- Anthony Scaramucci’s 11-day tenure during President Trump’s first term in the White House re-introduced him to Bitcoin, he said on Tuesday. The founder and co-managing partner of SkyBridge Capital later wrote The Little Book of Bitcoin, and Strategy executive chairman Michael Saylor wrote the forward—after he convinced Scaramucci to change the ending.
According to Anthony Scaramucci, the second time he heard about Bitcoin was in the Roosevelt Room of the White House on a Wednesday in 2017. Scaramucci remembers it was a Wednesday because it was the only one he spent at the White House before President Trump fired him.
In the Oval Office, then Treasury Secretary Steve Mnuchin and two officials from The Federal Reserve arrived to discuss research into cryptocurrency and Bitcoin, recalled Scaramucci while speaking at the Abundance360 summit on Tuesday. Scaramucci, the founder of SkyBridge Capital who is known casually as “Mooch,” had heard about the digital currency five or six years earlier, he said, but back then he found the subject nonsensical. That day in the West Wing, however, it dawned on Mooch that he was sitting in the White House and representatives from the Central Bank were talking about Bitcoin and blockchain technology, he said.
Scaramucci was fired a few days later, ending his dramatic tenure as White House communications director at a brief 11 days. He went home to his wife and bought a URL with SkyBridge and Bitcoin in it, he said, and started researching the digital currency. Scaramucci has since become a crypto investor through his hedge fund and his recent offering, The Little Book of Bitcoin, was published last year. In it he tells stories about how people find their way to the cryptocurrency. Scaramucci believes more than 90% of people who seriously look at Bitcoin wind up believing in it, citing billionaire investors like Paul Tudor Jones, Ray Dalio, and Stanley Druckenmiller.
Scaramucci asked Strategy chairman Michael Saylor to write the forward, Scaramucci said. Strategy, formerly known as Microstrategy, is a software company that Saylor remade into a corporate vehicle to stockpile Bitcoin. Under Saylor’s watch, the company has obtained nearly 500,000 Bitcoins valued at more than $40 billion. As Fortune reported, the price of Bitcoin has tumbled more than 25% from a $109,000 high in January following Trump’s election, and taken Strategy’s stock price with it; shares are down 50% since November.
As for Scaramucci’s book, Saylor read it and called Scaramucci from his yacht to say he loved it—but hated the last chapter, Scarmucci recalled. Saylor told him, “You just got done telling me this is the greatest investment” but you only recommend a 2% allocation, Scaramucci said. Saylor asked Scaramucci why he would tell people he had high conviction about Bitcoin as an investment with only a small allocation. So Scaramucci changed the ending, he said.
“He reminds me of this every time I see him,” Scaramucci said.
The veteran investor who spent years at Goldman Sachs clarified he has no interest in running for political office, but said if he had his druthers, there would be no battle with Canada. Trump on Tuesday reversed course on imposing an additional 25% tariff on Canadian steel and aluminum products, on top of 25% tariffs on imports slated to take effect on Wednesday.
Scaramucci said he hoped people could eventually break the impasse in politics in which someone from the Republican Party is elected President and “beats the brains out of the left,” followed by someone from the Democratic Party getting elected and “ripping up the policies of the right.”
“There are ideas on the right that have worked, and ideas on the left that have worked,” Scaramucci said. “I think we’ve lost our way a little bit.”
