Alex Mashinsky

Alex Mashinsky (born 1965) is a Ukrainian-born Israeli-American entrepreneur and business executive. He is a cofounder and former CEO of Celsius Network, a bankrupt cryptocurrency lending platform. In the early 1990s, Mashinsky founded VoiceSmart, one of the first firms to offer telecommunications switches to handle ordinary voice as well as Voice over IP call routing. Mashinsky founded GroundLink in 2004 as a service to book an on-demand limousine and car services from a computer or smartphone. He was also the founder of Q-Wireless, which later became part of Transit Wireless. From 2014 to 2015, Mashinsky served as CEO of Novatel. Mashinsky is the defendant in a civil lawsuit brought in January 2023 by the Attorney General of New York, who accuses him of committing securities fraud during his time as Celsius CEO. On July 13, 2023, the Securities and Exchange Commission filed a criminal complaint against Mashinsky and Celsius. Mashinsky was arrested on the same day. Mashinsky was born in 1965 in the Soviet Union to a Jewish family. His family obtained permission to leave the country in the 1970s and later moved to Israel. From an early age, he was a tinkerer, like his father, and would tap into and use public phone lines in Israel. As a teenager, he bought confiscated goods from Ben Gurion Airport at auction and resold them for a profit. Mashinsky attended a few different universities where he majored in electrical engineering but did not graduate. He served in the Israeli Army, where he trained as a pilot and served in the Golani Brigade, from 1984 to 1987. In 1988, he left Israel and moved to the United States. Mashinsky has worked in a variety of different industries, often focusing on popular technologies. The Wall Street Journal described him in 2022 as "a brash, confident serial entrepreneur with a constant stream of big ideas". On several occasions, Mashinsky has left his companies after a period of conflict or tension. After relocating to New York City, Mashinsky ran a business trading contracts for delivery of chemicals such as urea, gold, and sodium cyanide.