- Anthony Scaramucci was fired from his first job at Goldman Sachs, then again by Donald Trump after just 11 days—and he also unwittingly lost millions of dollars to Sam Bankman-Fried’s fraud. Despite each setback, like the layoffs Gen Z is currently facing, he says opportunities can still come knocking “if you live with integrity.”
Anthony Scaramucci knows a thing or two about getting knocked down.
The baby boomer financier is perhaps best known for his 11-day stint as Donald Trump’s White House communications director, but that was far from the lowest point of his career. The biggest punch to the gut came when Scaramucci learned the news about Sam Bankman-Fried.
“I think the worst day I had professionally was discovering that Sam Bankman-Fried was a fraud,” Scaramucci told Fortune. “I mean, getting fired from the White House, okay—it’s politics. I’m a big boy, you know, get over it, it’ll be fine. But when he got exposed as a fraud, that was a blow to me because I trusted the guy. I liked him.”
Scaramucci and Bankman-Fried met in 2021 and became business partners after SBF acquired one of Scaramucci’s early investments: crypto exchange LedgerX. Just a year later, their relationship blossomed more seriously, with Scaramucci selling 30% of his investment management firm, SkyBridge Capital, to the now convicted cryptocurrency entrepreneur.
But despite the messy legal battle trying to get his company stake back, plus the millions lost in his $10 million investment in FTX, “The Mooch” is the first person to laugh at the mistakes he’s made in his career—and also point out what he’s learned.
“You can never play the victim in life,” Scaramucci said. “Self-pity is the worst human emotion.”
Scaramucci may be a king of mistakes—but he’s also a king of pulling himself back up
Scaramucci likens his tenacity to that of a cockroach that can’t be killed. Even after hitting what some would consider near rock-bottom at nearly every step in his career, including when he was fired from his first job at Goldman Sachs, he got back up.
“I got fired from Goldman after I was there for about 18 months because I actually sucked at that first job,” he said.
“Could I complain about it? Could I play the victim? No, I had to keep going. So then, luck would have it, I got hired back at Goldman Sachs two months later.”
Many young people today are facing similar dilemmas to Scaramucci of being fired from their first job, with one report indicating that one in six employers has fired Gen Z workers fresh out of college. However, Scaramucci’s advice is simple: Take stock of what you do have, be thankful, and get back to work.
“If you live with integrity, you always have opportunity,” he said.
By using his network, he was able to land back in finance, and he embodied a philosophy for his entire career: taking hard falls in stride and learning from them.
Decades later, after being fired from one of the top communications jobs in the entire world, he realized the experience had actually given him an invaluable platform and name recognition.
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Bankman-Fried, too, taught him a great deal about the digital financial world and how to navigate it properly.
“The assets turned out to be extremely valuable, but he’s going to be in jail for a very, very long period of time because he had a bad set of morals,” Scaramucci said. “He probably didn’t have a good guidance system.”
Scaramucci is bullish on the future—and it keeps him nimble
Scaramucci spoke to Fortune early this month in perfect Scaramucci fashion—while on an IV being rehydrated in his office after an international trip to London. At age 61, as his peers are winding down for retirement, he’s still grabbing every opportunity that comes his way.
He’s just started a podcast, written a new book, and become a voice of reason on social media—with over a million followers on X—against the new Trump administration.
And despite the run-in with Bankman-Fried and the hesitation from other more traditional investors like Warren Buffett, Scaramucci isn’t shying away from new investment opportunities, like cryptocurrency.
“If I didn’t go toward everything and I didn’t have some openness of my personality and some neuroplasticity in my brain, I would be like all these other 60-year-old, old fogies that say NFW to Bitcoin.”
Plus, even if it all doesn’t work out the way he expected, Scaramucci is okay with that too, because that means he tried and learned—and he’ll just as easily find something new to keep him eager to wake up every morning anyway.
“Go toward everything. Don’t be afraid of anything,” he added. “Because what ends up happening is, if you go toward everything, you’ll keep the neuroplasticity in your brain forever.”
