Anthony Scaramucci, whose curiosity about cryptocurrencies began during his short stint in Washington, now plans to pivot his SkyBridge Capital toward digital assets after years of focusing on high-profile hedge funds.
Almost half of SkyBridge’s $3.5 billion under management is linked to crypto assets including Bitcoin, the Algorand protocol, Ethereum and publicly traded, crypto-related stocks, according to Scaramucci, who returned to money management at his New York-based firm after 11 days as then-President Donald Trump’s director of communications in 2017.
SkyBridge expects that the crypto focus could help triple assets to $10 billion, with digital assets representing the majority of those funds. “We feel so strongly about this opportunity that we’ve adapted and repositioned the firm to eventually be a leading cryptocurrency asset manager and adviser,” Scaramucci said in an interview.
Former White House Communications Director Anthony Scaramucci Interview
Anthony Scaramucci speaks during a Bloomberg Television interview in New York on Aug. 6, 2019. Photographer: Christopher Goodney/Bloomberg
Scaramucci spoke ahead of a SALT event this week co-sponsored with crypto exchange FTX that’s expected to draw nearly 2,000 people to the Bahamas.
Here are comments from the interview with Scaramucci and SkyBridge executive John Darsie, who helps run SkyBridge’s SALT conferences, edited for length:
BLOOMBERG: At what point did you make the decision to pivot to crypto?
ANTHONY SCARAMUCCI: We made a decision during the pandemic that we had to relitigate our entire portfolio. There’s a pre-pandemic world and a post-pandemic world, and a post-pandemic world has a lot more government deficits—it has a lot more uncertainty related to growth.
If you just look at the 10 years of GDP growth, it’s roughly about 1.6%, which is below trend. I’m not saying that the inflation is forever, but if you’re going to have high inflation, at least temporarily—which I would define as 18 to 36 months—you got to put yourself in a position to be in very high-growth-oriented places. For us, we think the cryptocurrency markets represent tremendous growth. It comes with volatility, certainly, but I think over the three to five years, we’d like that trajectory.
A seminal moment for me, though, was working in Washington, because I spent some time at the Export-Import Bank. It’s hard to believe it’s five years ago now, but in June of 2017, I was at the ExIm Bank in a meeting where Treasury officials were talking about the potential digitization of the dollar. And I was like, OK, well, how are you going to do that? Over the blockchain.
So when I got out of that meeting, it was a little bit of an epiphany for me: What the Winklevoss twins are talking about, what my friends like the Mike Novogratzes of the world are talking about, I have to take more seriously. So when I got fired from the White House, returned to SkyBridge, I bought the URL SkyBridgeBitcoin.com.
Our friend Michael Saylor started making very large Bitcoin investments in August of 2020. For SkyBridge, we made our first sizable investment in December, where we put about $270 million as a macro in investment in our Series G fund. Our average price was $18,500—that’s proven to be a very good entry point. But, granted, there’s been tremendous volatility. This is not for the faint of heart—this is a long-term, strategic decision.