Samuel Bankman-Fried[1] (born March 6, 1992[2]), also known by his initials SBF,[3] is an American entrepreneur and investor. He is the founder and former CEO of FTX, a cryptocurrency exchange,[4][5] and FTX.US, its U.S. affiliate.[6] He had managed assets through Alameda Research, a quantitative cryptocurrency trading firm he founded in October 2017. FTX experienced a solvency crisis in late 2022, which led to a collapse in FTX's native cryptocurrency, FTT. Amid the crisis, Bankman-Fried also announced he would wind down operations at his trading firm, Alameda Research and filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy for FTX and its affiliates.[7][8]
Bankman-Fried's net worth peaked at $26 billion.[9] In October 2022, he had an estimated net worth of $10.5 billion;[10] however, on 8 November 2022 amid FTX's solvency crisis, his net worth was estimated to have dropped 94% in a day to $991.5 million, according to the Bloomberg Billionaires Index, the largest one-day drop in the index's history.[11][8] By 11 November 2022, the Bloomberg Billionaires Index considered Bankman-Fried to have no material wealth.[12] Before Bankman-Fried's wealth eroded in November 2022, Bankman-Fried was a major donor to the Democratic Party and many left-wing political causes.[13][14]
Early life and education
Bankman-Fried was born in 1992 on the campus of Stanford University into a family of academics. Born and raised to an upper-middle-class Jewish family in California, he is the son of Barbara Fried and Joseph Bankman, both professors at Stanford Law School.[2] His aunt Linda P. Fried is the current dean of Columbia University Mailman School of Public Health.[15] His brother, Gabe Bankman-Fried is a former Wall Street trader[16] and the director of the non-profit Guarding Against Pandemics.[17][18][19] He attended Canada/USA Mathcamp, a summer program for mathematically talented high-school students.[2] He attended high school at Crystal Springs Uplands School in Hillsborough.[20]
From 2010 to 2014, Bankman-Fried attended the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.[2] There, he lived in a coeducational group house called Epsilon Theta.[2] In 2014, he graduated with a degree in physics and a minor in mathematics.[2][21][22]
Career
In the summer of 2013, Bankman-Fried began working at Jane Street Capital, a proprietary trading firm,[2] trading international ETFs.[23] Initially an intern, he returned there full-time after graduating.[2]
In September 2017, Bankman-Fried quit Jane Street and moved to Berkeley, where he worked briefly at the Centre for Effective Altruism as director of development from October to November 2017.[2][24] In November 2017, he founded Alameda Research, a quantitative trading firm.[2] As of 2021, Bankman-Fried owned approximately 90% of Alameda Research.[2] In January 2018, Bankman-Fried organized an arbitrage trade, moving up to $25M per day, to take advantage of the higher price of bitcoin in Japan compared to in America.[2][24] After attending a late 2018 cryptocurrency conference in Macau, he moved to Hong Kong.[2][25] He founded FTX, a cryptocurrency derivatives exchange, in April 2019, and it then launched the following month.[2]
On December 8, 2021, Bankman-Fried, along with other industry executives, testified before the Committee on Financial Services in relation to regulating the cryptocurrency industry.[26][27]
On May 12, 2022, it was revealed that Emergent Fidelity Technologies Ltd., which is majority owned by Bankman-Fried, had bought 7.6% of Robinhood Markets Inc. stock.[28][29]
In September 2022, it was revealed that Bankman-Fried had offered Elon Musk billions of dollars to fund his purchase of Twitter.[30] According to messages released as part of the lawsuit between Twitter and Musk during the latter's proposed acquisition of Twitter, on April 25, 2022, investment banker Michael Grimes wrote that Bankman-Fried would be willing to commit up to $5 billion.[31]
Bankman-Fried has stated he is a supporter of effective altruism and says that he is pursuing earning to give as an altruistic career.[32][33] He is a member of Giving What We Can and has said that he plans to donate the great majority of his wealth to effective charities over the course of his life.[4] He founded the FTX Future Fund for this purpose, which included William MacAskill one of the founders of the effective altruism movement. After the collapse of FTX, the entire team resigned.[34][35]
Solvency crisis at FTX
In November 2022, Binance CEO Changpeng Zhao revealed on Twitter that his firm intended to sell its holdings of FTT, FTX's token.[36] Binance received FTT as part of a sale of its equity in FTX in 2021.[37] Zhao published his tweet soon after a report from CoinDesk indicating that the bulk of the holdings of Alameda, Bankman-Fried's hedge fund, were in FTT.[37] Bloomberg and TechCrunch reported that any sale by Binance would likely have an outsize impact on FTT's price due to the token's low trading volume.[38][39] The announcement by Zhao of the pending sale and disputes between Zhao and Bankman-Fried on Twitter led to a decline in the price of FTT and other cryptocurrencies.[40] Zhao had been critical of Bankman-Fried's lobbying efforts.[41]
