Semafor to Buy Out Sam Bankman-Fried’s $10 Million Investment

Semafor, the scoop startup led by means of former Bloomberg Media Group CEO Justin Smith and BuzzFeed News founder Ben Smith, plans to shop for out a $10 million funding by means of disgraced crypto multi-millionaire Sam Bankman-Fried, or SBF, the newest media company to go back cash from the chief of failed buying and selling platform FTX.

Elon Musk Slammed Semafor

Launched not up to 3 months in the past, Semafor got here underneath fireplace after the FTX meltdown when it revealed a piece of writing claiming Tesla CEO Elon Musk had requested Bankman-Fried for $100 million.

Musk denied the tale, calling it “a lie” and asking, “How a lot of you does SBF personal?” Ben Smith answered by means of announcing Semafor has lined SBF “aggressively” and at all times expose his funding when writing about him. “Like you and plenty of others, we took and funding from him,” Smith tweeted.

Semafor Wants to Come Clean

Sam Bankman-Fried made investments in Semafor as a part of a $25 million investment spherical, in step with Crunchbase.Semafor, which describes on its site its project as bringing transparency to the scoop, is in search of new tactics to lift cash. It objectives to position the SBF budget right into a separate account till officers inform Semafor the place and the way the cash must be returned.

The Bottom Line

Semafor is one among a number of media corporations that won investment from Bankman-Fried. For example, ProPublica, the nonprofit investigative information outlet, won $5 million from Sam Bankman-Fried’s circle of relatives basis and has introduced returning the $1.6 million. Vox won $200,000 from SBF’s circle of relatives. The Block’s CEO, Michael McCaffrey, needed to renounce after failing to expose a sequence of loans from Sam Bankman-Fried’s Alameda Research.