FTX’s “Million+ Creditors” Include Netflix, DoorDash, and Airbnb

The FTX Arena in Miami seen from above.

The FTX creditor list also named Miami-based Basketball Properties LTD as a creditor. FTX purchased the home rights to the Miami Heat arena for $135 million in 2021. The Miami-Dade County government has since terminated that 19-year contract.

FTX’s ongoing Chapter 11 bankruptcy is still trying to recoup the billions of dollars needed to return customers and investors whole. A problem with this lofty goal is the near- 10 million FTX customers which still had funds on the exchange before its collapse are apparently lumped together with old lunch bills from FTX employees.

The list of creditors has been under judicial seal for three months, but Delaware District Judge John Dorsey finally told FTX’s attorneys to file it on Wednesday. Previous bankruptcy documents speculated that there could be 1 million creditors among more than 100 different companies. The list doesn’t make the mess surrounding the failed cipher exchange any less confusing. It may even indicate how messy the FTX books were before the company finally imploded last November.

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The company has been going through a long and convoluted bankruptcy since November, after investigations revealed that the exchange’s CEO, Sam Bankman-Fried, was funneling client crypto to his hedge fund Alameda Research. Bankman-Fried is currently awaiting trial on criminal allegations of fraud and conspiracy, and FTX barely managed to represent $5.5 billion in assets of a company that was once valued at $32 billion at its peak.

The list of creditors gives no indication of the amount owed to each entity, but the 116-page document includes a huge list of names, although many of those on the document have been redacted. Some of these people are rather strange to see on a due list. There are known FTX investor names like Tom Brady and his ex-wife, model Gisele Bündchenalthough the latter was listed under the Gisele Bündchen Charitable Giving, her charitable foundation.

Mercedes-Benz has also been listed several times. FTX had sponsored its F1 team, although the automaker has since terminated this partnership and removed the FTX logo from his vehicle. Moonstone Bank was another listed creditor. The Washington state-based bank was trying to set up a crypto and cannabis operation from a small town on the Idaho border.

Among the names are a few other notable entities, including Modulo Capital, a small crypto trading company. This company received meticulous examination federal prosecutors for the hundreds of millions of dollars Bankman-Fried gave him over the years, according to unnamed sources cited by The New York Times. FTX’s new executives are trying to bring those millions back from Modulo as part of its attempt to restore creditor integrity.

And then there are the head-scratching entities that FTX lists as a creditor. Netflix is ​​listed as one of the entities alongside the Wall Street Journal. There are the names of the Alabama Department of Revenue listed multiple times alongside several other state agencies. Major tech companies such as Meta, Microsoft, and Apple are also listed alongside the names of Apple’s IT staff.

Some of these entities on the list could simply be expenses that inexplicably ended up included in the company’s list of creditors. DoorDash and UberEats are listed together more than a dozen times around the world, in places like San Francisco, Toronto, Canada and Melbourne, Australia. Airbnb is listed alongside several luxury hotels in places like Austin, Chicago, as well as Nassau in the Bahamas where FTX was based.

As pointed out Corner Telegraphformer FTX employees have spoken openly about the paltry amount of money staff spend on luxury homes, apartments, private chefs, massages, and more.

So it’s unclear if FTX just didn’t pay its Netflix bill, if the exchange had marketing deals with these other companies, or if the Bankman-Fried darling just listed the expenses of the employees because the company kept such bad books. John Ray III, the person responsible for managing FTX during its bankruptcy, said he has no confidence in the FTX balance sheets.

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