Sam Bankman-Fried Height, Age, Girlfriend, Family, Biography

Some Lesser Known Facts About Sam Bankman-Fried

• Sam Bankman-Fried belongs to a Jewish family of educators. Since a young age, he disliked going to school.

• During his seventh grade, he admitted to his parents about his dislike towards school and later, they got him admitted to a maths camp for the summer, which according to Sam helped with his problem-solving and managerial skills.

• While pursuing his graduation at MIT, lived in a coeducational group house called Epsilon Theta. While living at the Epsilon Theta, he was appointed as its president.
  

  A picture of Sam Bankman-Fried while living at the Epsilon Theta

• During his second year at university, Bankman-Fried discovered a philosophy known as “effective altruism” which aims to build a better world by taking action based on research. According to one of the philosophy’s teachings, “earning to give”, Sam aimed to earn as much money as possible to give away generously to various causes.

• In 2013, Bankman-Fried began working as an intern at an American proprietary trading firm named Jane Street Capital at the Wall Street, where he traded international ETFs.

• After completing his graduation from MIT, he began working full-time with Jane Street Capital. While working at Jane Street, he became a member of an American altruism-associated organisation named Giving What We Can and donated around half of his Jane Street salary to charity.

• In September 2017, Bankman-Fried resigned from Jane Street and moved to Berkeley, California, where he worked as Director of Development at the Centre for Effective Altruism (CEA) from October to November 2017.

• In November 2017, Bankman along with  Tara Hedley co-founded the quantitative trading firm Alameda Research. According to a report by Yahoo Finance, he owned approximately 90 per cent of Almeda Research by 2021.

• In 2018, Bankman-Fried began an arbitrage trade, moving approximately $25 million per day to take advantage of the higher price of Bitcoin in Japan compared to the United States.

• In late 2018, he moved to Japan after he attended a cryptocurrency conference in Macau.

• In April 2019, he founded the FTX limited cryptocurrency derivatives exchange in Hong Kong. After 2 years, Sam moved the entire headquarters of the FTX from Hong Kong to the Bahamas.

• During an interview, he talked about the reason behind moving the entire FTX firm from Hong Kong to the Bahamas and said that the Carrabian had comprehensive regulations regarding the Cryptocurrency Exchange system.

• In November 2020, during the 2020 US Elections, he donated $5.2 million to two super political action committees (PACs) that supported the Joe Biden 2020 presidential campaign and became the second-largest individual donor to Biden in the 2020 election cycle following the American businessman Michael Bloomberg.

• After the success of FTX, Sam became to be known as the ‘Poster Boy’ for cryptocurrency. Many renowned American personalities including Tom Brady, Stephen Curry, Katy Perry and Larry David became ambassadors for the exchange.
  

  Sam Bankman-Fried (third from right) with American celebrities

• In 2021, Sam Bankman-Fried was featured on the 30 Under 30 list by Forbes Magazine.

• In 2022, Bankman-Fried donated $27 million in total to Protect Our Future PAC was launched as a political action committee of the Democratic Party to help lawmakers who play the long game on policymaking in areas like pandemic preparedness and planning.

• In 2022, an American journalist said that Bankman-Fried had often donated to politicians who cultivate good Israel–United States relations but also claimed that “it was unclear if his backing of pro-Israel candidates was coincidental or motivated by any personal interest in Middle East policies.” In response, Bankman said that political donations were not being made to influence his policy goals for the cryptocurrency ecosystem but were made in good faith and to help in the great causes that reduced existential risks like nuclear war, pandemics, artificial intelligence, and threats to American democracy.

• In March 2022, during his wealth and career peak, Bankman-Fried had a net worth of 26 billion US Dollars.  He donated money to many PACs including the Next 50 PAC, Guarding Against Pandemics PAC, and the leadership PAC for Brendan Boyle. During the same year, his donations were estimated to be around $262,200.

• According to a book by American author and financial journalist Michael Lewis on the life of Bankman, it said that in mid-2022, Sam had begun to find legal ways to pay American politician Donald Trump to not contest for president in 2024 and got a response from Trump’s team allegedly giving an approximate amount of $5 billion.

• In September 2022, it was reported that Samuel asked his advisor Will MacAskill to make an offer to Elon Musk on his behalf to fund him in the acquisition of Twitter in April of the same year; however, he was refused by Musk.

• He made regular investments of large amounts in different ventures including $500 million in Anthropic, and more than $500 million in venture capital firms, including $200 million in Sequoia Capital which is an investor in FTX.

• After the news of SBF’s bankruptcy went viral, all the employees of FTX Foundation’s FutureFund resigned from their positions. As of 1 September 2022, Future Fund declared it had conducted 110 nonprofits valued at around  $160 million.

• Meanwhile, there were reports that Bankman-Fried spent around $135 million on naming rights for the Miami Heat’s basketball arena and an estimated $30 million on a single Super Bowl Ad.

• In November 2022, during an interview with an American journalist on Twitter personal messages, he revealed that he and his company’s ideology for crypto regulation were not sincere and were “just PR.” He also said that it was “mostly a front” and compared ethics to a “dumb game we woke Westerners play where we say all the right shibboleths and so everyone likes us”.

• In November 2022, the news website CoinDesk reported that all the FTX’s holdings were in FTT  which led Changpeng Zhao, the CEO of the global company Binance Holdings Ltd to announce that he was going to sell all his FTX tokens known as FTT worth $529 Million which further led to a feud between the two companies over a Twitter thread.

• Later, due to the feud, the prices of the FTT and various other cryptocurrencies declined. On 8 November 2022, Zhao announced that Binance would be acquiring FTX and would do research on the company first. On 9 November, Binance Holdings reported that they would not acquire FTX because FTX mishandles customer funds and pending investigations of FTX.

• On the next day, SBF announced that he was no more a billionaire and on 11 November 2022, all the firms owned by Sam including FTX, Alameda Research, and more than 130 associated legal entities declared bankruptcy and Bankman-Fried also resigned as the  CEO of FTX.

• On 3 January 2023, Bankman-Fried pled “not guilty” to all the charges against him and on 1 February 2023, the judge assigned to Bankman-Fried’s case imposed more strictness on his bail and forbade Bankman-Fried from contacting current or former employees of FTX without the presence of any lawyers.

• In November 2023, Sam Bankman-Fried was featured on the Forbes Hall of Shame list.

• Sam Bankman-Fried was known for his sleep schedule and sleeping only for four hours a night on a bean bag next to his desktop.

7) I'm (in)famous for playing League of Legends while on phone calls.

I'll also try to avoid restarting my RAM if possible.

One side advantage of the bean bags: if I sleep in the office, my mind stays in work mode, and I don't have to reload everything the next day. pic.twitter.com/AKlQm7wneI

— SBF (@SBF_FTX) February 4, 2021