1. On December 12,2022, Sam Bankman-Fried was arrested in the Bahamas and extradited to the United States, where he was indicted on seven criminal charges, including wire fraud, commodities fraud, securities fraud, money laundering, and campaign finance law violations.
Sam Bankman-Fried was born on March 5,1992, in an upper-middle class Jewish family in Stanford, California.
Sam Bankman-Fried is the son of Barbara Fried and Joseph Bankman, both professors at Stanford Law School.
Sam Bankman-Fried's maternal grandmother, Adrienne Fried Block, was a noted musicologist and his maternal grandfather George Fried was an administrator with the New York State Supreme Court probation department.
Sam Bankman-Fried's parents admit Sam gave them the assets as gifts but deny wrongdoing and are currently in court to make their case.
Sam Bankman-Fried attended high school at Crystal Springs Uplands School in Hillsborough, California.
Sam Bankman-Fried graduated from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 2014 with a bachelor's degree in physics and a minor in mathematics.
Sam Bankman-Fried returned there to work full-time after graduating from MIT.
In September 2017, Sam Bankman-Fried left Jane Street and moved to Berkeley, California, where he worked briefly at the Centre for Effective Altruism as director of development from October to November 2017.
In January 2018, Sam Bankman-Fried organized an arbitrage trade, moving up to $25million per day to take advantage of the higher price of bitcoin in Japan compared to the United States.
Sam Bankman-Fried founded the FTX cryptocurrency derivatives exchange in April 2019; it opened for business the following month.
Sam Bankman-Fried was included on the 2021 list of Forbes 30 Under 30 but was included on Forbes 2023 Hall of Shame list, featuring ten picks the publication wishes it could take back.
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.
Sam Bankman-Fried invested $500million in Anthropic and more than $500million in venture capital firms, including $200million in Sequoia Capital, itself an investor in 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.
Sam Bankman-Fried has publicly stated he supports effective altruism, contending that he was pursuing "earning to give" as an "altruistic career".
Sam Bankman-Fried claimed to make donations "not based on personal interest but on the projects that are proven by data to be the most effective at helping people", such as those that reduced existential risks like nuclear war, pandemics, artificial intelligence, and threats to American democracy.
Sam Bankman-Fried was a member of Giving What We Can and donated around half of his Jane Street salary to charity.
Sam Bankman-Fried is the founder of Future Fund, whose team included Scottish philosopher and author William MacAskill, one of the founders of the effective altruism movement.
The stated reason for FTX's relocation to the Bahamas was the friendly regulatory environment, and Sam Bankman-Fried openly discussed paying off the country's $9billion national debt.
In November 2022, Sam Bankman-Fried participated in an interview with Vox writer Kelsey Piper over Twitter private messages.
Sam Bankman-Fried later claimed to have been referring to ESG, CSR, and greenwashing, as opposed to effective altruism, anti-malaria nets, and pandemic prevention.
Sam Bankman-Fried wrote that he expected FTT to be "highly volatile in the coming days as things develop".
Amid the crisis, Sam Bankman-Fried was no longer a billionaire, according to the Bloomberg Billionaires Index.
An anonymous source cited by The Wall Street Journal stated that Sam Bankman-Fried had disclosed that Alameda owed FTX about $10billion, which was secured through customer funds held by FTX when FTX had, at the time, $16billion in customer assets.
Sam Bankman-Fried implied that the managing team and the law firms managing the bankruptcy were using the Enron precedent in an effort to reap inordinately large amounts of fees from the process.
The arrest took place the day before Sam Bankman-Fried was scheduled to appear before the US House Committee on Financial Services, but Forbes obtained and published his prepared testimony.
Sam Bankman-Fried was allowed to remain free on a $250million bond, the largest such bond ever set in an American criminal proceeding.
On January 3,2023, Sam Bankman-Fried pled "not guilty" to fraud and the other charges.
On February 1,2023, the judge presiding over his case, Judge Lewis Kaplan, tightened the bail conditions and forbade Sam Bankman-Fried from contacting current or former employees of FTX without attorneys present.
