The dishevelled former wunderkind fooled Silicon Valley and stole billions from customers, a court found.
Sam Bankman-Fried has been convicted of stealing billions of dollars from customers of his cryptocurrency exchange FTX. It's a spectacular downfall for Silicon Valley's dishevelled wunderkind, who rubbed elbows with celebrities like Gisele and Tom Brady.
They considered their options. Was it possible that his rival would walk back the criticism? Was it probable that that would stem the bleeding? "Fairly unlikely," Bankman-Fried wrote.It was the kind of calculus Bankman-Fried had been making for years, the quick equations friends said he used in nearly every situation - mulling a break-up, assessing a risky trade.
Both tellings reveal how tightly the fortunes of FTX were tied to the image of its founder, whose oddball magnetism drew former presidents, celebrities, and corporate titans into his orbit and his multi-billion dollar gamble."Mostly I sleep on a beanbag," Mr Bankman-Fried once told his Twitter followers
To do the most good, Mr MacAskill told him, Bankman-Fried could take his considerable intellect to lucrative Wall Street, and donate most of his salary to important causes. In 2019, he founded FTX, then a Hong Kong-based crypto exchange for international investors. Like Elizabeth Holmes - another Silicon Valley billionaire whose star came crashing down - he was able to convince big name investors to lend the company not only cash, but credibility.
According to internal accounts, life at FTX could sometimes resemble a grown-up maths camp, filled with a selection of brilliant misfits and led by the perpetually rumpled Bankman-Fried. "We just trusted him 100%," she told the BBC. "To a degree that we kind of worried speaking up for ourselves."Appearing side-by-side with Bill Clinton, Tony Blair, Gisele Bundchen and Katy Perry in shorts and ill-fitting T-shirts, he became an ambassador of sorts for the crypto industry as whole, just as it began to reach new heights.
"It was a great story, everybody loved it," said Mr Faux. "People loved it in Congress, the VCs loved it, the bankers loved it."In September of 2022, the venture capital firm Sequoia Capital ran a breathless profile of Bankman-Fried in its magazine. At the time, FTX was valued at $32bn. Then came that announcement on 6 November from industry rival, Binance CEO Changpeng Zhao, known as CZ, who said he would dump his own sizable stores of FTT.For some observers of the crypto boom, and Bankman-Fried's meteoric rise to power, the fall was not unexpected.In a now deleted post Sequoia Capital said Sam Bankman-Fried's 'intellect is as awesome as it is intimidating'.
"I think he marketed himself to me as a version of his public persona, which at the time was the California wunderkind, billionaire philanthropist," Mr McKenzie said. The prosecution, in turn, painted Bankman-Fried as someone whose ambition went hand-in-hand with a hubris that led Bankman-Fried to play the odds with his company.Bankman-Fried's courtroom downfall was aided by former members of his inner circle, including Ms Ellison, who acted as chief executive of Alameda, as well as college roommates Adam Yedida and Gary Wang, and Nishad Singh, a childhood friend of Bankman-Fried's younger brother.
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