Binance, the world’s largest crypto trading service by trading volume, has pledged to cover all losses and temporarily paused customer withdrawals. Binance co-founder and co-CEO Yi He said the crypto firm expects to restore normal withdrawal service by Nov. 1.
Musk, though, appeared to take a swipe at the company’s troubles on X. One user compared Binance’s statements to those issued by Sam Bankman-Fried, the disgraced founder of the FTX crypto exchange, just before the company went bankrupt. Musk responded with a grimace emoji and seemingly laughed at Zhao in a separate post as well.
“Elon, have a lot of respect for you, but bad time to troll. Please stop,” Zhao replied in an Oct. 30 X post. “Our SPCX shares (from our $500m investment in your Twitter takeover) are worth more than a billion.”
Zhao continued: “Would appreciate if you show a little support. Thanks!”
SpaceX representatives did not immediately respond to a request for comment from Moneywise.
The fallout of the Binance hack
Zhao’s response to Musk about Binance’s $1 billion stake in SpaceX promoted a reaction from He. In a post on X, the co-CEO clarified that Binance has enough revenue to cover losses and doesn’t yet need to sell SpaceX shares. Zhao responded to He’s clarification saying he “didn’t say anything about selling” SpaceX shares and was showing Musk that he can be “less worried.”
Musk and Zhao have squabbled once before. Binance suspended Dogecoin withdrawals in November 2021 while it was updating its wallet for the memecoin, which Musk called “shady” at the time on what was then Twitter. Zhao shot back with a Guardian article about a Tesla recall asking: “What happened here?”
Binance has scrambled to contain the fallout of the crypto breach, which led to a plunge in Bitcoin trading prices. The company said it appeared to be the target of a sophisticated hacking operation while emphasizing customer funds were safe and deposits were functioning as normal.
“Our initial investigation suggests this security incident may have started with a compromised DevOps engineer’s laptop,” Binance co-CEO Richard Teng said in an X post. “That gave an attacker access to a service container, where they submitted unauthorized withdrawal transactions.”
