Background and career
Anthony Scaramucci ( SKARR-ə-MOO-chee; born January 6, 1964) is an American financier and broadcaster who briefly served as the White House communications director from July 21 to July 31, 2017. Scaramucci worked at Goldman Sachs's investment banking, equities, and private wealth management divisions between 1989 and 1996. After leaving Goldman Sachs, he founded Oscar Capital Management, and in 2005, he founded the investment firm SkyBridge Capital. On July 21, 2017, Scaramucci was appointed White House Communications Director. Days into the job, Scaramucci provoked controversy after launching a strongly worded attack on members of the Trump administration, including an interview with The New Yorker's Ryan Lizza that he believed was off the record. Ten days after his appointment, he was dismissed by President Donald Trump, at the recommendation of the new White House Chief of Staff, John F. Kelly. He has since been critical of Trump in the media and voiced his support for Joe Biden and Kamala Harris in the 2020 and 2024 elections, respectively.
Scaramucci was born into an Italian-American family on January 6, 1964, on Long Island, New York, where he was raised in Port Washington. He is the son of Marie DeFeo Scaramucci and Alexander Scaramucci, who was a crane operator. His paternal grandfather, Alessandro Scaramucci, immigrated to the United States from Gualdo Tadino, Umbria. He had a working-class / lower middle class (according to US definitions) upbringing and was the first generation of his family to attend college. He has an older brother, David, and a sister, Susan. Scaramucci graduated in 1982 from Paul D. Schreiber Senior High School in Port Washington, where he served as student council president. He earned a B.A. in economics at Tufts University and a J.D. at Harvard Law School. Scaramucci credits his time and education at Harvard Law School as a springboard for his career in finance. He has never practiced law and went to work at Goldman Sachs directly after graduating.
Scaramucci began his career at Goldman Sachs in 1989, in the Investment Banking division. A year later he was fired, then rehired two months later in the Equities division. In 1993, he became a vice president in the bank's Private Wealth Management division.
Scaramucci left Goldman in 1996 to launch Oscar Capital Management with his colleague Andrew Boszhardt. In 2001, Oscar Capital was sold to Neuberger Berman, and upon Neuberger Berman's sale to Lehman Brothers in 2003, Scaramucci served as a managing director in the firm's Investment Management division.
In 2005, Scaramucci founded SkyBridge Capital, a global alternative investment firm. Scaramucci is the chairman of the SkyBridge Alternatives Conference, or "SALT" Conference, launched in 2009. SALT hosts its annual flagship event in Las Vegas and an international event in the Fall/Winter. SALT has hosted large conferences in Singapore, Tokyo and, most recently, Abu Dhabi. In 2011, Scaramucci received the Ernst & Young Entrepreneur of the Year Award New York Award in the Financial Services category, and in 2016 was ranked No. 85 in Worth magazine's "Power 100: The 100 Most Powerful People in Global Finance". In May 2014, SkyBridge licensed the rights to Wall Street Week, a financial television news program formerly hosted by Louis Rukeyser on PBS, but then hosted by Scaramucci. Broadcast rights were transferred to Fox Broadcasting Company in 2016. On January 17, 2017, SkyBridge announced the sale of a majority stake of its business to RON Transatlantic EG and HNA Capital (U.S.) Holding, a Chinese conglomerate with close ties to the Chinese Communist Party (CCP). With the announcement, Scaramucci stepped down from his co-management role and ended his affiliation with SkyBridge and SALT. In April 2018, it was announced that Scaramucci would be returning to SkyBridge after the deal with HNA Group had collapsed due to the lack of approval of the Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States, an inter-agency government committee. As of March 2023, Skybridge's assets had dwindled to about $2 billion from a peak of $9 billion in 2015. Investors lost about 30% from the beginning of 2020 through March 2023. The fund had reduced the ability of investors to withdraw funds and reduced staffing.
Scaramucci supported the presidential campaigns of Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama. In 2008, Scaramucci was a fundraiser for Obama's presidential campaign. In September 2010, however, Scaramucci asked Obama at a CNBC event when he was going to "stop whacking Wall Street like a piñata". Scaramucci had tweeted at various times during 2012, that he was against the death penalty and "always been for strong gun control laws" and that "Republicans should support gay marriage". He served as the national finance co-chair for Mitt Romney's 2012 presidential campaign. In 2015, on a Fox Business Network television appearance, Scaramucci called Trump a "hack politician" whose rhetoric is "anti-American and very, very divisive". He further warned Trump to "cut it out now", and "stop all this crazy rhetoric". In December 2015, Scaramucci criticized Trump's call for a border wall between Mexico and the US. He also criticized Trump for "making a fundamental mistake of trying to blame all of Islam and all Muslims for what is the ideology and the actions of a minority". Ahead of the 2016 election, Scaramucci tweeted that he hoped Hillary Clinton would be the next president, but had turned against Clinton by 2015. During the 2016 Republican Party presidential primaries, Scaramucci first endorsed Scott Walker and later Jeb Bush. In May 2016, after Walker and Bush had withdrawn from the race, Scaramucci signed on to Donald Trump's political campaign by joining the Trump Finance Committee. In November 2016, he was appointed to the Presidential Transition Team Executive Committee of then-president-elect Trump.
