In 2022, Larry David broke a decades-long refusal to do ads and starred in an FTX Super Bowl spot as a time-traveling grouch who sneers at every advance in human history — the wheel, the fork, the toilet, democracy — before landing on a pitch for Sam Bankman-Fried’s crypto exchange. “Ehhh, I don’t think so,” he says. “And I’m never wrong about this stuff. Never.” The tag: “Don’t be like Larry. Don’t miss out.”
As it turns out, Larry people should have taken his advertising character quite literally.
Nine months later, with FTX a smoking crater, and Bankman-Fried was on his way to a 25-year sentence, all the celebrities who starred in ads for the platform — Tom Brady, Gisele Bündchen, Shaquille O’Neal, Naomi Osaka, and, obviously, Larry David — were named defendants in a class action accusing them of hawking unregistered securities to people who lost everything.
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Enter Latham’s Andrew Clubok.
Clubok, the global chair of Latham & Watkins’ securities litigation practice, represented Larry and others in the case. In May 2025, Judge K. Michael Moore tossed 12 of the 14 claims, ruling that being “uninformed, negligent, or even reckless” about a crypto exchange is not the same as knowing it was a fraud. The spokespeople probably should have taken a lesson from Taylor Swift, who famously asked pointed questions about FTX’s business before rejecting the bid, or our former Dealbreaker colleague Matt Levine, who told Bankman-Fried on a podcast “You’re just like, well, I’m in the Ponzi business and it’s pretty good.” In any event, the celebrities who did cut ads for FTX were left facing two claims — unregistered-securities counts under Florida and Oklahoma law — but Clubok has substantially cleared them of liability.
Larry apparently decided Clubok’s talents would translate to the screen, and gave him a part in his new show.
In the third episode of Life, Larry and the Pursuit of Unhappiness — the HBO series in which David and Jeff Schaffer restage American history as “Curb in costume,” with Barack and Michelle Obama producing — Clubok appears as Senator Charles E. Potter. The episode restages the Army-McCarthy hearings, with David playing Joe McCarthy and Michael McKean as Army counsel Joseph Welch, the man who finally asked, “Have you no sense of decency?”
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The McCarthy hearings are the ur-text of American lawyers shredding constitutional order. That’s the room that gave us Roy Cohn — McCarthy’s chief counsel and Donald Trump’s mentor and fixer — the legal profession’s patron saint of bad faith. Clubok, by contrast, appears one of the few people in that room who walked out looking good. The real Charles Potter was a Michigan Republican who lost both legs in the war, broke ranks to become the first senator to call out McCarthy’s staff, demanded Cohn be fired over suborning perjury, and later wrote an entire book — Days of Shame — repudiating the whole circus.
Schaffer told Variety that the characters David plays “didn’t change history — in fact, they were largely ignored by history. And that’s a good thing.” Unfortunately, ignominious characters like McCarthy and his pit bull Cohn find themselves enjoying a disgraceful renaissance now that Cohn’s protege naps in the Oval Office.
As for the man who is never wrong — the wheel, the fork, FTX — it turns out he was right about hiring good starring counsel.
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Joe Patrice is a senior editor at Above the Law and co-host of Thinking Like A Lawyer. Feel free to email any tips, questions, or comments. Follow him on Twitter or Bluesky if you’re interested in law, politics, and a healthy dose of college sports news.