Binance hack: violent divorce between Elon Musk and CZ

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https://cryptoast.fr/hack-de-binance-elon-musk-se-moque-cz-le-menace/

Humanity has just experienced the biggest heist in its history. This Thursday, October 29, hackers finally penetrated the defenses of the largest crypto platform in the world. Binance, however, was able to resist hacks longer than the others. On February 21, 2025, the Bybit platform bit the dust in the face of North Korean hackers. The latter left with 1.5 billion dollars, the record at the time. This spectacular cybercrime is part of a long “tradition” for the ecosystem. Even the paragon of security, Ledger, suffered a massive attack targeting its wallets a few weeks ago. In cryptocurrencies, cybersecurity is not about knowing “if” an attack will occur, but when.

While we use these dramatic incidents to learn and strengthen ourselves, the rest of the economic world, as usual, is laughing. “Classic” companies do not understand that what happens today in crypto will happen to them tomorrow. We have also seen this with crypto-kidnappings. Only this time, it was a self-proclaimed ally who came to knock us down: Elon Musk.

The latter, however, has a long love affair with cryptocurrencies. In 2021, before buying Twitter and renaming it X, the billionaire was able to win the good graces of the ecosystem. The values ​​of Web3 stuck to the image that the entrepreneur wanted to give himself: iconoclastic, focused on the future and new technologies, all with a certain rejection of public institutions. Elon Musk also shared a common enemy with American crypto entrepreneurs: Gary Gensler and the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC).

However, when you are a small sector in love, hated by the mainstream media, you have to know how to pull out all the stops. Elon Musk was not the hero we hoped for, but the one we had. For lack of anything better, we had to make do with it. Especially since at the time, the vast majority of billionaires only talked about cryptocurrencies to recite the untruths of the banking lobby and make predictions about the collapse of the price of Bitcoin.

Even Changpeng Zhao, the creator and former CEO of Binance, an emblematic figure in the ecosystem, regularly exchanged with Elon Musk on Twitter. During the takeover of the social network by the South African billionaire, CZ participated in the financing round to the tune of $500 million. Samuel Bankman-Fried also tried to join this fundraising, but was rejected by Elon Musk, whose “bullshit” detector was activated. One thing was clear: crypto billionaires wanted to get closer to Elon Musk, especially if the latter became the owner of Twitter, the largest media outlet in the world.

Machine-translated from French