About Sam Bankman-Fried

In the summer of 2013, Sam Bankman-Fried  worked as an intern at Jane Street Capital, a proprietary trading firm, trading international ETFs. He returned there to work full-time after graduating from MIT. In September 2017, Bankman-Fried left Jane Street and moved to Berkeley, California, where he worked briefly at the Centre for Effective Altruism (CEA) as director of development from October to November 2017. In November 2017, following fund injections from billionaire computer programmer Jaan Tallinn and investor Luke Ding, Sam Bankman-Fried and CEA's Tara Hedley (née Mac Aulay) cofounded the quantitative trading firm Alameda Research. By 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 cryptocurrency conference in Macau in late 2018, he moved to Hong Kong. Sam Bankman-Fried  founded the FTX cryptocurrency derivatives exchange in April 2019; it opened for business the following month. In September 2021, Bankman-Fried and the entire senior staff of FTX moved from Hong Kong to the Bahamas. Bankman-Fried was included on the 2021 list of Forbes 30 Under 30 but was also included on Forbes 2023 Hall of Shame list, featuring ten picks the publication wishes it could take back. On December 8, 2021, Sam 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 was 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, Sam Bankman-Fried  said he and FTX cofounder Gary Wang together borrowed over $546 million from Alameda Research in order to finance Emergent Fidelity Technologies' purchase of Robinhood Markets stock. In September 2022, it was reported that Sam 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. No investment actually took place when Musk finalized the acquisition. Sam Bankman-Fried  invested $500 million in Anthropic and more than $500 million in venture capital firms, including $200 million in Sequoia Capital, itself an investor in FTX. Sequoia published a "glowing" profile of Bankman-Fried, which it subsequently removed after the solvency crisis at FTX. In July 2023, allegations emerged that Sam Bankman-Fried  had considered "purchasing" the island country of Nauru to use as a bunker in the event of an apocalyptic event, in what has been described as a "misguided and sometimes dystopian" project.