like Larry David, Tom Brady, Steph Curry, and Shaq. Swift was almost one of those celebrity spokespeople, with FTX offering her $US100 million over three years to sponsor the exchange in talks throughout 2021 and 2022. Now, Moskowitz has claimed on The Scoop podcast that Swift was the only one of these celebrity offers that kept her side of the street clean and that the celebrity spokespeople that got caught were probably not coordinating with their lawyers before accepting FTX’s money.
“The one person I found that [talked to their lawyers] was Taylor Swift,” Moskowitz said. “In our discovery, Taylor Swift actually asked them: ‘Can you tell me that these are not unregistered securities?’”
Swift did not immediately return Gizmodo’s request for comment.
Moskowitz went on to call FTX a “pyramid scheme” and explained that most celebrities and influencers that partnered with FTX were likely motivated by greed. Moskowitz, along with ex-Weinstein lawyer David Boies, filed a class action lawsuit in Florida have alleged that FTX’s celebrity endorsers helped peddle a “Ponzi scheme” with their actions affecting “thousands, if not millions, of consumers nationwide.”
FTX collapsed this past November as the cryptocurrency exchange could not meet the withdrawal demand of its users. A bombshell report from Coinbase pointed to the eventual revelation that FTX had used customer funds to fuel investments into its co-owned trading firm Alameda Research, leading FTX to eventually file for Chapter 11 bankruptcy. Court-appointed FTX CEO John Ray III said he’d never seen “such an utter failure of corporate controls at every level of an organisation,” referring to FTX.
While FTX’s downfall was kicked off by what appears to be good old-fashioned fraud, charging crypto companies with offering unregistered securities has become common in the last year. Last September, SEC chair Gary Gensler said that he believes “the vast majority” of crypto tokens meet the definition of an unregistered security.
Once again, Taylor Swift was ahead of the game and FTX wasn’t ready for it.