Sam Bankman-Fried

Sam Bankman-Fried (born March 6, 1992) is the founder and CEO of FTX, a cryptocurrency exchange.[1][2] He also manages assets through Alameda Research, a quantitative cryptocurrency trading firm he founded in October 2017.[3]

Sam Bankman-Fried
Born (1992-03-06) March 6, 1992
Stanford, California, United States
NationalityUnited States
EducationBA Physics, Massachusetts Institute of Technology
OccupationEntrepreneur
Known forCEO of FTX
CEO of Alameda Research

Biography

Early life and education

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.[4] When he was about 14 years old, his mother noticed that he had spontaneously developed an interest in utilitarianism.[4] Later, he attended Canada/USA Mathcamp, a summer program for mathematically talented high school students.[4]

From 2010 to 2014, Bankman-Fried attended the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.[4] There, he lived in a coeducational group house called Epsilon Theta.[4] In 2012, he blogged about utilitarianism, baseball, and politics.[2][4] In 2014, he graduated with a degree in physics.[4][5][6]

Career

Bankman-Fried started his career at Jane Street Capital, a proprietary trading firm,[4] trading international ETFs.[7] In September 2017, he quit Jane Street and moved to Berkeley, where he was briefly the director of the Centre for Effective Altruism from October to November 2017.[4][8] In November 2017, he founded Alameda Research, a quantitative trading firm.[4] (As of 2021, FTX owns approximately 90% of Alameda Research[4].)

In January 2018, he 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.[4][8] 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.[4][9] He founded FTX, a cryptocurrency derivatives exchange, in April 2019, and it then launched the following month.[4]

Bankman-Fried was named on the Forbes 30 Under 30 (Finance) list in 2021.[10]

Philanthropy

Bankman-Fried is a supporter of effective altruism and pursues earning to give as an altruistic career.[11] 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.[1]

His company FTX has a policy of donating 1% of its revenue to charity.[11][12] 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.[11][13]

Personal life

Bankman-Fried is a vegan.[2][4][6] He sleeps four hours per night, when he has no meetings, on a bean bag chair in his office next to his computer;[4][9] in fact, he ensures that every room in his office has bean bag chairs to sleep on.[6] He shares an apartment with roommates.[6] He almost never drinks or goes on vacation.[6] He often uses the Latin verb quaere (meaning "ask yourself") in conversations.[4]

Bankman-Fried describes himself morally as a "Benthamite" and a "a total, act, hedonistic/one level (as opposed to high and low pleasure), classical (as opposed to negative) utilitarian".[4]

References
  1. Schleifer, Theodore (March 20, 2021). "How a crypto billionaire decided to become one of Biden's biggest donors". Vox.
  2. Wallace, Benjamin (February 2, 2021). "The Mysterious Cryptocurrency Magnate Who Became One of Biden's Biggest Donors". Intelligencer.
  3. "Sam Bankman-Fried". Forbes. Retrieved April 30, 2021.
  4. Parloff, Roger (August 12, 2021). "Portrait of a 29-year-old billionaire: Can Sam Bankman-Fried make his risky crypto business work?". finance.yahoo.com. Retrieved September 6, 2021.
  5. "The Team". Alameda Research. Retrieved April 19, 2021.
  6. Chan, Michelle (June 25, 2021). "Hong Kong's 29-year-old crypto billionaire: FTX's Sam Bankman-Fried". Nikkei Asia. Retrieved September 6, 2021.
  7. "The Ex-Trader Building a Multi-Billion Crypto Empire (Podcast)". Bloomberg.com. March 31, 2021. Retrieved October 1, 2021.
  8. Wallace, Benjamin (February 2, 2021). "The Mysterious Cryptocurrency Magnate Who Became One of Biden's Biggest Donors". Intelligencer. Retrieved September 6, 2021.
  9. Lipton, Eric; Livni, Ephrat (August 19, 2021). "Crypto Nomads: Surfing the World for Risk and Profit". The New York Times. ISSN 0362-4331. Retrieved September 6, 2021.
  10. "Sam Bankman-Fried". Forbes. Retrieved July 28, 2021.
  11. Osipovich, Alexander (April 16, 2021). "This Vegan Billionaire Disrupted the Crypto Markets. Stocks May Be Next". Wall Street Journal.
  12. "FTX". ftx.com. Retrieved May 3, 2021.
  13. "Crypto firm ropes in Gisele, Tom Brady to burnish green credentials". South China Morning Post. July 1, 2021. Retrieved July 28, 2021.
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