Shaquille O’Neal sits on the bench before a match between the Indiana Pacers and the New York Knicks in Game 2 of the 2025 Eastern Conference Finals held at Madison Square Garden in New York City, New York on May 23, 2025.
Jesse D. Garrabrant | National Basketball Association | Getty Images
Shaquille O’Neal has agreed to pay $1.8 million to resolve allegations that he misunderstood investors by promoting the now-insolvent Crypto Exchange FTX.
The retired NBA superstar, who once urged fans to trust the platform, resolves the allegations without acknowledging fraud. However, the deal is one of the first well-known settlements in legal calculations surrounding the collapse of FTX.
The proposed settlement, filed in Florida federal court, is said to have helped O’Neal to end a class action lawsuit accusing FTX of presenting it in trustworthy, legitimate investment tools, particularly live events and social media content, and promoted the adoption of unregistered securities.
This class includes people who deposited their money into FTX from May 2019 to the second half of 2022 or who held their own token FTT.
If the Supervisory Judge approves the transaction, O’Neal’s $1.8 million payments cover all legal costs, notices, administrative costs and payments to eligible investors. The arrangement also includes a drastic release from future liability and provisions prohibiting seeking a refund from FTX bankrupt real estate.
In short, the checks he writes are final and all inclusive.
“We are pleased to have this issue behind us,” O’Neill’s lawyer said in a statement.
Unlike other celebrity defendants and former FTX advocates (such as Tom Brady, Gisele Bundchen, Steph Curry), the case remained intertwined after a long effort to serve him in legal papers.
Front Office Sports reported in February that O’Neal had signed a $15 million contract to stay at TNT’s “NBA Inside.”
O’Neal told CNBC in 2022 that he was “a paid spokesman for the commercial” regarding FTX.
O’Neal was named in a class action lawsuit claiming that an FTX spokesman was “controlled, promoted and supported.” [or] We actively participated in the company “actively” to “proactively sell.”
In a previous interview with CNBC, O’Neal said he is actively eschewing cryptocurrencies.
“I don’t understand that, so I’ll probably leave it until I fully understand what it is,” he said at the time. “From my experience, that’s just too good.”
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