Sam Bankman-Fried

Samuel Benjamin Bankman-Frie also known by the initials SBF, is an American entrepreneur, investor, and alleged fraudster. Bankman-Fried was the founder and CEO of the cryptocurrency exchange FTX and associated trading firm Alameda Research, both of which experienced a high-profile collapse resulting in chapter 11 bankruptcy in late 2022.

Prior to FTX's collapse, Bankman-Fried was ranked the 41st richest American in the Forbes 400, and the 60th richest person in world by The World's Billionaires. His net worth peaked at $26 billion. By November 11, 2022, amid the bankruptcy of FTX, the Bloomberg Billionaires Index considered his net worth to have been reduced to zero. Before his wealth evaporated, Bankman-Fried was a major donor to US political campaigns, donating openly to Democratic candidates and covertly to Republicans, as well as claiming that he planned to spend around $1 billion in the 2024 U.S. presidential election. 

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; Bankman-Fried faces up to 115 years in prison if convicted on all eight counts. An additional four charges were announced in February 2023. On December 22, Bankman-Fried was released on a $250 million bond, on condition that he reside at his parents' home in California. A campaign finance charge was dropped on July 27, 2023, but is facing wire and securities fraud charges ahead of his trial in October. 

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 to work there full-time after graduation 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 as director of development from October to November 2017. In November 2017, he co-founded Alameda Research, a quantitative trading firm, with Tara Mac Aulay from the Centre for Effective Altruism. As of 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 late 2018 cryptocurrency conference in Macau, he moved to Hong Kong.

Bankman-Fried founded FTX, a cryptocurrency derivatives exchange, in April 2019; it opened for business the following month. 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 is 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 $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 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 considered purchasing the island 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.