Sam Bankman-Fried

Sam Bankman-Fried in 2021

Samuel Bankman-Fried (born March 6, 1992), also known by his initials SBF, is an American entrepreneur, investor and founder and former CEO of the cryptocurrency exchange FTX, FTX.US and quantitative cryptocurrency trading firm Alameda Research. FTX experienced a crisis in late 2022, which led to a collapse in FTX's native cryptocurrency, FTT. Amid the crisis, Bankman-Fried announced he would wind down operations at Alameda Research and resigned as CEO of FTX, which filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy. He was later arrested and convicted of fraud when investigators discovered he had been secretly embezzling customer money from FTX to fund Alameda Research's trades.

Quotes

• I got involved in crypto without any idea what crypto was... It just seemed like there was a lot of good trading to do.
  • "Meet The World’s Richest 29-Year-Old: How Sam Bankman-Fried Made A Record Fortune In The Crypto Frenzy". Oct 6, 2021.

• I would never read a book... I'm very skeptical of books. I don’t want to say no book is ever worth reading, but I actually do believe something pretty close to that, I think, if you wrote a book, you fucked up, and it should have been a six-paragraph blog post.
  • "Sam Bankman-Fried Has a Savior Complex—And Maybe You Should Too" (interview by Adam Fisher), Sequoia, September 22, 2022.

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  • "Sam Bankman-Fried Is Going Down Posting" (By Will Gottsegen November 19, 2022)

Quotes about Bankman-Fried

Bankman-Fried at the Brooklyn Metropolitan Detention Center in 2023

• He’s a phenom ... He’s achieved a lot so far, and he has the respect of a lot of investors—I’m one of them—but his job is just beginning.
  • Kevin O'Leary, "Meet The World’s Richest 29-Year-Old: How Sam Bankman-Fried Made A Record Fortune In The Crypto Frenzy". Oct 6, 2021.

• Never in my career have I seen such a complete failure of corporate controls
  • John Jay Ray III, Sam Bankman-Fried Is Going Down Posting (By Will Gottsegen November 19, 2022)

• My plan was to write a profile of crypto's boy genius, the man who, at twenty-nine, seemed to have the future of money figured out His rise had been so meteoric that it seemed plausible when he said FTX would one day take over all of Wall Street. He was worth at least $20 billion, but he claimed he'd only gotten rich so that he could give it all away. He drove a Toyota Corolla and liked to sleep at the office on a beenbag chair, which I could see next to his desk. It was an irresistable story. The problem was it was not true. While the media, politicians, venture capitalists, and investment bankers lauded him as a benevolent prodigy—a Warren Buffett or J. P. Morgan for the digital age—he was secretly embezzling billions of dollars of his customers' money and blowing it on bad trades, celebrity endorsements, and an island real-estate shopping spree to rival any drug kingpin's.
  • Zeke Faux, Number Go Up: Inside Crypto's Wild Rise and Staggering Fall (2023)
• I was still fairly certain that huge swaths of crypto were essentially a pyramid scheme, but the bubble hadn’t popped. The industry was doing great. It seemed quite possible that the craze could continue far beyond my deadline. Or maybe crypto would gain so many followers that it would become unstoppable. I had no idea what the ending of the book was going to be. After we’d spent a few hours together, I decided to ask Bankman-Fried for advice. This was half interview tactic, half genuine cry for help. I didn’t expect him to tell me his whole industry was really a fraud. But I wanted to see if he might be willing to point me in the right direction. So I laid out my whole narrative dilemma. I told him my theory: that the coin called Tether, the supposedly safe crypto-bank that served as the backbone for a whole lot of other cryptocurrencies, could prove to be fraudulent, and how that could bring down the whole industry. Bankman-Fried said that I was wrong. Crypto wasn’t a scam, and neither was Tether. But he wasn’t offended by my question. He said he totally understood my problem. Then he did something that didn’t strike me as strange at the time. But knowing what I know now, I can’t help but wonder if he was trying to make some kind of winking confession. Bankman-Fried cut me off, nodding, as I tried to explain more. His tone turned chipper. He said: “It’s like the narrative would be way sexier if it was like, ‘Holy shit, this is the world’s biggest Ponzi scheme,’ right?” Right.
  • Zeke Faux, Number Go Up: Inside Crypto's Wild Rise and Staggering Fall (2023)