Kevin Bacon is opening up about how he and his wife lost “most of our money” in Bernie Madoff’s massive Ponzi scheme.
In an appearance on this week’s episode of Jason Bateman, Will Arnett and Sean Hayes’ “Smartless” podcast, the 64-year-old “Footloose” star explained that he and wife Kyra Sedgewick were among Madoff’s 40,000 victims.
He was drawn to the promise of a high return on his investment with Madoff but in hindsight the tantalizing figures should have been a warning sign. “There’s obvious life lessons there,” Bacon said. “If something is too good to be true, it’s too good to be true.”
Madoff’s massive fraud scheme is estimated to have ripped clients off to the tune of $65 billion.
Despite the massive financial hit he took, Bacon admitted that he didn’t expect to receive much sympathy for what he experienced.
“I think people will be not happy to hear me whining about money,” he said.”How concerned are you that the money given to you by @SBF_FTX will be clawed back? Are you prepared to hand it back to creditors if they were to ask?” @andrewrsorkin asks @cz_binance:
The billionaire investor, who was paid $15 million to be an FTX spokesman, was speaking at a US Senate hearing Wednesday into the downfall of FTX, which has shaken faith in the stability of companies dealing in crypto assets.
O’Leary said FTX had been forced to spend as much as $3 billion on repurchasing a chunk of its shares from Binance, according to what the exchange’s founder and former CEO Sam Bankman-Fried told him. That stripped FTX’s balance sheet of assets, he testified to the Senate Committee on Banking, Housing & Urban Affairs.
“Now, maybe there is nothing wrong with that — maybe there is nothing wrong with love and war. But Binance is a massive unregulated global monopoly now, and they put FTX out of business,” he added.
The failure of now-bankrupt FTX in November came after the exchange suffered a severe liquidity crisis that sent Bankman-Fried on the hunt for a $8 billion cash injection.
The disgraced former CEO is now in custody in the Bahamas following his arrest on charges of defrauding investors, after reports that FTX secretly transferred billions of dollars in its customers’ funds to sister trading arm Alameda Research.
During the hearing, O’Leary said Binance owned a 20% stake in FTX, which Bankman-Fried was forced to buy back at up to $3 billion, and that helped tip the exchange into collapse.
Bankman-Fried said he had to buy the stake because Binance and its founder Changpeng Zhao, commonly known as “CZ” , were at war over regulatory issues, according to O’Leary.
“Apparently, according to Sam Bankman-Fried, CZ would not comply with regulators’ requests in different jurisdictions to provide the data that would clear them [FTX] for a license,” O’Leary told lawmakers.
“The only option the management and Sam Bankman-Fried had was to buy him out at an extraordinary valuation close to $32 billion,” he added, saying that’s what drained assets from FTX’s balance sheet.
He also pointed to Zhao’s decision to have Binance sell its holdings of FTX’s FTT token as another factor in the collapse.
Despite the massive financial hit he took, Bacon admitted that he didn’t expect to receive much sympathy for what he experienced.
“I think people will be not happy to hear me whining about money,” he said.
Indeed, despite saying that he was “angry” at the time, Bacon remained well aware that he was still in a relatively fortunate situation compared to some of Madoff’s other victims.
Bacon said that he had recouped a “portion” of his losses in the years since but has not yet been made whole.
Instead of letting the negative circumstances get the best of them, Bacon said that he and his wife decided to focus on the positives in their life.
“When something like that happens, you look at each other and you go, ‘Well, that sucks,’” he said. ”‘Let’s roll up our sleeves and get to work.’”
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