CZ cites billion-dollar SpaceX stake in reply to Musk after Binance hack

Changpeng Zhao asked Elon Musk to stop joking about the $6.3 billion Binance hack on Friday, pointing to the exchange's stake in Musk's own empire as a reason for support. "Elon, have a lot of respect for you, but bad time to troll. Please stop," Zhao wrote on X.

Musk had entered the thread with "Everyday is Zeroday," a reference to zero-day exploits, and earlier answered Zhao's warning about malicious email attachments with a fire and laughing emoji pair, according to Bitcoin.com News. The exchange was two days into withdrawal suspensions after attackers drained hot wallets starting around 20:05 UTC on Oct. 29.

Zhao followed his request with a financial reminder. "Our SPCX shares (from our $500m investment in your Twitter takeover) are worth more than a billion," he wrote. "Would appreciate if you show a little support. Thanks!"

The position dates to Binance's $500 million commitment to Musk's $44 billion acquisition of Twitter in 2022. Musk's xAI later acquired X, and xAI was folded into SpaceX, which went public earlier in 2026. Zhao's cited value is more than twice the original outlay, but the precise ownership structure of the holding has not been independently established, Bitcoin.com News noted. Crypto Briefing reported that Binance had earlier canceled tokenized SpaceX IPO campaigns when it could not source enough shares, refunding about $557 million to investors and distributing a $1 million airdrop of SPCXB tokens.

In a separate reply, Binance co-founder Yi He said the company does not plan to monetize the position to pay for the breach. "Reporting to the major shareholder: Our company's revenue for the year is sufficient to cover the losses, so we do not yet need to sell the SpaceX shares you are bullish on," she posted on X, as CNA separately reported.

The exchange has reserved more than $6.34 billion in company funds to cover the theft, with about $5 billion already held in the affected tokens, Crypto Briefing reported. Industry partners have frozen roughly $3 billion of the stolen assets, a figure that sits apart from the reserve and remains subject to recovery. Binance held around $144 billion in assets under custody before the breach, the same report said.

Zhao also suggested the SPCX shares could help close a remaining shortfall without an immediate forced sale. Crypto Briefing flagged the caveat: Binance's direct ownership of SpaceX shares has not been verified, and the exposure runs through the Twitter investment rather than a direct equity purchase. Zhao had written elsewhere that the gap after frozen assets and the Secure Asset Fund was "about $2b," with SPCX alone above $1 billion, TokenPost reported. That report put the remaining balance as "still painful, but manageable" in Zhao's framing.

Yi He's revenue claim puts the operating business forward as the first line of defense. Binance generates substantial fees across trading, lending and its broader platform, though the company has not published figures tying annual income to the incident. Neither Zhao nor Yi He said when or whether any SPCX position would be sold.

The public thread is a detour from the operational timeline Binance has been running since the breach. Withdrawals stayed suspended through Friday while deposits continued, and co-CEO Richard Teng said in a video address the same day that the exchange targets a restart by Sunday, Nov. 1, with a full proof-of-reserves report due Monday, Nov. 2. Teng said investigators found intrusion points beyond an initially suspected compromised laptop and that attackers used EIP-7702 delegation to take control of a hot wallet without normal approvals, as TokenPost separately detailed.

Stablecoin issuers can freeze tokens at the contract level, which makes them useful partners when stolen funds sit in dollar-pegged assets, Crypto Briefing noted. Binance has said it is working with law enforcement, blockchain intelligence firms and token issuers on recovery, and that roughly $3 billion has already been frozen onchain. Those recovery efforts run alongside the funding debate playing out in public between Zhao, Musk and Yi He.

The SpaceX thread is the most visible public disagreement between the two billionaires since the breach. Musk's jokes drew a detailed financial rejoinder from Zhao, and Yi He's post shifted the question from whether the stake would be sold to whether it needed to be. For customers waiting on the Sunday withdrawal target, the exchange's stated position remains that corporate funds, not user balances, absorb the loss.

Musk did not reply further to Zhao's appeal in the threads captured by the outlets. The public exchange left the hack's funding question resting on three stated legs: frozen assets, the SAFU buffer and company resources, with the SpaceX-linked stake named but not liquidated.