CZ Cites $1B SpaceX Stake as He Asks Musk to End Hack Trolling

CZ Asks Musk to Stop Trolling

With $6.3 billion in customer assets reported stolen from a major Binance hot crypto wallet on October 29, the exchange's founder Changpeng Zhao (CZ) publicly asked Elon Musk to stop mocking the company on X, telling the billionaire the timing of his jokes could not be worse. The FBI and the U.S. Secret Service are investigating the theft. The row began when a user posted a meme that ironically paired Zhao's promise to cover customer losses with Sam Bankman-Fried's message on the eve of the FTX collapse, “FTX has enough to cover all client holdings.” Musk reacted with a grimacing emoji, which set off a wave of trolling directed at the exchange while federal investigators tracked the stolen funds.

Zhao's reply came within minutes. In a public response on October 30, he wrote: “Elon, have a lot of respect for you, but bad time to troll. Please stop.” He then reminded Musk whose money helped him buy Twitter in 2022: Binance provided $500 million toward the takeover, and that investment, now held as SpaceX (SPCX) shares, was worth more than $1 billion by October 2026. “Would appreciate if you show a little support. Thanks!” he added. The four-year-old stake has, in the middle of the crisis, become the exchange's most visible argument that it can absorb the loss without touching customer funds, and Binance separately plans to resume withdrawals within 45 to 48 hours once internal checks are complete. The owner of X has so far left the message unanswered. Zhao's open asking of a favor from the world's richest man, at the exact moment users were questioning the exchange's health, quickly drew questions from other users about why the SpaceX stake mattered at all.

The $2 Billion Balance Gap

The answer came as a rough public accounting. In the same thread, Zhao put the damage from the October 29 breach above $6 billion: about $3 billion in stolen funds has been frozen by stablecoin issuers, more than $1 billion is available through the Secure Asset Fund for Users (SAFU), and the remaining balance gap sits at roughly $2 billion. The SPCX stake, he argued, could in principle cover about half of that gap, leaving an amount that is “still painful, but manageable.” He framed the figures as directional, not a final accounting, and said Binance had no plans to sell the shares.

Musk's part went further than a single emoji. When Zhao published a cybersecurity warning on October 28, urging followers not to open suspicious email links or download attachments from trusted contacts, Musk replied with fire and laughing emojis. After news of the attack, he commented “Everyday is Zeroday” on a post about the stolen cryptocurrency, a nod to zero-day vulnerabilities that attackers exploit before developers can patch them. Zhao answered that more people following his advice might have limited the damage, adding that compromised devices or algorithms often play a role. Co-CEO Yi He then stepped into the thread with a message addressed to the “major shareholder”: the company's revenue for the year is sufficient to cover the losses, so Binance does not yet need to sell the SpaceX shares Musk is bullish on. Zhao replied he had not suggested a sale, only that the holdings showed available resources. Behind the social theater, investigators identified an Ethereum wallet address authorization that let the attacker redirect funds from a major hot wallet, and Binance's initial investigation points to a compromised DevOps engineer's laptop. The exchange reports no evidence that private keys leaked. Blockchain investigators have attributed the attack to North Korea-linked hackers; Binance has not confirmed any attribution. Withdrawals are expected to resume within 48 hours of the October 30 service update, while deposits remain operational.

SPCX as Public Collateral

The exchange's response has so far bought it a narrative rather than a recovery. Zhao's numbers make the SPCX stake a public safety margin, but the $2 billion gap is an estimate, the frozen $3 billion has no disclosed return date, and the full technical report Binance promised has yet to appear. On-chain monitoring of the attacker's address is now the test: whether the frozen portion stays put or moves through a crypto mixer will say more about the eventual loss than any social thread. Until that record and the post-mortem land, solvency rests on management statements. Withdrawals resuming within 48 hours is a stated intention, not a completed fix.