In a post on X, Fox Business reporter Charles Gasparino has raised questions on Ripple and its CEO Brad Garlinghouse. Based on Gasparino, Garlinghouse may now be price an estimated $10 billion—yet the firm’s financial disclosures remain largely concealed from public view.
Ripple CEO Faces Scrutiny
“With the recent price surge in XRP, the web price of Brad Garlinghouse, Ripple’s CEO, is around $10 billion, making him certainly one of the richest people within the country,” Gasparino wrote. “And yet, why hasn’t anyone seen a public filing from Ripple about just how much money the corporate makes? Ripple is a business in spite of everything, in the normal sense. It is just not a blockchain experiment.”
He further hinted that this lack of transparency could turn into a pivotal issue for Paul Atkins, the previous SEC Commissioner who has been nominated by President Donald Trump to steer the US Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC). Atkins is scheduled to look before the Senate Banking Committee on March 27, 2025, for his confirmation hearing, where he is predicted to face lawmakers like US Senator Elizabeth Warren.
“That’s going to be the important thing query for Paul Atkins and the SEC on the Ripple case going forward. Retail trading of XRP passes the decentralization test, in keeping with the SEC. But there’s little question it was used to construct the Ripple platform, which is a business. Under securities laws, that sometimes mandates disclosures of financials. This might come up during Atkins confirmation hearing next week from someone like Senator Warren who does know securities laws, I’m told,” Gasparino wrote.
Garlinghouse and Ripple, for his or her part, haven’t publicly commented on Gasparino’s remarks. While the corporate is understood for releasing quarterly XRP Markets Reports detailing its token holdings and the status of certain escrow accounts, it doesn’t publish comprehensive financial statements like public firms do. Since the firm is privately held, US securities law doesn’t require it to submit filings similar to 10-Ks or 10-Qs.
Gasparino’s posts arrive amid one other significant legal development for Ripple. Just this week, Garlinghouse revealed that the US Securities and Exchange Commission ended its appeal of Judge Analisa Torres’s July 2023 ruling in Manhattan, which found that XRP sold on public exchanges doesn’t meet the legal definition of a security.
Senator Elizabeth Warren, widely considered a critic of cryptocurrency, is seen as a possible linchpin within the upcoming confirmation hearing. Gasparino noted that the Massachusetts senator may press Atkins to deal with whether Ripple, as a personal company issuing a token integral to its operations, must disclose traditional financials under securities laws.
If Garlinghouse’s net price truly stands at $10 billion, he could be hovering across the a hundredth spot on Forbes’ US wealth rankings, fueled largely by the rise in XRP’s market value. Ripple’s token, initially allocated at 100 billion units, has sparked repeated questions through the years about how profits flow to corporate leadership and early founders.
While public records are sparse, court documents within the SEC’s lawsuit against Ripple shed some light on Garlinghouse’s personal sales of XRP. Between 2017 and 2020, Garlinghouse sold an estimated $164.26 million price of XRP, with greater than 90% of the sales conducted on foreign exchanges. The best single-year sale occurred in 2017, netting around $42.27 million in a single self-directed transaction via Bitstamp.
Chris Larsen, Ripple’s executive chairman and co-founder, reportedly accounted for the remaining portion of the $600 million in personal, unregistered XRP sales cited within the SEC lawsuit. Meanwhile, the initial founders—Arthur Britto, Jed McCaleb, and Larsen—collectively received 20 billion XRP when the token was created. Ripple later locked 55 billion XRP in escrow in 2017, aiming to supply predictability around token supply.
At press time, XRP traded at $2.41.
Featured image from YouTube, chart from TradingView.com
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