Sam Bankman-Fried

Sam Bankman-Fried is the founder of Alameda Research, a Hong-Kong based private equity firm. He is also the co-founder and CEO of FTX Trading Ltd, a Cryptocurrency Derivatives Exchange. He holds a Bachelor's degree in Physics from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

Samuel Bankman-Fried (born March 6, 1992), also known by his initials SBF, is an American entrepreneur. He is the founder and CEO of FTX, a cryptocurrency exchange. He also manages assets through Alameda Research, a quantitative cryptocurrency trading firm he founded in October 2017. He is ranked 32nd on the 2021 Forbes 400 list with a net worth of US$22.5 billion.

Bankman-Fried was born in 1992 on the campus of Stanford University, the son of Barbara Fried and Joseph Bankman, both law professors from Stanford Law School. When he was about 14 years old, his mother noticed that he had spontaneously developed an interest in utilitarianism. Later, he attended Canada/USA Mathcamp, a summer program for mathematically talented high school students.

From 2010 to 2014, Bankman-Fried attended the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. There, he lived in a coeducational group house called Epsilon Theta. In 2012, he blogged about utilitarianism, baseball, and politics. In 2014, he graduated with a degree in physics and a minor in mathematics.

In the summer of 2013, Bankman-Fried began working at Jane Street Capital, a proprietary trading firm, trading international ETFs. Initially an intern, he returned there full-time after graduating.

In September 2017, Bankman-Fried quit 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 founded Alameda Research, a quantitative trading firm. (As of 2021, FTX owns approximately 90% of Alameda Research.)

In January 2018, Bankman-Fried organized an arbitrage trade, moving up to $25M per day, to take advantage of the higher price of bitcoin in Japan compared to in America. After attending a late 2018 cryptocurrency conference in Macau, and while also inspired by the concurrent fork of Bitcoin Cash, he moved to Hong Kong. He founded FTX, a cryptocurrency derivatives exchange, in April 2019, and it then launched the following month.

On December 8, 2021, Bankman-Fried, along with other industry executives, testified before the Committee on Financial Services in relation to regulating the cryptocurrency industry.

Chief Executive Officer

FTX: Cryptocurrency Derivatives Exchange

Apr 2019 – present time

Hong Kong

CEO

Alameda Research

Nov 2017 – present time

Director of Development

The Centre for Effective Altruism

Oct 2017 - Nov 2017

Trader

Jane Street

June 2014 - Sept 2017

New York

Bankman-Fried is a supporter of effective altruism and pursues earning to give as an altruistic career. He is a member of Giving What We Can and plans to donate the great majority of his wealth to effective charities over the course of his life.

His company FTX has a policy of donating 1% of its revenue to charity. He was one of the largest CEO donors to Joe Biden in the 2020 election cycle, personally donating $5.2 million, second to only Michael Bloomberg.

Bankman-Fried is a vegan. He sleeps four hours per night, when he has no meetings, on a bean bag chair in his office next to his computer. He ensures that every room in his office has bean bag chairs to sleep on. He shares an apartment with roommates. He lives in the Bahamas. He almost never drinks or goes on vacation.

Bankman-Fried describes himself morally as a "Benthamite" and "a total, act, hedonistic/one level (as opposed to high and low pleasure), classical (as opposed to negative) utilitarian".

According to Forbes, Sam Bankman-Fried’s net worth was $8.7 billion as of May 2021. This made him the 274th richest person in the world. Forbes specifies that the vast majority of Bankman-Fried’s wealth is in FTX equity and FTT tokens.

In February 2021, Bankman-Fried was the second richest known entrepreneur in the cryptocurrency space after Brian Armstrong, according to Forbes. At the time, Bankman-Fried’s net worth was $4.5 billion, while Armstrong’s worth was $6.5 billion.

Sam Bankman-Fried is present on Twitter and LinkedIn.

In 2021, Cointelegraph named Bankman-Fried the third most notable figure in the blockchain industry after Andre Cronje (#2) and “All of us” (#1). Cointelegraph’s list includes other prominent individuals such as Kraken founder Jesse Powell, Bitcoin Stock-to-Flow model creator PlanB, Polkadot co-founder Gavin Wood, and Chainlink co-founder Sergey Nazarov.

Bankman-Fried has been featured in major online publications such as Business Insider and Vox. He has been interviewed by Anthony Pompliano and Raoul Pal’s Real Vision and UpOnly TV’s CryptoCobain as well.