HomeBusinessThe rise and fall of FTX's Sam Bankman-Fried, who became a crypto billionaire in just 4 years before losing most of his wealth in a day and resigning from his beleaguered company
The rise and fall of FTX's Sam Bankman-Fried, who became a crypto billionaire in just 4 years before losing most of his wealth in a day and resigning from his beleaguered company
Sam Bankman-Fried catapulted into a crypto billionaire, but it took just one day for most of his fortune to be wiped out.
The co-founder of cryptocurrency exchange FTX and Alameda Research saw his net worth plummet from nearly $16 billion to $1 billion.
Bankman-Fried, also known as SBF, has since resigned as CEO while FTX begins Chapter 11 proceedings.
A month ago, Sam Bankman-Fried was a 30-year-old with a mop of brown hair and enough clout to go by his initials, SBF. He had a cryptocurrency exchange called FTX, a trading firm called Alameda Research, and $15.6 billion to his name, according to estimates from Bloomberg.
The collapse of Bankman-Fried's fortune has loomed for months. Reports have been circulating this year that FTX was on a "shaky financial foundations" amidst larger instabilities in the global crypto market, according to The New York Times.
Bankman-Fried spoke to Andrew Ross Sorkin at the New York Times DealBook Summit on Wednesday, where he said he doesn’t “personally think that” when Sorkin asked if he was worried about being held criminally liable for the collapse of FTX.
He said he’s more focused on helping FTX’s millions of customers and stakeholders who lost money from the exchange.
Here's how SBF went from crypto's poster child to its greatest cautionary tale:
Bankman-Fried grew up in Silicon Valley as the son of two Stanford Law professors.
turtix/Shutterstock
He spent his childhood playing games like chess and bridge. His brother, Gabe, told Insider, "playing games growing up, his inclination is if a board game is fun, you should play two simultaneous games at once with a timer."
A chess board
Bankman-Fried studied physics at Massachusetts Institute of Technology where he juggled several extracurriculars alongside his academics. "I worked like an hour and a half a day in total and had trouble getting places on time," Bankman-Fried told Insider. "I was a really negligent student."
During college, Bankman-Fried began honing his moral compass. He became especially interested in effective altruism, a philosophical movement that uses calculations to understand how people can use their time, money, and resources to best help others.
Orbon Alija/ Getty Images
After college, Bankman-Fried went to work for the global trading firm, Jane Street. That's where he learned the art of arbitrage— a form of trading in which traders buy an asset for a low price in one market and sell it for higher in another market.
Photo by Alex Wong/Getty Images
During his three years at Jane Street, Bankman-Fried would give away half of his salary to animal-welfare groups and effective altruism charities, according to Bloomberg. He left to work for MacAskill's Centre for Effective Altruism, set up by William MacAskill, one of the leaders of the effective altruism movement.
Catherine Falls Commercial/ Getty Images
By 2017, crypto was booming, and people were trading on private exchanges. Bankman-Fried noticed that some coins were selling for higher prices on some exchanges than others. He realized he could use his arbitrage skills to exploit the gaps in prices.
The gap in bitcoin prices between Asian and Western exchanges eventually became known as the Kimchi Premium.
Gontabunta/Shutterstock
By October of 2017, Bankman-Fried had set up his own crypto trading firm, Alameda Research, in Berkeley, California. His Alameda colleagues told Insider that he was adept at finding ways to move faster than other traders.
At its peak, Alameda was moving almost $15 million a day between markets, according to Bloomberg. Bankman-Fried soon earned the nickname "the Moby Dick of crypto whales" for the waves he was making in the crypto industry.
EyesWideOpen/Getty Images
In 2018, he abruptly moved Alameda's team to Hong Kong, after realizing how lax the rules were compared to the United States. "I think we're losing $50,000 a day by not working out of Hong Kong instead of Berkeley," one of his colleagues who spoke to Insider recalled him saying.
Victoria harbour, Hong Kong
As Bankman-Fried continued to rack up money from trading, his ambitions grew, too. He began entertaining thoughts of building an alternative to what he called the "shitshow exchanges" he was trading in between the years of 2017 and 2018.
FTX Official/YouTube
By the start of 2019, Bankman-Fried and his team were fervently working towards building their own crypto exchange. After four months coding, they launched FTX in May.
