Cyrus Shepard posted about how FTX, you know, the company Sam Bankman-Fried ran, is now suing Neil Patel and his company, for $55 million. There are a ton of whoppers in this lawsuit, and I have no idea who is right or wrong here, but as Cyrus noted, Neil Patel went through lots of efforts to hide this in the Google search results.
Update: See the comment below from Neil Patel who said, "We aren’t being sued for $55 million." Cyrus also posted an update that says FTX Debtors aren't seeking a specific dollar amount, but to “avoid or recover all such transfers.” These transfers, in total, amount to tens of millions. And clearly FTX sued as many as they could to claw back money from as many sources they possibly can.
Cyrus Shepard wrote, "If you search for “Neil Patel sued”, there’s a good chance you’ll see a torrent of posts by Neil talking about a time he got sued in 2011." It got him thinking, why is he flooding Google for these types of results and he found out it, "A clever bit of reputation management, really," Cyrus explained.
The full filing is over here and it was filed in November 2024.
Here are some quotes from the filing - again, just quoting the filing and the court has not ruled on any of this yet:
- In October 2021, Bankman-Fried caused Blockfolio Inc. (“Blockfolio”) to hire Patel as Marketing Manager and agreed to compensate him $75,000 per month.
- FTX Insiders caused the FTX Group to engage Defendants Big Deal and NP Digital—entities Patel owns or co-founded and has a substantial financial interest in—ultimately paying them at least $30.8 million.
- FTX Trading paid $14.8 million for Big Deal to spend four months merely attempting to find another consultant, which it never actually did.
- Defendants also billed the FTX Group for duplicative and exaggerated services for which Defendants received excessive and unreasonable fees untethered to any fair market value. Indeed, FTX Group employees described Defendants’ work as “sooo sloppy” and “terrible performance,” and many of Defendants’ promised services were never provided at all.
- On October 18, 2021, Patel accepted a position as Marketing Manager for Blockfolio with a “$75k per month salary” and 100,000 shares of FTX Trading Class A common stock.
- Plaintiffs paid Defendants over $30.8 million for duplicative, sub-par, and often non-existent services.
- According to invoices NP Digital submitted in connection with opening an FTX.US account in Fall 2022, NP Digital charged other businesses $200,000 to $500,000 annually for similar services—12 times less than it was charging FTX Trading.
I'll stop there, you can read it yourself, read what Cyrus posted and then do your own research.
If you follow Neil Patel, a couple of months ago, he started posting videos on every channel about "The time I got sued," about a case from 2011.
— Cyrus (@CyrusShepard) June 3, 2025
I thought, “Why is Neil flooding social media with a story from 14 years ago?“
The answer is a clever bit of reputation management.… pic.twitter.com/xZkeialP8L
I mean, this reads like a movie...
Forum discussion at X.
Neil Patel commented below saying:
Hope all is well Barry, it’s been a while since I saw you at a conference.I have no clue where people are getting this from. We aren’t being sued for $55 million.
People tend to forget that the lawyers who took over FTX are suing, not the people who used to run FTX. If people in the organization hated the work they wouldn’t keep paying. We even won awards from Search Engine Land for it, and I believe you were a judge.
Lawyers had little to no data as they deleted all records, emails, etc (see here).
So we are working to dismiss the case and provide the FTX lawyers with the contracts, the work, the results, etc., as they have no records on their end. People deleted almost everything, so they assume the worst.
They also sued 70-plus other companies the same week they sued us to try and claw back money.
The people reporting on this online didn’t know if the money they paid us was for work, media spend, or what the work was for, etc. People are just assuming and don’t have the details.
Remember, if someone really hated the work or the results, they would stop paying you. ;)
PS: I also have never met Sam in real life.
