In a post on X, Fox Business reporter Charles Gasparino has raised questions about Ripple and its CEO Brad Garlinghouse. According to Gasparino, Garlinghouse may now be worth 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 net worth of Brad Garlinghouse, Ripple’s CEO, is around $10 billion, making him one of the richest people in the country,” Gasparino wrote. “And yet, why hasn’t anyone seen a public filing from Ripple about just how much money the company makes? Ripple is a business after all, in the traditional sense. It is not a blockchain experiment.”
He further hinted that this lack of transparency could become a pivotal issue for Paul Atkins, the former SEC Commissioner who has been nominated by President Donald Trump to lead the US Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC). Atkins is scheduled to appear before the Senate Banking Committee on March 27, 2025, for his confirmation hearing, where he is expected to face lawmakers like US Senator Elizabeth Warren.
“That’s going to be the key question for Paul Atkins and the SEC on the Ripple case going forward. Retail trading of XRP passes the decentralization test, according to the SEC. But there’s no doubt it was used to build the Ripple platform, which is a business. Under securities laws, that usually mandates disclosures of financials. This could come up during Atkins confirmation hearing next week from someone like Senator Warren who does know securities laws, I am told,” Gasparino wrote.
Garlinghouse and Ripple, for their part, have not publicly commented on Gasparino’s remarks. While the company is known for releasing quarterly XRP Markets Reports detailing its token holdings and the status of certain escrow accounts, it does not publish comprehensive financial statements like public companies do. Because the firm is privately held, US securities law does not require it to submit filings such as 10-Ks or 10-Qs.
Gasparino’s posts arrive amid another 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 does not meet the legal definition of a security.
Senator Elizabeth Warren, widely considered a critic of cryptocurrency, is seen as a potential linchpin in the upcoming confirmation hearing. Gasparino noted that the Massachusetts senator may press Atkins to address whether Ripple, as a private company issuing a token integral to its operations, must disclose traditional financials under securities laws.
If Garlinghouse’s net worth truly stands at $10 billion, he would be hovering around the 100th 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 over the years about how profits flow to corporate leadership and early founders.
While public records are sparse, court documents in 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 worth of XRP, with more than 90% of the sales conducted on foreign exchanges. The highest single-year sale occurred in 2017, netting around $42.27 million in one 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 in 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 provide predictability around token supply.
At press time, XRP traded at $2.41.
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