As Sam Bankman-Fried stares down the barrel of a 25 year Patrick Gruhn, the former head of FTX Europe, recently spent $1.5 million to acquire a gold watch found on the corpse of a victim of the Titanic, according to a report in Gruhn told the Like the late businessman whose watch he now owns, FTX’s Gruhn was also born in Germany before settling in the United States. He too has amassed a fortune—but one that has come with a fair amount of legal scrutiny. In November 2021, FTX spent $376 million to acquire a Swiss crypto firm run by Gruhn and his business partners, which would become FTX Europe. According to a Over the next two years, according to the same lawsuit, Gruhn sent over $4 million from FTX Europe to Kephas, a company he personally owned, for unspecified consulting services.During that same period, per the FTX suit, Gruhn used Kephas to purchase a custom, $146,000 bulletproof Cadillac Escalade; he also used funds from the company to pay the salaries of a butler, a full-time chef, a housekeeper, and multiple estate managers, all of whom worked at his 700-acre private home in La Pine, Oregon. The suit, filed last summer, sought to compel Gruhn and his partners to pay back the huge sums they received from FTX—which allegedly consisted of misappropriated FTX customer funds. After Gruhn and his partners filed a countersuit, both sides Gruhn continues to live in Oregon, where he purchased eight properties during the period he led FTX Europe. He’s now building a crypto derivative exchange in Europe, according to the report, and operates a Catholic television network in Germany.Edited by Andrew Hayward
