How to Build Wealth (And Survive Failure) with Anthony Scaramucci

Anthony Scaramucci, founder of Skybridge Capital and former White House Communications Director, argues in his new book All the Wrong Moves that well-intentioned people made catastrophic policy decisions that created the conditions for populism and Trump's rise. He admits he was naive about how Washington works before joining in 2017, and describes Washington as a place that changes you rather than the other way around, a lesson he says he learned too late. After being fired from the White House he chose to appear on the shows that mocked him rather than retreat, and says refusing to play the victim is a core principle he applies to both politics and investing.

Scaramucci traces his wealth-building discipline to The Richest Man in Babylon, published in 1926, and has bought stocks every month since age 17. He says a young podcast producer he mentored accumulated over 100,000 pounds in an investment account within two years using the same monthly investing discipline. He cautions younger investors to think far longer term rather than focusing on near-term market movements, and says taking exogenous risk early in a career was necessary to reach his level of success.

He missed Amazon twice. At the Sun Valley Allen and Company conference around 2000, he heard Jeff Bezos explain that Amazon was using books to map warehouse demand locations and intended to sell everything, referencing the A to Z brand concept. Buffett publicly dismissed Amazon at an event Scaramucci attended, comparing its valuation unfavorably to Sears, which caused Scaramucci to discard his notes and miss the investment. A 10,000 dollar investment at that time would have grown to north of 14 million dollars. Amazon fell approximately 85 percent peak to trough during the dot-com bust, and Barron's declared the internet retailer era over at precisely the moment Amazon began its real rise. Scaramucci uses Amazon's volatility history, including dropping 50 percent eight times and 85 percent once, as a direct analogy for how investors should think about Bitcoin.

Scaramucci passed on Bitcoin at roughly 60 dollars around 2011 after hearing about it from Hal Finney at Ames Research Center, and passed again when the Winklevosses pitched it at his Salt event in Las Vegas in 2014 at 600 to 1,000 dollars. He reconsidered after leaving the White House, partly prompted by two Fed officials entering the West Wing with Steven Mnuchin to discuss digitizing the US dollar over the blockchain. He describes Bitcoin as a hard asset and an open fully transparent spreadsheet verified by hundreds of thousands of nodes, with the absence of a third party as its distinguishing characteristic. He estimates roughly four trillion dollars in global expenses relate to third-party transaction verification, including lawyer fees, credit card fees, and wire fees, and notes that credit card fees of approximately 3.5 percent on a restaurant with 15 percent margins represent a 28 to 30 percent impact on gross margin. Bitcoin wallets grew from roughly 50 million in 2017 to approximately 450 to 500 million now, yet holders still represent only four to five percent of global population. The network currently produces 450 coins per day and will halve to 225 in approximately two years. Scaramucci predicts Bitcoin could trade to half the market capitalization of gold, implying roughly a ten times increase over the next decade, and says the generational divide is the key dynamic, with the 60-year-old generation favoring gold and the 34-year-old generation set to own Bitcoin.

On inflation, Scaramucci views current price pressures as supply-shock driven by Trump tariffs, the war, Strait of Hormuz uncertainty, and tanker insurance costs, and considers it likely short term. His bigger forward concern is deflation driven by AI, automation, robotics, and immunotherapy. He says the US dollar has lost 28 percent of its value since January 2020 according to TruFlation, which aggregates data directly from storefronts rather than using traditional CPI metrics. He argues the political class has wildly overspent and undertaxed, monetizing debt through inflation, which he calls the most regressive form of taxation because it crushes asset-poor working-class people while asset owners are hedged against it.

Scaramucci says self-awareness is the primary prerequisite before leaving a stable career to start a business. He wrote in his diary he would leave Goldman Sachs once his school debt was paid off because he did not believe he had the personality to make partner. As a concrete signal of his own commitment, he invested 850,000 dollars of his own money in trading network infrastructure including Cisco servers and switches rather than buying a summer house in the Hamptons. He describes entrepreneurship as jumping off a cliff and building the plane while descending, and says failure should be expected when taking exogenous risk, but that playing the victim when setbacks occur is never an option.