Sam Bankman-Fried Biography, Net Worth, Wife, Age, Religion, Married, Family, Parents, Arrest
American entrepreneur and founder of the collapsed cryptocurrency exchange FTX, Sam Bankman-Fried, reportedly arrested in Bahamas.
The following information on Samuel Bankman-Fried’s Biography, Net Worth, Age, Family, Parents, Siblings, Children, Wife and Nationality is all you need to know.
Samuel Bankman-Fried Biography
Samuel Bankman-Fried (born March 6, 1992), also known by his initials SBF, is an American entrepreneur, investor and former billionaire. Bankman-Fried was the founder and CEO of the cryptocurrency exchange FTX, FTX.US and cryptocurrency trading firm Alameda Research. FTX experienced a crisis in late 2022, which led to a collapse in FTX’s native cryptocurrency, FTT. Amid the crisis, Bankman-Fried announced he would wind down operations at Alameda Research and resigned as CEO of FTX, which filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy.
Samuel Bankman-Fried Early Life
Bankman-Fried was born in 1992 on the campus of Stanford University into a Jewish family. He is the son of Barbara Fried and Joseph Bankman, both professors at Stanford Law School. His aunt Linda P. Fried is the dean of Columbia University Mailman School of Public Health. His brother, Gabriel Bankman-Fried, is a former Wall Street trader and the former director of the non-profit Guarding Against Pandemics and its associated political action committee.
Bankman-Fried attended Canada/USA Mathcamp, a summer program for mathematically talented high-school students. He attended high school at Crystal Springs Uplands School in Hillsborough, California. From 2010 to 2014, Bankman-Fried attended the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. There, he lived in a coeducational group house called Epsilon Theta. In 2014, he graduated with a bachelor’s degree in physics and a minor in mathematics.
Samuel Bankman-Fried 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, 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 of Effective Altruism. As of 2021, Bankman-Fried owned approximately 90% 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 in America. 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% of Robinhood Markets Inc. 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. Bankman-Fried invested more than $500 million in venture capital firms, including $200 million in Sequoia Capital. Sequoia published a “glowing” profile of Bankman-Fried which it subsequently removed after the solvency crisis at FTX was revealed.
On December 12, 2022, Bankman-Fried was arrested shortly after 6 p.m. in his apartment complex in the Bahamas by the Royal Bahamas Police Force with the expectation that he would be extradited to the United States to face trial. 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”, according to a source cited by the New York Times; the charges are expected to be unsealed December 13. 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 … while 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, stated that a conviction on any of the charges may result in a prison sentence of years or decades.
Samuel Bankman-Fried Wife
Bankman-Fried is vegan. As of mid-2021, he lived in a 5-bedroom penthouse in the Bahamas with about ten roommates. After the collapse of FTX, the penthouse was put up for sale for close to $40 million. According to former employees of FTX and Alameda, Bankman-Fried was romantically involved with co-worker Caroline Ellison, the CEO at Alameda Research.
Samuel Bankman-Fried Net Worth
Bankman-Fried’s net worth peaked at $26 billion. In October 2022, he had an estimated net worth of $10.5 billion. However, on November 8, 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. By November 11, 2022, the Bloomberg Billionaires Index considered Bankman-Fried to have no material wealth.
