Larry David's Coffee Moment: When Celebrity Advice Brews Disaster in Crypto

The comedian Larry David faced an uncomfortable reality this week when discussing his infamous Super Bowl advertisement for FTX, the now-collapsed cryptocurrency exchange owned by Sam Bankman-Fried. Rather than defend his decision, David embraced the moment with characteristic humor—or perhaps resignation. “I called friends who seemed to know what they were talking about. I asked them straight up: should I do this?” David explained to the Associated Press. “They told me it was legitimate, totally above board.” He paused. “So like an idiot, I took the coffee and ran with it.”

That “coffee”—a casual decision based on trusted voices—would become one of the most regrettable professional choices for a figure of his stature.

The Advertisement That Predicted Its Own Failure

In the commercial, David channeled his inner contrarian, playing a character who dismisses every major innovation in human history. The wheel? “Eh, I don’t think so.” The fork? The toilet? Each innovation received his comedic dismissal, including coffee in the sequence. But the punchline was intended for cryptocurrency. When told “It’s FTX—a safe and easy way to get into crypto,” David’s character responded with characteristic skepticism: “I don’t think so, and I’m never wrong about this stuff. Never.”

The screen then displayed: “DON’T BE LIKE LARRY.”

The irony cut deeper than anyone anticipated. David’s sarcastic skepticism in the ad turned out to be prescient—though not in the way FTX intended.

The Collapse That Made the Ad Prophetic

Months after the Super Bowl commercial aired, FTX imploded spectacularly. By late 2022, the exchange was in freefall. Bankman-Fried’s empire crumbled just nine days after a CoinDesk investigation, triggering the final cascade that froze customer funds. In November 2023, Bankman-Fried himself was convicted of stealing billions of dollars from platform users—a betrayal that made David’s on-screen dismissal look less like comedy and more like accidental wisdom.

“I called for skepticism, and I was right to be skeptical,” David might have said. Instead, his coffee cup moment of trusting friends’ advice had cost him significantly.

The Personal Price of Misplaced Trust

The comedian didn’t escape unscathed. “Part of my compensation was paid in crypto,” David revealed to the AP. “I lost substantial money.” The very endorsement that was supposed to position him as out-of-touch with the times made him, instead, a cautionary tale about due diligence in the digital asset space.

Yet there’s a silver lining emerging from the debris. The FTX bankruptcy estate recently announced it expects to fully repay customers who lost funds during the exchange’s collapse in 2022. Whether David will recover his losses remains uncertain, but the announcement suggests that not all crypto stories need to end in total loss.

The Broader Lesson: Why Even Smart People Get Fooled

David’s experience illuminates a crucial vulnerability: even skeptics with sharp critical minds can be swayed by trusted advisors. The comedian consulted colleagues who assured him the venture was legitimate. That trust in friends who “seemed to know the space” blinded him to red flags that should have been apparent to someone of his intellectual caliber.

“I trusted the wrong people,” is the subtext of David’s self-deprecating admission. It’s a coffee-stained lesson learned the hard way—a reminder that in crypto’s wild west, even a coffee break’s worth of proper due diligence might have saved him thousands. The real punchline? Sometimes the script writes itself, and the “Don’t Be Like Larry” message became crypto’s most unintentionally honest warning about the dangers of blind trust in celebrity-backed ventures.