Sam Bankman-Fried

• 1. Introduction

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  Sam Bankman-Fried was playing League of Legends on a call with Sequoia Capital investors. He was pitching FTX as a future "super app." The investors described it as one of those "your-hair-is-blown-back type of meetings." Sequoia eventually put more than $200 million into the company. At his peak, Bankman-Fried ranked as the 41st-richest American on the Forbes 400. He ran a cryptocurrency exchange with affiliates worldwide and held billions in customer funds. He spoke often about giving most of his fortune to pandemic prevention and existential risk research. Then November 2022 arrived, and billions of those customer funds turned out to be missing. On the 12th of December, police arrested him at his apartment complex in the Bahamas. The financier Anthony Scaramucci called him "the Bernie Madoff of crypto." Had FTX ever been solvent? And had the philanthropy always been performance?

• 2. Academic Roots

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  Sam Bankman-Fried was born on the 5th of March 1992 in Stanford, California. His parents, Barbara Fried and Joseph Bankman, were both professors at Stanford Law School. His maternal grandmother, Adrienne Fried Block, was a noted musicologist. His grandfather, George Fried, administered probation for the New York State Supreme Court.

  He attended Crystal Springs Uplands School, a private school in Hillsborough, California. He also attended Canada/USA Mathcamp, a summer program for mathematically talented teenagers. In 2014, he graduated from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology with a bachelor's degree in physics and a minor in mathematics. During his time as a student, he lived in a coeducational group house on campus called Epsilon Theta.

  His aunt Linda P. Fried served as dean of the Columbia University Mailman School of Public Health. His younger brother Gabriel, born in 1995, later became a Wall Street trader before founding the nonprofit Guarding Against Pandemics. After graduating from MIT in 2014, Bankman-Fried joined Jane Street Capital, a proprietary trading firm in New York, where he had interned the previous summer trading international ETFs.

• 3. From Arbitrage to Exchange

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  In September 2017, Bankman-Fried left Jane Street and moved to Berkeley, California. There he spent two months as director of development at the Centre for Effective Altruism. In November 2017, he and the Centre's Tara Hedley cofounded Alameda Research, a quantitative trading firm. The launch came with backing from billionaire programmer Jaan Tallinn and investor Luke Ding.

  By January 2018, Alameda was running a bitcoin arbitrage trade that moved up to $25 million per day. The strategy exploited higher bitcoin prices in Japan compared to the United States. After attending a cryptocurrency conference in Macau in late 2018, Bankman-Fried relocated to Hong Kong. By 2021, he owned approximately 90 percent of Alameda Research.

  In April 2019, Bankman-Fried founded FTX, a cryptocurrency derivatives exchange. It opened the following month. In September 2021, he and the entire senior staff of FTX moved from Hong Kong to the Bahamas. That same year, Forbes named him to its 30 Under 30 list. On the 8th of December 2021, he testified before the U.S. House Committee on Financial Services about crypto regulation. Bankman-Fried also invested $500 million in Anthropic and $200 million in Sequoia Capital.

  In July 2023, allegations surfaced that Bankman-Fried had investigated purchasing the island nation of Nauru as a bunker against an apocalyptic event. The project had been described as "misguided and sometimes dystopian."

• 4. Earning to Give

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  Bankman-Fried publicly described his career as a project of "earning to give," the effective altruism principle of building wealth specifically to donate it. He was a member of Giving What We Can and donated around half of his Jane Street salary to charity. In June 2022, he signed the Giving Pledge. His name was removed from the pledge's website in December 2022, after his arrest.

  He founded Future Fund, a philanthropic organization. Its team included Scottish philosopher and author William MacAskill, one of the founders of the effective altruism movement. As of the 1st of September 2022, Future Fund had committed around $160 million to 110 nonprofits. On the 15th of May 2022, FTX donated $18 million to support the TOGETHER Trial. That consortium conducts clinical trials testing existing drugs as treatments for conditions including COVID-19. After the collapse of FTX, all members of Future Fund resigned simultaneously.

  For the 2020 presidential election, he gave $5.2 million to two super PACs supporting Joe Biden. That made him the second-largest individual donor to Biden in that cycle, behind only Michael Bloomberg. For the 2022 midterms, he contributed a total of $39.8 million to Democratic causes. That placed him second among individual donors to the party, with $27 million going to Protect Our Future, a Democratic PAC. He said he also directed money to Republican candidates through dark money channels. "All my Republican donations were dark," he said, because the press was "super liberal" and he wanted to keep the giving secret.

  In November 2022, Bankman-Fried told Kelsey Piper of Vox, over Twitter private messages, that FTX's advocacy for crypto regulation had been "just PR." He said regulators "make everything worse" and "don't protect customers at all." On his public ethics stance, he agreed it was "mostly a front." He called ethics a "dumb game we woke Westerners play where we say all the right shibboleths and so everyone likes us." He later claimed those comments were directed at ESG, corporate social responsibility, and greenwashing, not effective altruism or pandemic prevention. Sequoia had published a "glowing" profile of Bankman-Fried. The firm removed it after the solvency crisis at FTX began.

• 5. The Bank Run

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  In November 2022, Binance CEO Changpeng Zhao revealed on Twitter that his firm intended to sell its holdings of FTT, FTX's own token. Binance had received $529 million worth of FTT as part of a 2021 sale of its equity stake in FTX. A CoinDesk report published around the same time had revealed the composition of Alameda Research's holdings. The bulk of them consisted of FTT rather than cash or more liquid assets. The announcement set off a surge in customer withdrawals that FTX could not fulfill.

