Updated posts August 2026
Anthony Scaramucci: From the White House to the Frontlines of Crypto and Culture
Anthony Scaramucci suddenly became a household name in 2017, serving as the no holds barred White House Director of Communications under President Donald Trump for just eleven days. But long before his stint in the political limelight, he was already a well known Wall Street figure with a knack for outside the box risk taking and the deep pocketed rewards that followed.
I’ve been a liquor investor, a hoard spirits investor, and I’m an investor in something called Whipshots with Cardi B, says Scaramucci, founder and managing partner of global alternative investment firm SkyBridge, and founder and chairman of SALT, an international thought leadership forum and venture studio, speaking energetically about the flavored, alcohol infused whipped cream. And I own a piece of a Balinese rum that’s about to enter the US market. It is as potent as any other rum but a little less sweet.
Yet that’s hardly where the avid entrepreneur’s love of a good time ends. Scaramucci also owns midtown Manhattan’s popular wheeling and dealing Hunt and Fish Club, and recently opened a satellite restaurant at LaGuardia Airport, with plans to expand into JFK. In his own words, it all stems from a personal love to tinker with new things.
From Port Washington to Wall Street
The 59 year old, now father of five and lifelong Long Islander, was born and raised in a middle class Italian-American family in the hamlet of Port Washington. The son of a sand mine crane operator, Scaramucci was the first in his generation to attend college. After earning a Bachelor of Arts in Economics from Tufts University and a Juris Doctor from Harvard Law School, where his time briefly overlapped with future President Barack Obama, the wildly ambitious financier embarked on an illustrious career as a private wealth manager at Goldman Sachs before co-founding investment partnership firm Oscar Capital Management, which sold in 2001 to Neuberger Berman.
In 2005, Scaramucci brought SkyBridge Capital to life, where he remains a managing partner and rebuffs the exhaustive label of a conventional CEO, leading the firm into the multibillion dollar value sphere, specializing in investments and assets falling outside traditional categories. With that same zest for innovation, Scaramucci became one of the earliest and proudest adopters of cryptocurrency and its underlying blockchain technology, and was ranked number 47 last year on Cointelegraph’s Top 100 Influencers list in the space.
Riding the Crypto Rollercoaster
That affiliation came with riding high as crypto soared in 2020 and 2021, followed by a meteoric crash in 2022, amplified by the bankruptcy of crypto exchange and hedge fund FTX and the criminal charges levied by the US government against disgraced founder Sam Bankman-Fried, someone with whom Scaramucci had closed deals, once called a visionary, and considered a friend. Further complicating matters, 2023 brought a string of controversial lawsuits against other major exchanges by the SEC, and one could hardly blame the SkyBridge maven for washing his hands entirely of the volatile decentralized financial system. Yet his faith remains unwavering.
We looked incredibly smart in 2021, and we obviously looked very stupid in 2022. But the cryptocurrency markets, particularly Bitcoin, are up approximately 80 percent this year. So it’s been a good recovery year for us, Scaramucci continues, with an almost infectious enthusiasm. If you’re an investor in crypto, depending on the day or the moment, you look very stupid or very smart. But we’re holding out long term, despite the regulatory turmoil, uncertainty, and market volatility.
He has his eye on the emerging gaming arena, with particular enthusiasm for Vulcan Forged, a blockchain based play-to-earn crypto game, along with its broader cohorts, the metaverse and the next evolution of the internet, collectively termed Web3.
Understanding Web3
In basic terms, Web3 describes a version of the World Wide Web owned and directed by users rather than large conglomerates. While Big Tech companies like Amazon, Google, and Facebook, now Meta, dominate the current internet landscape, controlling what content gets pushed, promoted, prohibited, and passed along, Web3 leans on decentralized blockchain technology to eliminate the middleman and put users back in the driver’s seat. It’s also a natural progression of technological advancement. Web1 was the internet many of us grew up with in the 1990s and early 2000s, defined by laborious dial-up connections, open source protocols, fixed webpages, sluggish downloads, basic messaging, and little else in the way of real time interaction. The past two decades brought the emergence of Web2, igniting an era of multimedia and social media, dynamic interaction, advanced gaming, and the rise of Silicon Valley on our desks and in our pockets.
