Sam Bankman-Fried

On January 3, 2023, Bankman-Fried pled not guilty to fraud and other charges.

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. In October 2022, he had an estimated net worth of $10.5 billion. By November 8, 2022, amid the bankruptcy of FTX, his net worth was estimated to have dropped 94 percent in a day to $991.5 million according to the Bloomberg Billionaires Index, the largest one-day drop in the index's history. On November 11, 2022, the Bloomberg Billionaires Index considered Bankman-Fried to have no material wealth.

Before Bankman-Fried's wealth disappeared in November 2022, Bankman-Fried was a major donor to mostly Democratic political campaigns, and planned to spend tens of millions in the 2024 U.S. presidential election.

On December 12, 2022, Bankman-Fried was arrested in the Bahamas, pending potential extradition 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 a range of 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. On December 22, Bankman-Fried was released on a $250 million bond, on condition that he reside at his parents' home in California.

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.

Bankman-Fried publicly supported effective altruism and contended that he was pursuing earning to give as an altruistic career. He is a member of Giving What We Can and claimed that he planned to donate the great majority of his wealth to effective charities over the course of his life. 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. Future Fund had committed $160 million in charitable grants and investments by September 1, 2022. In November 2022, Bankman-Fried stated that the appearance of welcoming regulation and promoting the need for regulators to keep a close eye on crypto markets, that he and his company displayed, was not sincere, and was "just PR", and that "they (regulators) make everything worse". On being asked about his previously stated ethical views that it's unacceptable to do unethical things for the greater good, he disagreed with those views and said that expressing those views was a "dumb game we woke westerners play where we say all the right shibboleths and so everyone likes us".

In November 2022, Binance CEO Changpeng Zhao revealed on Twitter that his firm intended to sell its holdings of FTT, FTX's token. Binance received $529 million worth of FTT as part of a sale of its equity in FTX in 2021. Zhao published his tweet soon after a report from CoinDesk stating that the bulk of the holdings of Alameda, Bankman-Fried's trading firm, were in FTT. 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. 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. Shortly before, Zhao had criticized Bankman-Fried's lobbying efforts.

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. An anonymous source cited by the Wall Street Journal stated that Bankman-Fried had disclosed that Alameda owed FTX about $10 billion which was secured through customer funds held by FTX when FTX had, at the time, $16 billion in customer assets. According to anonymous sources cited by the Wall Street Journal, the Chief Executive of Alameda Research Caroline Ellison told employees that Bankman-Fried was aware that FTX had lent its customers’ money to Alameda to help it meet its liabilities.

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". 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".

Contributions were made to members of both U.S. political parties. In 2022, Bankman-Fried provided initial financial support for Protect Our Future PAC. Protect Our Future was launched as a political action committee of the Democratic Party 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. Bankman-Fried donated $27 million in total to this PAC.

Bankman-Fried was the second-largest individual donor to Democratic causes for the 2022 U.S. elections, with total donations of $39.8 million, only behind George Soros, of which $27 million was given to the Protect Our Future PAC. Additional recipients included The Next 50 PAC, Guarding Against Pandemics PAC, and the leadership PAC for Brendan Boyle. 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. 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. According to The New York Times, the CFTC has a reputation for favoring relatively relaxed regulations for the industry when contrasted with other regulators like the Securities and Exchange Commission.

Bankman-Fried pushed for regulations via the proposed 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. In May 2022, Bankman-Fried stated that he planned to spend "north of $100 million" in the 2024 presidential election with a "soft ceiling" of $1 billion. In October 2022, he walked back his pledged spending, calling it a "dumb quote on my part".

In the aftermath of the FTX scandal, recipients of Bankman-Fried's and other FTX executives' political campaign contributions have been donating equal amounts to charitable organizations. Elected officials doing so include Senator Kirsten Gillibrand, as well as Representatives Chuy García and Kevin Hern. A spokesperson for former Texas gubernatorial candidate Beto O'Rourke said that his campaign had received a $1 million donation from Bankman-Fried in October 2022, but returned the funds in early November, prior to the election.

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.

Donations to Republican Party campaigns in the 2021–22 cycle have been estimated at $262,200, including donations to senators Susan Collins of Maine, Mitt Romney of Utah, Lisa Murkowski of Alaska, and Ben Sasse of Nebraska. Journalist Matthew Kassel says that Bankman-Fried had often donated to politicians who cultivate good Israel–United States relations but concluded "it is unclear if his backing of pro-Israel candidates was coincidental or motivated by any personal interest in Middle East policy."

Bankman-Fried is vegan. As of mid-2021, he lived in a five-bedroom penthouse in the Bahamas with approximately ten roommates. After the collapse of FTX, the penthouse was put up for sale for close to $40 million.

Bankman-Fried's only campaign finance activity prior to 2019 was a $1,000 contribution in 2010 to Michael Bennet. For the 2020 U.S. elections, he contributed $5.2 million to two super PACs that supported the Joe Biden 2020 presidential campaign. Bankman-Fried was the second-largest individual donor to Biden in the 2020 election cycle, after Michael Bloomberg.

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 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.

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.

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 Benjamin Bankman-Fried (born March 6, 1992), also known by his initials SBF, is an American suspected fraudster, entrepreneur, investor, and former billionaire. Bankman-Fried was the founder and CEO of the cryptocurrency exchange FTX 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.

Bankman-Fried was born on March 6, 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.