Maskot
FTX was a win. The platform boasted cost-effective features like low-trading fees and offered several types of coins for traders to bet on. FTX even allowed traders to swap cash as collateral for coins.
Sam Bankman-Fried.
FTX
In 2020, Bankman-Fried also opened a small US branch of FTX. He had designs of eventually taking a major slice of the U.S. crypto market and began lobbying Congress for new crypto rules a few times a year. He's also donated millions to pro-crypto super PAC, GMI PAC, according to Politico.
Tom Williams/Getty Images
In September 2021, Bankman-Fried decided to move FTX's operations to the Bahamas. It was just a flight away from Miami, but the platform could still operate outside of the SEC's purview.
Damianos Sotheby’s International Realty
FTX only takes a minor cut of every trade, but by 2020, an average of $1 billion was being traded daily on the platform, according to Bloomberg. In 2021 alone, Bankman-Fried raked in a profit of $350 million from FTX, and another $1 billion from Alameda, according to Bloomberg.
Rafael Henrique/SOPA Images/LightRocket via Getty Images
Major investors like SoftBank Vision Fund, Tiger Global, Sequoia Capital, and BlackRock placed bets on FTX in funding rounds. By early 2022, FTX and its U.S. operations were valued by investors at a combined $40 billion, according to Forbes.
Issei Kato/Reuters
At his peak, Bankman-Fried's own net worth was $26 billion, according to Bloomberg.
FTX
He's allocated that wealth towards sponsorships, funding political leaders, and furthering his moral agenda.
SALT NY
He suddenly emerged as a major political donor in 2020 and spent over $10 million backing Joe Biden's presidential campaign, according to Politico. But Bankman-Fried actually made his political first donation back in 2010 to Democratic Senator Michael Bennet of Colorado, Politico reported.
AP Photo/Matt Slocum, File
He spent over $40 million on campaigns in 2022, according to Federal Election Committee filings reviewed by Politico.
Hill Street Studios/Getty Images
He's made donations on both sides of the political aisle though the majority of his funding has skewed towards Democratic leaders. The Los Angeles Times reported that Bankman-Fried has given $1 million to the Senate Majority PAC and $6 million to the House Majority PAC— two super PACs that are dedicated to keeping Congress in the hands of Democrats. He also funded Protect Our Future, a Super PAC that focuses exclusively on Democratic House primaries, according to Politico.
OsakaWayne Studios/ Getty Images
He's made COVID-19 prevention a top issue as the principle funder of Guarding Against Pandemics, a nonprofit run by his brother Gabe, according to Politico.
A fundraiser for Guarding Against Pandemics.
Bryan Metzger/Insider
Bankman-Fried has said his donations are about furthering his larger belief in effective altruism. He told Bloomberg that he would eventually only keep 1% of his income or a minimum of $100,000 a year.
Lam Yik/Bloomberg via Getty Images
His simple lifestyle, too, follows the ideas of effective altruism. He drives a Toyota Corolla, lives with roommates, and is vegan.
The 2020 Toyota Corolla.
Paul Marotta/Getty Images
At the same time, he's funneled money into flashy corporate sponsorships. His most notable is acquiring naming rights for the Miami Heat's arena which will cost him about $135 million over 19 years, according to Bloomberg.
Mike Ehrmann/Getty Images
He also spent about $30 million airing an ad in the 2022 Super Bowl with the comedian Larry David, according to Bloomberg.
FTX commercial starring Larry David
FTX
Through FTX, Bankman-Fried has also forged deals with major basketball teams like the Washington Wizards and Golden State Warriors. FTX has also struck deals with individual athletes like basketball player Steph Curry and quarterback Tom Brady.
Steph Curry in FTX commercial
FTX
Bankman-Fried seemed unstoppable— until he wasn't. In early November, the crypto publication CoinDesk reported a leaked balance sheet that showed that Alameda Research was on unstable grounds.
OLIVIER DOULIERY/AFP via Getty Images
The report revealed that most of Alameda's assets were tied up in FTX's in-house token, FTT. With the broader crypto market already reeling, traders began worrying about a sudden drop in the value of FTT.
SOPA Images / Contributor/ Getty Images
Changpeng Zhao, who runs Binance, FTX's rival exchange, announced shortly after that Binance would be selling its holdings of FTT. With that traders across the board began rushing to withdraw their own holdings off of FTX's platform. Bankman-Fried had no choice but to ask Binance to bail FTX out.
