Sam Bankman-Fried
Born on March 6, 1992, Samuel Benjamin Bankman-Fried, also known by the initials SBF, is a young American entrepreneur, investor, and former billionaire.
Bankman-Fried graduated from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) with a bachelor's degree in physics and a minor in mathematics in 2014. After graduation, Bankman-Fried worked as an intern at Jane Street Capital, a proprietary trading firm, in the summer of 2013. He then returned to work there full-time before leaving in September 2017 to move to Berkeley. He briefly worked at the Centre for Effective Altruism as director of development from October to November 2017 before co-founding Alameda Research, a quantitative trading firm, in November 2017. Bankman-Fried owned approximately 90% of Alameda Research as of 2021.
In January 2018, Bankman-Fried organized an arbitrage trade, moving up to $25 million per day, to take advantage of the higher price of bitcoin in Japan compared to the United States. After attending a late 2018 cryptocurrency conference in Macau, he moved to Hong Kong. In April 2019, Bankman-Fried founded FTX, a cryptocurrency derivatives exchange, which opened for business the following month.
Under Bankman-Fried's leadership, FTX and Alameda Research experienced a meteoric rise in the world of cryptocurrency. Prior to FTX's collapse, Bankman-Fried was ranked the 41st richest American in the Forbes 400, and the 60th richest person in the world by The World's Billionaires. His net worth peaked at $26 billion. However, both FTX and Alameda Research experienced a high-profile collapse resulting in chapter 11 bankruptcy in late 2022, and by November 11, 2022, amid the bankruptcy of FTX, the Bloomberg Billionaires Index considered his net worth to have been reduced to zero.
On December 12, 2022, Bankman-Fried was arrested in the Bahamas and was subsequently extradited to the United States. An indictment of him before the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York was unsealed on December 13, revealing eight criminal charges for offenses including wire fraud, commodities fraud, securities fraud, money laundering, and campaign finance law violations. An additional four charges were announced on February 23. On December 22, Bankman-Fried was released on a $250 million bond, on condition that he reside at his parents'
