Short answers, pulled from the story.
Sam Bankman-Fried is an American entrepreneur who founded the FTX cryptocurrency exchange and was once ranked the 41st-richest American on the Forbes 400. A jury convicted him on all seven counts of fraud, conspiracy, and money laundering in the case of United States v. Bankman-Fried on the 2nd of November 2023. On the 28th of March 2024, he was sentenced to 25 years in prison.
FTX collapsed after Binance CEO Changpeng Zhao announced plans to sell his firm's FTT holdings, triggering mass customer withdrawals that FTX could not fulfill. A CoinDesk report had revealed that the bulk of Alameda Research's holdings consisted of FTT rather than liquid assets. FTX, Alameda Research, and more than 130 associated legal entities filed for bankruptcy on the 11th of November 2022.
Sam Bankman-Fried was sentenced to 25 years in prison on the 28th of March 2024 by Judge Lewis Kaplan in Manhattan. The court also ordered him to forfeit $11.02 billion. Under the First Step Act and related time credit programs, he may serve approximately 18 years.
Alameda Research was Sam Bankman-Fried's quantitative trading firm, cofounded with Tara Hedley in November 2017 with backing from Jaan Tallinn and Luke Ding. FTX customer funds were funneled into Alameda to cover investments, loan repayments, and other liabilities. Gary Wang, FTX's cofounder, testified that Alameda misappropriated as much as $65 billion from FTX customers.
In November 2022, Sam Bankman-Fried told Vox journalist Kelsey Piper over Twitter private messages that FTX's advocacy for crypto regulation was "just PR" and that regulators "make everything worse." He agreed his public ethics stance was "mostly a front" and called ethics a "dumb game we woke Westerners play." He later claimed those remarks referred to ESG and greenwashing rather than effective altruism.
For the 2022 midterms, Sam Bankman-Fried donated $39.8 million to Democratic causes, making him the second-largest individual donor to the party behind George Soros, with $27 million going to Protect Our Future PAC. For the 2020 presidential election, he gave $5.2 million to pro-Biden super PACs, ranking second among individual Biden donors behind Michael Bloomberg. He also said his Republican donations were routed through dark money channels.