Overview

Samuel Benjamin Bankman-Fried (born March 5, 1992), commonly known as SBF, is an American entrepreneur convicted of fraud. Bankman-Fried founded the FTX cryptocurrency exchange and was celebrated as a "poster boy" for crypto, with FTX having a global reach with more than 130 international affiliates. At the peak of his net worth, he was ranked the 41st-richest American in the Forbes 400.

In November 2022, as evidence of potential fraud began to surface, depositors quickly withdrew their assets from FTX, 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.

In the case of United States v. Bankman-Fried, he was convicted of all seven counts of fraud, conspiracy, and money laundering. On March 28, 2024, he was sentenced to 25 years in prison and ordered to forfeit $11 billion. The trial was one of the most notorious cases of white-collar crime in the United States; the financier Anthony Scaramucci termed Bankman-Fried "the Bernie Madoff of crypto."

Early life

Samuel Benjamin Bankman-Fried was born on March 5, 1992, to upper-class Jewish parents in Stanford, California. His parents are Barbara Fried and Joseph Bankman, both professors at Stanford Law School. His maternal grandmother, Adrienne Fried Block, was a noted musicologist. His maternal grandfather, George Fried, was an administrator with the New York State Supreme Court probation department.

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

Sam's younger brother, Gabriel (b. 1995), had been a legislative assistant and a Wall Street trader. He became director of the nonprofit Guarding Against Pandemics and its associated political action committee. The PAC had come under scrutiny by federal investigators after the discovery that much of the US$35 million on its books had been stolen by Sam from Alameda Research customer accounts.

Education

Bankman-Fried attended Canada/USA Mathcamp, a summer program for mathematically talented high-school students. He attended high school at the elite private Crystal Springs Uplands School in Hillsborough, California.

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.

Career

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. 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) cofounded the quantitative trading firm Alameda Research. By 2021, Bankman-Fried owned approximately 90 percent of Alameda Research. 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 cryptocurrency conference in Macau in late 2018, he moved to Hong Kong.

FTX

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 of 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 U.S. House 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 cofounder Gary Wang together borrowed over $546 million 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 $5 billion. No investment actually took place when Musk finalized the acquisition.

Bankman-Fried invested $500 million in Anthropic and more than $500 million in venture capital firms, including $200 million 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.