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Sam Bankman-Fried is the founder of Alameda Research, a Hong Kong-based private equity firm. He is also the co-founder and former CEO of FTX Trading Ltd, a cryptocurrency derivatives exchange.
Bankman-Fried was born on March 6, 1992, in Palo Alto, California as both of his parents, Joseph Bankman and Barbara Fried, were law professors at Stanford University. He has a younger brother, and they were raised by their parents with utilitarian ideals. Bankman-Fried attended Crystal Springs Uplands, a private high school in California, and graduated in 2010.
In 2010, Bankman-Fried went on to attend college at Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), where he studied physics. While at MIT, he became a member of Epsilon Theta, a STEAM-focused coed fraternity. Bankman-Fried graduated with his bachelor's degree in physics in 2014.
After graduating from MIT, Bankman-Fried was a trader at Jane Street, a global liquidity provider and trading firm. He worked there until 2017, when he left to found his own company, Alameda Research, a quantitative trading firm. He also acted as CEO of that company until 2019.
While operating Alameda, Bankman-Fried decided to move to Hong Kong in 2018, due to the prominence of cryptocurrency and cryptocurrency-related events in the area. In April 2019, he founded FTX, a cryptocurrency derivatives exchange. The company thrived and he eventually moved its headquarters from Hong Kong to the Bahamas with the advent of COVID-19, so it would be easier to run the company in a place with fewer restrictions than Hong Kong.
In November 2022, Bankman-Fried resigned as CEO of FTX concurrently with the filing of Chapter 11 bankruptcy for the company.He also filed for bankruptcy for Alameda Research on the same day.
Bankman-Fried has been known as a philanthropist from early in his career. It is reported that he donated 50 percent of his salary to pro-animal welfare organizations while he was a trader at Jane Street. He was one of the largest CEO donors to Joe Biden in the 2020 election cycle and has donated significant sums of money to democratic-sided politics.
