Sam Bankman-Fried

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.

Both of his parents were sued by the new owners of FTX, to return assets Sam had given the couple in the form of cash and a home valued at over $32 million. His parents admitted Sam gave them the assets as gifts but denied wrongdoing and the case was eventually dropped.

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.

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.

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. …

On December 12, 2022, Bankman-Fried was arrested shortly after 6:00 p.m. in his apartment complex in New Providence, Bahamas, by the Royal Bahamas Police Force, with the expectation that he would be extradited to the United States to face trial. The arrest took place the day before Bankman-Fried was scheduled to appear before the U.S. House Committee on Financial Services, but Forbes obtained and published his prepared testimony.

Earlier that day, the Southern District of New York had charged Bankman-Fried with wire fraud, wire fraud conspiracy, securities fraud, securities fraud conspiracy, and money laundering. Philip Davis, the Prime Minister of The Bahamas, commented on the arrest that "The Bahamas and the United States have a shared interest in holding accountable all individuals associated with FTX who may have betrayed the public trust and broken the law ... [W]hile the United States is pursuing criminal charges against SBF individually, The Bahamas will continue its own regulatory and criminal investigations into the collapse of FTX". Braden Perry, a former senior trial lawyer at the Commodity Futures Trading Commission, opined that a conviction on any of the charges might result in a prison sentence of years or even decades.

After being held at Fox Hill Prison in Nassau for ten days, Bankman-Fried consented to his extradition from The Bahamas to the United States to face charges. He was allowed to remain free on a $250 million bond, the largest such bond ever set in an American criminal proceeding. Among the conditions was that he would stay at his parents' home in California.

On January 3, 2023, Bankman-Fried pled "not guilty" to fraud and the other charges. On February 1, 2023, the judge presiding over his case, Judge Lewis Kaplan, tightened the bail conditions and forbade Bankman-Fried from contacting current or former employees of FTX without attorneys present. …

The trial began on October 3, 2023, at the Daniel Patrick Moynihan United States Courthouse in Manhattan, presided over by Judge Lewis Kaplan. Bankman-Fried faced seven counts of fraud and conspiracy. The Guardian summarized the trial as a question of "whether Bankman-Fried is a crypto criminal mastermind or just an unlucky 'math nerd'". Bankman-Fried was accused of having "stole[n] billions from thousands of people" by funnelling customers' money from FTX into Alameda to fund investments, loan repayments, real estate, and political donations. The defense, on the other hand, told the story of a young but earnest entrepreneur critically out of his depth. Bankman-Fried, they said, worked 12 to 22 hours a day, "didn't drink or party", and wanted to fund more work on pandemic prevention. A series of mistakes from him and his inexperienced executive team, a devastating market crash, and adversarial action from external parties caused his companies to spiral into bankruptcy. But at no point, they insisted, was there intention to commit fraud.

Over a dozen witnesses testified for the prosecution, including FTX executives Caroline Ellison, Gary Wang, and Nishad Singh, as part of plea deals. For his plea bargain, Wang testified that "with some simple tweaks to computer code," he helped Alameda Research misappropriate as much as $65 billion from FTX customers and that he "lied about this to the public." Nearly all the testimony for the defense was provided by the defendant, with small contributions from a risk management expert and a Bahamian lawyer.

The case revolved largely around two ways that Alameda was able to access the funds of other FTX customers. The first was the line of credit Alameda had on the exchange. A credit line is a relatively common facility that enables an entity to function more efficiently as a liquidity provider, and margin traders on FTX were generally allowed to borrow from one another and do as they pleased with the borrowed funds. However, Alameda's credit line was "essentially unlimited", and it was exempt from posting collateral on the exchange to formally secure the borrows. Senior engineers testified that they had added these features at the direction of their CEO. Bankman-Fried contended that he had merely requested something that would prevent erroneous liquidation. …

Bankman-Fried is vegan. He was raised in a Jewish family. In mid-2021 it was reported that he lived with approximately 10 roommates in a five-bedroom Bahamian penthouse bought by co-CEO of FTX Ryan Salame. After FTX's collapse, the penthouse was put up for sale for close to $40 million. Bankman-Fried had a relationship with Alameda Research CEO Caroline Ellison that lasted around six months and ended on April 15, 2022. While testifying against him in court in October 2023, she claimed that his hairstyle and clothes were part of a "well calculated" image that he tried to project. She stated that Bankman-Fried believed he had received higher bonuses while working at Jane Street because of his hair and used his appearance as "an important part" of FTX's "narrative and image." In court, he appeared with trimmed hair and wearing a grey suit.

Bankman-Fried once played the video game League of Legends while on a call attempting to secure an investment from Sequoia Capital, talking about how FTX would become a "super app." The investors were "incredibly impressed," with one calling the call "one of those your-hair-is-blown-back type of meetings." Afterward, Sequoia ended up investing over $200 million in FTX. An article in the Financial Times later characterized Bankman-Fried's "win ratios" in League of Legends as "average-to-bad".

Τhroughout the legal process, Bankman-Fried's parents stood by him, writing in a December 2022 letter, around the time of the arrest, "You are innocent." In an e-mail to The New Yorker, his mother, Barbara Fried, denounced the actions of the prosecution and the bankruptcy team as "McCarthyite" and a "relentless pursuit of total destruction," which is enabled by "a credulous public." After Bankman-Fried was incarcerated during the trial, his parents took turns traveling every Tuesday from California to be with him at the Brooklyn jail where he awaited the outcome of his trial, and the sentencing phase. She wrote a letter to the judge in February 2024 arguing for lenient sentencing, saying that Bankman-Fried would face extreme danger in prison because he has "trouble responding appropriately to many social cues".