Sam Bankman-Fried

At the peak of his success, he was ranked the 41st-richest American in the Forbes 400.

The public persona of Bankman-Fried masked significant problems at FTX, and in November 2022 when evidence of potential fraud began to surface, depositors quickly withdrew their assets, forcing the company into bankruptcy.

On December 12, 2022, Bankman-Fried was arrested in the Bahamas and extradited to the United States, where he was indicted on seven criminal charges including wire fraud, commodities fraud, securities fraud, money laundering, and campaign finance law violations.

On November 2, 2023, in the case of United States v. Bankman-Fried, he was convicted of all seven counts of fraud, conspiracy, and money laundering.

His sentencing, where experts say he faces decades in prison, is scheduled for March 28, 2024.

Samuel Benjamin Bankman-Fried (born March 5, 1992), or SBF, is an American entrepreneur who was convicted of fraud and related crimes in November 2023.

Bankman-Fried founded the FTX cryptocurrency exchange and was celebrated as a "poster boy" for crypto.

Bankman-Fried was born on March 5, 1992, in Stanford, California.

He is the son of Barbara Fried and Joseph Bankman, both professors at Stanford Law School.

His aunt Linda P. Fried is the dean of Columbia University Mailman School of Public Health.

His younger brother, Gabriel Bankman-Fried (b. c. 1995), previously worked as a legislative assistant, Wall Street trader, and director of the non-profit Guarding Against Pandemics and its associated political action committee, which came under scrutiny by Federal investigators after it was discovered that much of the US$35 million on its books had been stolen by his older brother, Sam, from Alameda Research accounts.

Both of his parents are also being sued by the new owners of FTX, to return assets Sam had given them, in the form of cash and a home, valued at over $32 million.

His parents admit Sam gave them the assets, as gifts, but deny wrongdoing, and are in court to make their case.

Bankman-Fried attended Canada/USA Mathcamp, a summer program for mathematically talented high-school students.

He attended high school at Crystal Springs Uplands School in Hillsborough, California.

In the summer of 2013, Bankman-Fried worked as an intern at Jane Street Capital, a proprietary trading firm, trading international ETFs.

He returned there to work full-time after graduating from MIT.

He graduated from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 2014 with a bachelor's degree in physics and a minor in mathematics.

As an MIT student he lived in a coeducational group house called Epsilon Theta.

In September 2017, Bankman-Fried left Jane Street and moved to Berkeley, California, where he worked briefly at the Centre for Effective Altruism (CEA) as director of development from October to November 2017.

In November 2017, following fund injections from billionaire computer programmer Jaan Tallinn and investor Luke Ding, Bankman-Fried and CEA's Tara Hedley (née Mac Aulay ) co-founded the quantitative trading firm Alameda Research.

As of 2021, Bankman-Fried owned approximately 90 percent of Alameda Research.

In January 2018, Bankman-Fried organized an arbitrage trade, moving up to $25million per day to take advantage of the higher price of bitcoin in Japan compared to the United States.

After attending a cryptocurrency conference in Macau in late 2018, he moved to Hong Kong.

Bankman-Fried founded the FTX cryptocurrency derivatives exchange in April 2019; it opened for business the following month.

In September 2021, Bankman-Fried and the entire senior staff of FTX moved from Hong Kong to the Bahamas.

Bankman-Fried was included on the 2021 list Forbes 30 Under 30, but was also included on Forbes 2023 Hall of Shame list, featuring ten picks the publication wishes it could take back.

On December 8, 2021, Bankman-Fried, along with other industry executives, testified before the Committee on Financial Services about regulating the cryptocurrency industry.

On May 12, 2022, it was disclosed that Emergent Fidelity Technologies Ltd., which was majority owned by Bankman-Fried, had bought 7.6 percent of Robinhood Markets stock.

In a November 2022 affidavit before the Eastern Caribbean Supreme Court, and prior to his arrest, Bankman-Fried said he and FTX co-founder Gary Wang together borrowed over $546million from Alameda Research in order to finance Emergent Fidelity Technologies' purchase of Robinhood Markets stock.

In September 2022, it was reported that Bankman-Fried's advisors had offered on his behalf to help fund Elon Musk's purchase of Twitter.

According to messages released as part of the lawsuit between Twitter and Musk during the latter's acquisition of Twitter, on April 25, 2022, investment banker Michael Grimes wrote that Bankman-Fried would be willing to commit up to $5billion.

No investment actually took place when Musk finalized the acquisition.

Bankman-Fried invested $500million in Anthropic and more than $500million in venture capital firms, including $200million in Sequoia Capital, itself an investor in FTX.

Sequoia published a "glowing" profile of Bankman-Fried, which it subsequently removed after the solvency crisis at FTX.

In July 2023, allegations emerged that Bankman-Fried had considered "purchasing" the island country of Nauru to use as a bunker in the event of an apocalyptic event, in what has been described as a "misguided and sometimes dystopian" project.

Bankman-Fried has publicly stated he supports effective altruism, contending that he was pursuing "earning to give" as an "altruistic career."

He claimed to make donations "not based on personal interest but on the projects that are proven by data to be the most effective at helping people," such as those that reduced existential risks like nuclear war, pandemics, artificial intelligence, and threats to American democracy.

He was a member of Giving What We Can and donated around half of his Jane Street salary to charity.

In June 2022, he signed the Giving Pledge; his name was removed from the list in December 2022 following his arrest.