Binance co-founder Changpeng Zhao publicly asked Elon Musk to stop trolling while the exchange battles the largest hack in its history, and in doing so offered a rare glimpse into a balance sheet detail few outsiders knew existed: a SpaceX stake that Zhao says is now worth more than 1 billion USD.
The exchange, which has been scrambling since attackers drained an estimated 6 billion USD from hot wallets earlier this week, is fighting a war on two fronts. One front is operational, where Binance says it has frozen roughly 3 billion USD in stolen assets and reserved more than 6 billion USD of its own funds to make affected users whole. The other front is reputational, and that is where the world’s richest man decided to weigh in.
Musk had chimed in on the crisis with a grimacing-face emoji posted to his account, a gesture that read to many observers as mockery directed at an exchange in distress. Zhao, who has spent years cultivating a friendly rapport with Musk, decided the moment called for bluntness.
“Elon, have a lot of respect for you, but bad time to troll. Please stop,” Zhao wrote, before appealing to Musk to show support for the exchange and its users instead.
The SpaceX stake Zhao referenced is not a random asset. He tied it directly to a 500 million USD investment Binance made in Musk’s takeover of Twitter, the platform now known as X, back in 2022. According to Zhao’s account, that early support has appreciated into a position in SpaceX shares he values at more than a billion dollars, a holding he described as “our SPCX shares.” The valuation and the ownership structure remain Zhao’s own claims and have not been independently verified, but the number itself was clearly chosen to send a message: Binance is not broke.
Why the public flex matters for the market
For a market still nursing wounds from the hack, the subtext of Zhao’s post matters almost as much as the text. The exchange was hit at the worst possible moment, just as bitcoin had slipped below the 79,000 USD level amid broader risk-off trading following the Federal Reserve’s rate decision. Traders spent days debating whether Binance could survive a loss of this magnitude without contagion spreading to withdrawals across other platforms.
Zhao’s response was effectively a public solvency argument. In a follow-up post describing what he called his rough math, he weighed the hack losses against the frozen assets, the exchange’s Secure Asset Fund for Users insurance wallet, and the estimated value of the SpaceX holding. His conclusion: the remaining gap is painful but manageable.
Co-founder Yi He reinforced that message shortly afterward, saying that Binance’s annual revenue is sufficient to cover the losses and that the company does not yet need to sell the SpaceX shares. When Zhao was asked why he brought up the stake at all, he explained that he was simply showing Musk a form of funds the Tesla chief might recognize, hoping it would make him less worried.
The distinction between revenue and ready cash
Investors should be careful with the accounting here, and to its credit Binance has been relatively explicit about the limits of its own claims. Revenue earned over the course of a year is not the same as cash available at any given moment. An estimated valuation of a private stake is not the same as money in the bank, particularly for shares in a company like SpaceX that does not trade publicly and has no established mechanism for Binance to convert the holding into liquidity quickly.
The exchange’s formal funding statement, issued separately from the founders’ posts, laid out a more concrete picture. Binance said that of the more than 6 billion USD in company funds it has reserved, about 5 billion USD is already held in the exact token assets that were affected by the breach. The remainder is being purchased through market and over-the-counter channels, a process the exchange warned could take longer than expected because some of the affected tokens trade with low liquidity and OTC settlement is inherently slow.
The company also drew a hard line between its reserved funds and the roughly 3 billion USD in stolen assets it has managed to freeze. Those frozen assets remain subject to ongoing recovery and verification, and treating them as recovered money would be a mistake. The funding commitment stands on its own, regardless of how much of the stolen haul is ultimately clawed back.
What it means for everyday investors
The episode is a reminder that in a crisis, the difference between panic and stability can come down to credibility. Zhao invoking a billion-dollar SpaceX stake while scolding Musk is theater, but it is theater with a purpose: convincing traders and rival platforms that Binance can absorb the loss. Yi He’s follow-up and the formal funding disclosure did the quieter work of explaining how.
For users, the more relevant metric is not the paper value of a private equity stake but the exchange’s stated progress in actually acquiring the affected tokens. On that measure, Binance claims most of the required inventory is already in hand. The final judgment will come not from posts on X but from withdrawals processing normally and balances remaining intact in the weeks ahead.
For now, the message from Binance’s founders is that the exchange intends to weather this without selling the spaceship.
Disclaimer: This article is for informational purposes only and does not constitute financial advice.
Over 6 billion reserved of their own funds plus the SAFU wallet while btc sat under 79k. Whatever you think of CZ, the exchange did not blink.
elon posting a grimacing emoji while 6 billion in user funds got drained is peak timeline behavior. cz telling him bad time to troll is somehow wilder than the hack itself
The man casually drops a SpaceX stake worth over a billion while his exchange burns. Say what you want about CZ, that is a strong hand.
a stake nobody knew about until the worst week of his career lol. timing on these reveals is never accidental
6b hack and the answer is we hold spacex shares worth a billion, trust me. revenue is not cash and spacex stock does not even trade, come on
fair on the cz math but the 500m into the twitter takeover in 2022 is documented. the appreciation multiple is the fuzzy part
yi he said annual revenue covers it, that is cash flow rather than paper wealth. the spacex stake is just cz being cz, solvency never needed it
yi he said annual revenue covers it and they froze 3b already, so it is not pure hopium. but yeah the SPCX valuation is cz math until anything gets audited
yi he saying annual revenue covers it is the strongest signal in the whole thread. binance prints fees in every market condition, the balance sheet was never the question, trust was
right, spacex does not trade. a mark from the last funding round is not cash you can wire to users, the billion is a story until a secondary actually clears
spacex secondaries do clear on an arranged basis every quarter so a mark exists, but you are right it is no withdrawal buffer. the frozen 3b plus safu is what actually answers users
frozen 3b of a 6.36b haul means users are still fronting the gap and a spacex mark clears no withdrawals. trust is the only balance sheet that matters this week
3 billion frozen out of the 6 stolen and another 6 reserved to make users whole. honestly didnt expect binance to eat the loss this fast, credit where due
same. i braced for a week of withdrawal panic and instead 3b frozen within days. the reputational bill is the part that lingers
elon dropping a grimace emoji while users sweat their withdrawals is peak twitter behavior. at least cz told him straight, bad time to troll is right