However, the Web3 world is likely a linking of Web1’s community directed mindset with the modern advancements of Web2, and much more besides.
There is going to be a big opportunity here for the metaverse. We think one of the cutting edge ideas in gaming is play-to-earn style gaming. We think we’re in the investment industry, but we’re actually in the fashion industry, the skirts go up and down, the styles change, Scaramucci explains. So one minute we’re hot on biotechnology, the next we’re hot on artificial intelligence. I’m old enough to remember Web1, which was a huge mania until it wasn’t. Cryptocurrency was a huge mania, and now it isn’t. If you look at long term trends and long term growth, we love gaming, we love Web3 gaming.
The Formula Behind His Investment Decisions
But ultimately, Scaramucci’s recipe for success boils down to patience and following both his instincts and the numbers when it comes to growth.
We would like growth. And so we’re probably willing to pay more on an earnings per share basis, or from a revenue or an event basis, if we see something with huge growth and scalability capability. In the case of something like Vulcan Forged, they had probably 25,000 users on our gaming platform when I made that investment. Now they have over 200,000. We think they can easily reach a million users over the next couple of years, he conjectures. In the case of Bitcoin, there were 80 million wallets when I made my first investment in October 2020. There are now 340 million wallets. And as the wallets go up, demand for Bitcoin goes up. There’s a lot of scalability, a lot of price performance, and opportunity ahead.
The second criterion behind any investment decision comes down to whether the prospect embodies real grit and a no-failure ethos.
For me, it’s the can-do attitude and the unwillingness to fail. I have failed a number of times in my career. But I’m not willing to give up, Scaramucci reflects. Can you hang in there when bad things are happening? Can you change your plan? Can you demonstrate resilience in the marketplace? That’s a huge factor for us when we’re investing in companies, early stage or late stage, or even the hedge fund managers we put our money with.
The third, and perhaps most challenging factor for everyone involved, is the discipline to avoid touching an investment even under client pressure or falling prices.
If you just hang in there, and you buy really good fundamentals, you’re going to ultimately be right, that’s our opinion. This is sort of a crazy statement to make, but the best performing accounts at Charles Schwab are the dead people. They own good assets and sit on those assets, Scaramucci emphasizes.
Steady Nerves Amid Political Uncertainty
Perhaps another undeniable key to this New Yorker’s prosperity is refusing to let widely voiced fears of political catastrophe slow his forward momentum. Scaramucci remains confident that inflation numbers are trending downward, and that emerging technology, from AI powered vehicles to self driving robots, will continue that promising trajectory. He also admits to feeling largely indifferent to this year’s brewing concerns that lawmakers might fail to raise the debt ceiling and default on the nation’s debt, confident the US would never risk such economic catastrophe.
That didn’t affect my investment judgment. I guess the broader question everyone should be asking themselves is, what is the United States going to do to fix the deficit problem, fix the entitlement problem in this country, fix the infrastructure problem, which we’re so sorely lacking in? And the short answer is, we don’t have politicians with the political will to lay that out for the American people, he asserts. We have a two minute plan. We have a cable news fighting plan and a tribal, let’s split the Republic and do damage to each other plan. But we don’t have a unified plan.
A Reluctant Return to Politics?
While remaining fiercely patriotic and right of center, Scaramucci himself has no apparent immediate plans to step back into the political fray. But being the charismatic, confidence brimming New York money man he is, he can’t help but offer an opinion or two as the 2024 presidential election gains momentum.
I’m a lifelong Republican. I supported Donald Trump in 2016. When I thought he was going off the rails and threatening democracy, I withdrew my support, because I’m more of a patriot than a partisan, so I will support the Republican nominee, he adds. If it’s DeSantis, Christie, Haley, or someone else, I’ll support them. But if it’s Donald Trump, I won’t support him, because I worked for him, so I know how nuts he is. This election is rough and tumble. But I guess I’ll talk about investing and stay out of politics.
Well, at least for now.