On November 8, Zhao announced Binance had entered into a non-binding agreement to purchase FTX due to a liquidity crisis at FTX.[42][43] Zhao further announced on Twitter that the company would complete due diligence soon, adding that all crypto exchanges should avoid using tokens as collateral.[44][45] He also wrote that he expected FTT to be "highly volatile in the coming days as things develop". On the day of the announcement, FTT lost 80 percent of its value.[46] The deal would not have included the sale of FTX.US.[42] On 9 November, the acquisition of FTX by Binance was reported by Bloomberg to be "unlikely" due to the poor state of FTX's finances.[47] Later that day, the Wall Street Journal reported that Binance was walking away from the FTX acquisition.[48] Binance cited FTX's mishandling of customer funds and pending investigations of FTX as the reasons the firm would not pursue the deal.[49] Amid the crisis, Bankman-Fried was no longer a billionaire, according to the Bloomberg Billionaires Index.[11] The same day, the FTT token's price fell more than 80 percent in 24 hours.[50]
Also on 9 November, Bloomberg reported that the Securities and Exchange Commission and Commodity Futures Trading Commission were investigating FTX and the nature of its connections to Bankman-Fried's other holdings.[51]
Anonymous sources cited by Reuters stated that Bankman-Fried had transferred at least $4 billion from FTX to Alameda Research, without any disclosure to insiders or the public, earlier in 2022. The sources said that the money transferred had included customer funds, and that it was backed by FTT and shares in Robinhood.[52][53] An anonymous source cited by the Wall Street Journal stated that Bankman-Fried had disclosed that Alameda owed FTX about $10 billion which were secured through customer funds stored in FTX when FTX had, at the time, $16 billion in customer assets.[54]
Bankman-Fried resigned as CEO of FTX and was replaced by John J. Ray III, the same day FTX and related entities filed for bankruptcy in Delaware.[55]
Politics
Bankman-Fried was the second-largest individual donor to Democratic causes in 2021–2022 election cycle with total donations of $39.8 million, only behind George Soros.[56][57][58] Of this, $27 million was given to Protect our Future PAC, bankrolled by Bankman-Fried.[59]
Bankman-Fried said in February 2022 that his political contributions were not aimed at influencing his policy goals for the cryptocurrency ecosystem; however, FTX was circulating a list of suggestions to policymakers at the time.[60] He said in an interview that he would prefer the Commodity Futures Trading Commission take a larger role in regulating and guiding the crypto industry.[60] The CFTC has a reputation for favoring relatively relaxed regulations for the industry, when contrasted with other regulators like the Securities and Exchange Commission.[61]
Bankman-Fried pushed for regulations via Digital Commodities Consumer Protection Act (DCCPA) by extensively lobbying Congress, which was perceived as being favorable to FTX but harmful to the broader industry, especially its decentralized finance competitors.[62][63][64]
Bankman-Fried made few political donations as a student, the exception being a $1,000 contribution to Michael Bennet at the age of eighteen.[60] In the 2020 election cycle, he contributed $5.2 million to two super PACs that supported the Biden campaign.[60] He was the second-largest individual donor to Joe Biden in the 2020 election cycle, personally donating $5.2 million,[65] second to only Michael Bloomberg.[32][66]
Contributions for June 2021 through February 2022 went to members of both parties. They included direct donations to the Republican campaigns of senators Susan Collins of Maine, Mitt Romney of Utah, Lisa Murkowski of Alaska, and Ben Sasse of Nebraska.[60]
Contributions for the year 2022, through August 15, 2022, also went to members of both parties, with $105,000 donated to conservatives, and $35,872,000 donated to liberals, a ratio of 1:341 in favor of liberal candidates.[67]
In 2022, Bankman-Fried provided initial financial support for Protect Our Future 
AC. Protect Our Future was launched as a Democratic political action committee with $10 million in initial funding aiming to support "lawmakers who play the long game on policymaking in areas like pandemic preparedness and planning", according to Politico.[68]
Personal life
Bankman-Fried is vegan.[25] He lives in a penthouse in the Bahamas with about 10 roommates.[22][69] He has a love for the video game League of Legends[70] and his company, FTX, has invested in the esports organization TSM, which included the changing of TSM's name to TSM FTX.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sam_Bankman-Fried