The restriction was imposed as Judge Kaplan considered his contact with a potential witness as a "material threat of inappropriate contact with prospective witnesses", and hinted Sam Bankman-Fried might deserve to be jailed pending trial.
The Guardian summarized the trial as a question of "whether Sam Bankman-Fried is a crypto criminal mastermind or just an unlucky 'math nerd".
Sam Bankman-Fried was accused of having "stole[n] billions from thousands of people" by funnelling customers' money from FTX into Alameda to fund investments, loan repayments, real estate, and political donations.
Sam Bankman-Fried, they said, worked 12 to 22 hours a day, "didn't drink or party", and wanted to fund more work on pandemic prevention.
Sam Bankman-Fried contended that he had merely requested something that would prevent erroneous liquidation.
Sam Bankman-Fried was not aware of the specific solution implemented, he said, although he was aware that Alameda ultimately borrowed "around $2billion" this way.
Sam Bankman-Fried denied knowledge of a crucial part of the second way that Alameda accessed customer funds.
Sam Bankman-Fried assumed that if Alameda had been spending the funds, that would have been reflected as a borrow on Alameda's main account on FTX.
Sam Bankman-Fried claimed to have only skimmed the "dishonest" balance sheets that Alameda's CEO sent to lenders and the defense made a great effort to demonstrate her autonomy in the role, the prime example being her refusal to follow Bankman-Fried's advice to hedge against a market downturn.
Sam Bankman-Fried had asked for these charges to be dismissed because they were not part of the extradition agreement with Bahamian authorities, or alternatively he requested that they be resolved under a separate trial.
On July 26,2023, prosecutors alleged witness tampering after Sam Bankman-Fried gave a reporter personal writings of former Alameda Research CEO Caroline Ellison.
Sam Bankman-Fried added that Bankman-Fried could not prepare for the trial subsisting on bread, water, and peanut butter.
Sam Bankman-Fried requested to remain incarcerated in MDC Brooklyn while he pursued an appeal.
In March 2025, Tucker Carlson interviewed Sam Bankman-Fried, who made an "indirect pitch to Mr Trump" to pardon his case, emphasizing that some of his donations went for Republican causes.
Sam Bankman-Fried was placed in solitary confinement for giving an unapproved interview.
Sam Bankman-Fried's only campaign finance activity prior to 2019 was a $1,000 contribution in 2010 to Michael Bennet.
Sam Bankman-Fried was the second-largest individual donor to Biden in the 2020 election cycle, after Michael Bloomberg.
For Democrats, Sam Bankman-Fried donated $27million to Protect Our Future, a Democratic PAC.
Sam Bankman-Fried was the second-largest individual donor to Democratic causes for the 2022 US elections, with total donations of $39.8million, only behind George Soros, of which $27million was given to the Protect Our Future PAC.
Sam Bankman-Fried said in February 2022 that his political contributions were not aimed at influencing his policy goals for the cryptocurrency ecosystem; however, FTX was circulating a list of suggestions to policymakers at the time.
Sam Bankman-Fried said in an interview that he would prefer the Commodity Futures Trading Commission take a larger role in regulating and guiding the crypto industry.
Sam Bankman-Fried pushed for regulations via the proposed Digital Commodities Consumer Protection Act by extensively lobbying Congress, which was perceived as being favorable to FTX but harmful to the broader industry, especially its decentralized finance competitors.
In May 2022, Sam Bankman-Fried stated that he planned to spend "north of $100million" in the 2024 presidential election with a "soft ceiling" of $1billion.
However, in Going Infinite, Michael Lewis revealed that Sam Bankman-Fried had begun to investigate the legality of directly paying Donald Trump not to run for president in 2024, with Trump's team allegedly giving a potential figure of $5billion.
Sam Bankman-Fried had a relationship with Alameda Research CEO Caroline Ellison that lasted around six months and ended on April 15,2022.
Sam Bankman-Fried wrote a letter to the judge in February 2024 arguing for lenient sentencing, saying that Bankman-Fried would face extreme danger in prison because he has "trouble responding appropriately to many social cues".