Tom Brady and Gisele Bundchen’s FTX stake will probably get wiped out
By Allison Morrow, CNN
Less than a year after Tom Brady and Gisele Bundchen appeared in a series of Super Bowl ads for FTX, the former couple have emerged as some of the biggest equity holders in the now-bankrupt enterprise.
Brady owns 1.1 million common shares of FTX, while Bundchen owns 686,000 shares, according to bankrupcty court documents filed Monday.
At its peak, the privately held FTX was valued at around $32 billion.
Whatever Brady and Bundchen paid for their stakes, they, along with hundreds of other investors, will almost certainly see their positions completely wiped out. (The court documents didn’t disclose what investors paid for their shares or detail when they were acquired.)
When companies go bankrupt, stockholders are typically the last in line to recover any funds. US bankruptcy laws stipulate that creditors — in FTX’s case, customers who’d deposited money on the platform — be repaid first.
A representative for the pair, who divorced in October, didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment.
Their role in boosting FTX has already come under legal scrutiny. Soon after FTX’s collapse, a customer filed a proposed class-action lawsuit against FTX founder Sam Bankman-Fried, along with Brady, Bundchen and several other celebrity backers. The case, filed by heavyweight lawyers Adam Moskowitz and David Boies, argues that FTX was “a massive Ponzi scheme,” and that the leaders behind it were “geniuses at public relations and marketing.”
When the crypto platform collapsed in mid-November, Bankman-Fried and others were replaced at the helm by restructuring experts who are overseeing the bankruptcy of FTX and dozens of affiliates.
“At the end of the day, we’re not going to be able to recover all the losses here,” said the company’s new CEO, John Ray III, before a Congressional committee last month.
Bankman-Fried pleaded not guilty last week to eight federal counts of wire fraud, conspiracy and campaign finance violations. Federal prosecutors accuse the 30-year-old entrepreneur, once a celebrity in crypto circles, of stealing customer funds from FTX to cover outsize losses at his hedge fund, Alameda. They also say he used the funds to underwrite a lavish lifestyle for himself and his employees.
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