Shaquille O’Neal has reached a settlement agreement with a group of FTX investors who accused him of enabling the failed crypto exchange fraud by acting as a celebrity promoter, according to a court.
Details of the settlement agreement, including the amount that O’Neal will pay, has not yet been revealed. The applicants in the case are looking up to $ 21 billion in total damage from O’Neal and other promoters, former leaders and other insiders.
The former basketball star-facing business mogul was only one of a number of celebrity promoters named in the class case. Other athletes, including tennis player Naomi Osaka, baseball player Shohei Otani, basketball player Steph Curry and retired footballer Tom Brady were also appointed defendant with comedian Larry David, Shark Tank Star Kevin O’Leary and Model Gisele Bundchen.
Although O’Neal is the first defendant with great name in the case to settle on Wednesday, seven other celebrity promoters and former leaders reached a conciliation agreement with investors back in 2023, including Jaguar’s Quarterback Trevor Lawrence and YouTubers Tom Nash, Graham Stephan and Andrei Jikh. The first tranche of settlements was relatively small, a total of a collective $ 1.4 million.
O’NEAL’s settlement with FTX investors is not his first bound to a promotion of a failed crypto project. Last year, O’Neal and several of his employees agreed to pay $ 11 million to Astral non-spoken token (NFT) holders who lost money in the Solana-based project he founded and promoted.