Antonio Masiello/Getty Images
By Wednesday, Binance had walked away from the deal. Bankman-Fried's own assets dropped 94% and his net worth plummeted to around $1 billion, according to Bloomberg.
Horacio Villalobos/CorbisAlex Wong/Getty Images
On Friday, FTX announced Bankman-Fried was resigning as CEO but would help "assist in an orderly transition" to new CEO John J. Ray III.
OLIVIER DOULIERY/AFP via Getty Images
Ray has held several senior executives roles at other companies in the past, including at Enron to lead its turnaround efforts.
Having failed to secure a bailout, FTX, Alameda Research, and 130 additional affiliated companies have started voluntary Chapter 11 bankruptcy proceedings.
OLIVIER DOULIERY/AFP via Getty Images
"The immediate relief of Chapter 11 is appropriate to provide the FTX Group the opportunity to assess its situation and develop a process to maximize recoveries for stakeholders," said new CEO Ray. "The FTX Group has valuable assets that can only be effectively administered in an organized, joint process. I want to ensure every employee, customer, creditor, contract party, stockholder, investor, governmental authority and other stakeholder that we are going to conduct this effort with diligence, thoroughness and transparency."
As part of FTX's bankruptcy proceedings, the new CEO said he'd never "seen such a complete failure of corporate controls and such a complete absence of trustworthy financial information" as what happened with the company.
The logo of FTX is seen at the entrance of the FTX Arena in Miami, Florida, US.
On the first day of FTX's bankruptcy hearing, the company's lawyer said one of its US branches bought almost $300 million worth of Bahamian real estate.
Sam Bankman-Fried and a Bahamas government building in Nassau.
Tom Williams/CQ-Roll Call, Inc via Getty Images; Walter Bibikow/Getty Images
"Based on preliminary investigations, most of those real estate purchases related to homes and vacation properties that were used by senior executives of the company," James Bromley, a restructuring partner at Sullivan & Cromwell who is on FTX's bankruptcy team, said.
Bankman-Fried showed up for an interview on Wednesday with Andrew Ross Sorkin at the DealBook Summit in a segment called "What Happened?"
Michael M. Santiago/Getty Images
Bankman-Fried said he's not focused on worrying about being held criminally liable for FTX's collapse, and that instead he wants to "help" the millions of customers and stakeholders who lost their money.
He appeared virtually from the Bahamas, and said he's "thought about" coming back to the US — denying that the reason he hasn't returned is because of fears of being arrested.
He denied reports of improper drug use and "wild parties" with his employees.
Sam Bankman-Fried speaks with Andrew Ross Sorkin during The New York Times DealBook Summit in New York City on November 30, 2022.
Michael M. Santiago/Getty Images
During his appearance at the DealBook Summit, Bankman-Fried told Sorkin that drugs he took were "totally on-label," and were prescribed to him for "focus and concentration."
He also said he doesn't know what happened to the $100 million stake he had in Twitter. Elon Musk previously disputed a Semafor report that said he invited Bankman-Fried to roll over his public Twitter shares into a stake in the now private company.
Tom Williams/CQ-Roll Call Inc via Getty Images; Carina Johansen/Getty Images
Against the advice of his lawyers, Bankman-Fried is also talking to other news publications.
Sam Bankman-Fried speaks onstage during the first annual Moonlight Gala benefitting CARE - Children With Special Needs - hosted by Michael Cayre, Roy Nachum and MegaMoon Museum at Casa Cipriani on June 23, 2022 in New York City.
Craig Barritt/Getty Images for CARE For Special Children
In addition to appearing at the DealBook Summit, Bankman-Fried has done interviews with Intelligencer and Good Morning America, and had his conversation with a Vox reporter, who is also a "longtime friend," published. At the DealBook Summit, Bankman-Fried said he "stupidly forgot" his friend "was also a reporter."
He also said at the summit that his lawyers don't want him talking, but, "I have a duty to talk to people... I have a duty to do everything I can to try and do what's right."
On Good Morning America, Bankman-Fried said he could've prevented FTX's implosion if he'd spent "an hour a day" on risk management.
Sam Bankman-Fried dines with (from left) TK, Anthony Scaramucci, and Kevin O'Leary at the SALT NY Conference
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