Sam Bankman-Fried biography: 13 things about entrepreneur born in Stanford, California

Sam Bankman-Fried is a Jewish-American entrepreneur and investor born in Stanford, California, United States to Joseph Bankman and Barbara Fried. Sam is Gabriel Bankman-Fried‘s older brother and Linda P. Fried‘s nephew.

Sam went to Crystal Springs Uplands School in Hillsborough, California. Here are 13 more things about Sam:

1. From 2010 to 2014, he attended the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Cambridge, Massachusetts, USA where he earned a bachelor’s degree in physics and a minor in mathematics.
2. In 2013, he worked as an intern at Jane Street Capital, a proprietary trading firm trading international exchange-traded funds (ETFs) in New York, USA.
3. In September 2017, he left Jane Street Capital and moved to Berkeley, California. From October 2017 to November 2017, he worked at the Centre for Effective Altruism in Berkeley as director of development.
4. In November 2017, he and Tara Mac Aulay from the Centre of Effective Altruism co-founded the quantitative trading firm Alameda Research. He served as the chief executive officer until April 2019.
5. In January 2018, he 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. Months later, he attended a cryptocurrency conference in Macau and moved to Hong Kong.
6. In April 2019, he founded the cryptocurrency derivatives exchange FTX, which opened for business in May 2019.
7. On December 8, 2021, he and other industry executives testified before the Committee on Financial Services about regulating the cryptocurrency industry.
8. In October 2022, he had an estimated net worth of $10.5 billion. But on November 8, 2022, his net worth was estimated to have dropped in a day to $991.5 million amid FTX’s solvency crisis. On November 11, 2022, he resigned as CEO of FTX and was replaced by John J. Ray III. On the same day, FTX filed for bankruptcy.
9. On December 12, 2022, the Royal Bahamas Police Force arrested him in his apartment complex in the Bahamas and booked into Fox Hill Prison in Nassau, Bahamas. On December 22, 2022, he consented to his extradition from the Bahamas to the U.S. and was given a $250 million bond.
10. On January 3, 2023, he pleaded not guilty to wire fraud, wire fraud conspiracy, securities fraud, securities fraud conspiracy and money laundering. On February 23, 2023, four additional criminal charges levied against him were announced.
11. In July 2023, prosecutors dropped a campaign finance charge filed against him due to treaty obligations to the Bahamas created by his extradition. They alleged witness tampering after he gave a reporter personal writings of former Alameda Research chief executive Caroline Ellison.
12. On August 11, 2023, Judge Lewis Kaplan concluded that witness tampering had likely occurred and revoked his bail. He was remanded into custody at the Metropolitan Detention Center, Brooklyn in Brooklyn, New York City, New York.
13. He was 30 years old when he was found guilty on November 2, 2023 of seven counts of fraud and conspiracy. On March 28, 2024, he will be sentenced.