  On the 8th of November, Zhao announced that Binance had entered a nonbinding agreement to acquire FTX due to a liquidity crisis. FTT lost 80 percent of its value that day. On the 9th of November, Binance walked away, citing reports of FTX's mishandling of customer funds and pending regulatory investigations. According to the Bloomberg Billionaires Index, Bankman-Fried ceased to be a billionaire in those same days.

  On the 11th of November 2022, FTX, Alameda Research, and more than 130 associated legal entities filed for bankruptcy in Delaware. Bankman-Fried resigned as CEO that same day. His replacement was John J. Ray III, who had led the effort to recover Enron assets for creditors between 2004 and 2009. Anonymous sources told Reuters that Bankman-Fried had transferred at least $4 billion from FTX to Alameda earlier in 2022. None of those transfers had been disclosed to the companies' insiders or the public. Caroline Ellison, then CEO of Alameda Research, reportedly told employees that Bankman-Fried had known FTX was lending customer money to Alameda.

  On the 17th of November, Ray submitted a sworn declaration to the bankruptcy court. He stated that Alameda Research had lent $1 billion to Bankman-Fried personally. Ray added a sharper verdict. "Never in my career," he wrote, "have I seen such a complete failure of corporate controls and such a complete absence of trustworthy financial information."

• 6. The Manhattan Trial

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  A $250 million bond allowed Bankman-Fried to remain free after consenting to extradition from the Bahamas. It was the largest such bond ever set in an American criminal proceeding. Among the conditions was that he would live at his parents' home in California. On the 3rd of January 2023, he entered a plea of not guilty.

  The trial began on the 3rd of October 2023 at the Daniel Patrick Moynihan United States Courthouse in Manhattan. Judge Lewis Kaplan presided. The Guardian summarized the case as a question of whether Bankman-Fried was "a crypto criminal mastermind or just an unlucky 'math nerd.'" Prosecutors accused him of funneling customer money from FTX into Alameda. The funds had financed investments, loan repayments, real estate purchases, and political donations. The defense described a young entrepreneur who worked 12 to 22 hours a day and "didn't drink or party." At no point, they argued, was there an intention to commit fraud.

  Over a dozen witnesses testified for the prosecution. They included FTX executives Caroline Ellison, Gary Wang, and Nishad Singh, all of whom had entered plea deals. Wang testified that "with some simple tweaks to computer code," he had helped Alameda Research misappropriate as much as $65 billion from FTX customers. Wang added that he "lied about this to the public." Ellison testified that Bankman-Fried's hairstyle and clothes had been part of a "well calculated" image. She said he believed his appearance was "an important part" of FTX's "narrative and image." He appeared in court wearing a grey suit with trimmed hair.

  On the stand, Bankman-Fried testified that he had not known the full extent of Alameda's access to customer funds until October or November 2022. He assumed that if Alameda had spent those funds, the transactions would have appeared as a borrow on Alameda's main account. FTX's records, he said, would have reflected any such movement. Other FTX executives acknowledged it seemed plausible he had not known exactly how the funds moved. But they also emphasized that at both companies, Bankman-Fried was the only person in charge. On the 2nd of November 2023, the jury found him guilty on all seven counts.

  The sentencing was scheduled for the 28th of March 2024, and legal experts began speculating about how much time Bankman-Fried might actually serve.

• 7. After the Verdict

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  On the 26th of July 2023, prosecutors alleged witness tampering after Bankman-Fried shared personal writings of Caroline Ellison with a reporter. Three weeks later, on the 11th of August, Judge Kaplan concluded that witness tampering had likely occurred and revoked Bankman-Fried's bail. He was taken into custody at the Metropolitan Detention Center in Brooklyn. His lawyers reported he was not receiving a vegan diet and that his medications for ADHD and depression were running low. By November 2023, he had access to a vegetarian diet and prescription drugs. He was also participating in the informal prison economy, exchanging mackerel packets from the commissary for services such as haircuts.

  On the 28th of March 2024, Judge Kaplan sentenced Bankman-Fried to 25 years in prison. The court ordered him to forfeit $11.02 billion. Under the First Step Act and related time credit programs, he may serve approximately 18 years. He had hired prison consultant Sam Mangel to help him prepare.

  After sentencing, he was assigned register number 37244-510 and requested to remain at MDC Brooklyn while appealing his conviction. As of late September 2024, he was sharing a dormitory-style cell with Sean Combs. In March 2025, without authorization from prison officials, he sat for an interview with Tucker Carlson. He called his conviction the product of "Biden's lawfare machine" and made an indirect pitch to Donald Trump for a pardon. The interview led immediately to solitary confinement. He was then moved to the Federal Correctional Institution, Terminal Island, a low-security prison in Los Angeles.

  On the 4th of November 2025, a federal appeals court in New York heard arguments in his case. His attorney argued the conviction should be overturned because Bankman-Fried had been "presumed guilty." His appeal could take years. It would require convincing higher courts that Judge Kaplan's errors had made the trial unfair. By April 2023, FTX's liquidators had already recovered $7.3 billion of the original $8 billion in missing customer funds. A bankruptcy settlement proposed that customers of FTX.com and FTX US would together receive more than 90 percent of distributable value worldwide.