The meteoric rise and even sharper fall of Sam Bankman-Fried
Sam Bankman-Fried, also known by the initials SBF, has tumbled from crypto king to convicted fraudster.
The founder of the FTX cryptocurrency exchange was found guilty in November of defrauding customers of his cryptocurrency exchange out of billions of dollars.
A Manhattan jury convicted him on all seven counts after a month-long trial.
FTX collapsed last November, shocking financial markets and wiping out the crypto tycoon’s estimated $26bn (£21bn) fortune.
But how did the 31-year-old go from such astronomic financial heights to being sentenced to 25 years in prison?
His early life
Bankman-Fried grew up in California’s wealthy San Francisco Bay area, where he attended a $56,000-a-year school.
Both his parents were professors at the prestigious Stanford Law School.
He studied at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) where he lived in a group house called Epsilon Theta, which promotes itself as an alcohol-free community “known for liking beanbags, board games, puzzles, and rubber ducks”.
He once told an FTX podcast he did not apply himself in classes and did not know what to do with his life for most of college.
Bankman-Fried graduated in 2014 with a major in physics and a minor in maths.
Vegan, teetotaller, effective altruist
Bankman-Fried didn’t lose the values of Epsilon Theta after graduation, if what he has told journalists is to be believed.
He pushed back against claims of drug and alcohol use at FTX, telling the New York Times’ DealBook Summit there were no “wild parties” at the company.
“When we had parties, we played board games and, you know, 20% of people would have three-quarters of a beer each or something like that. And you know, the rest of us would not drink anything,” he said.
He is also known for being a vegan – and has stuck to his principles in jail despite not being provided with vegan meals, according to his lawyers.
They said he was “literally subsisting” on bread, water and peanut butter in the run-up to his trial.
His veganism is linked to a history of animal rights activism – which in turn is bound up with the effective altruism movement.
While studying, he was reportedly considering a career in animal welfare, having organised a protest against factory farming in his first year of college.
But he met with Will MacAskill, one of the movement’s leaders, who told him he could make more of an impact by finding a career that paid well, and then donating money to charity.
This is known as “earning to give” and it’s one of the central pillars of effective altruism, a movement that seeks to do good by using resources effectively.
When Bankman-Fried took a job at quantitative trading firm Jane Street after graduating, he said he donated about half of his salary to charities, including animal welfare organisations.
He talked about plans to eventually donate most of the money made in his lifetime, with a focus on “long-termism” or safeguarding the future of humanity.
Read more:
The rise and fall of Sam Bankman-Fried
Does SBF’s arrest mean crypto is fundamentally unsound?
Sam Bankman-Fried after his arrest in the Bahamas
The start of the crypto king
After three years at Jane Street, Bankman-Fried quit with his eye on taking more risks to make more money.
He landed on crypto as the best way of getting rich quickly.
It started with Bitcoin. He realised it was selling for more in Asia than it was in the US – and figured if he could buy it in one place and sell it in another he could turn an easy profit.
“I got involved in crypto without any idea what crypto was,” he told Forbes. “It just seemed like there was a lot of good trading to do.”
In 2017 he co-founded cryptocurrency trading firm Alameda Research, bringing in other recruits from the effective altruism community and reportedly donating half of the company’s profits to charity.
At its peak, the company was moving $25m in Bitcoin each day.
Two years later, he founded FTX, an exchange which allowed users to buy and sell buy cryptocurrencies, and moved to Hong Kong.
The FTX boom
From Hong Kong, operations moved to the tax haven of the Bahamas, where Bankman-Fried bought a multimillion-dollar waterfront penthouse.
The luxury property, overlooking an area used for filming the scene where Daniel Craig famously emerged from the water as James Bond in Casino Royale, was also used as a home office for Bankman-Fried and up to nine of his FTX devotees.
In 2021, Forbes described him as “the richest twentysomething in the world” with a net worth of $22.5bn, putting him at 32 on The Forbes 400 rich list.
Please use Chrome browser for a more accessible video player
What went wrong for FTX’s Sam Bankman-Fried?
Relationship with Caroline Ellison
Bankman-Fried had an on-again, off-again relationship with Caroline Ellison, having met her while working at Jane Street.
He persuaded her to join Alameda Research. As a fellow effective altruist, she was also attracted by the prospect of earning money to give to charity.
The pair lived together in the Bahamas penthouse.
Ellison, who became Alameda’s co-chief executive in 2021 and assumed full control last year, has pleaded guilty to fraud charges and agreed to cooperate with prosecutors.
She appeared to have been unhappy at Alameda long before its collapse.
In July, the New York Times published an article citing her personal writings from early 2022, in which she described feeling “unhappy and overwhelmed” at work and “hurt/rejected” by a breakup with Bankman-Fried.
Bankman-Fried was jailed for allegedly sharing the writings with the reporter, with a judge saying it likely amounted to witness tampering.
Political donations
Bankman-Fried was the second-largest individual donor to Joe Biden in the 2020 election cycle.
He was also among the largest donors to Democratic candidates and causes ahead of the November 2022 midterm elections.
Prosecutors said he used $100m in stolen FTX deposits to fund those donations, which he hoped would spur the passage of crypto-friendly legislation.
He was initially charged with conspiring to break US campaign finance laws, but this charge was dropped after The Bahamas said it was not part of its agreement to extradite him.
However, a judge has said the political donations can still be discussed at the trial because they are “intertwined
inextricably” with the fraud charges.
The trial
After he was arrested in the Bahamas in December and extradited to the US, Bankman-Fried was found guilty of seven charges of fraud and conspiracy stemming from the collapse of FTX.
Bankman-Fried – who pleaded not guilty to two counts of fraud and five of conspiracy – clasped his hands together as the verdict was delivered.
He admitted “mistakes” in running FTX when he testified during the month-long trial, but denied stealing at least $10bn of his customers’ money.
Prosecutors claimed he used the funds for risky bets at his hedge fund Alameda Research – with a huge financial black hole emerging when crypto markets fell sharply.
He was sentenced to 25 years in prison on 28 March.
The world’s best golfer has suffered a freak injury while cooking Christmas dinner, forcing him to undergo surgery.
Scottie Scheffler sustained a puncture wound after cutting the palm of his right hand on broken glass.
The world number one required surgery as small glass fragments remained in the palm after the accident.
The injury has forced him out of the first tournament of the season, next week’s The Sentry in Hawaii.
Pic: Reuters
But the 28-year-old has been told he will recover in three to four weeks, and he hopes to be back in action at The American Express tournament in California on 16 January.
Scheffler won an Olympic gold and seven PGA Tour titles in the last year and was recently named PGA Tour’s Player of the Year for a third season in a row.
In May, he was arrested by police during the US PGA Championship after he was accused of trying to drive around a traffic jam caused by a fatal accident.
Scheffler’s arrest became a major story at the US PGA Championship. Pic: Matt Stone-USA TODAY Sports via Reuters
Just hours later, he was released and allowed to return to Valhalla Golf Club in Kentucky to play his second round of the tournament.
Criminal charges against Scheffler were later dismissed due to a lack of evidence and a police officer who arrested him was disciplined for not having his bodycam on at the time of the incident.
The man accused of burning a woman to death on a New York subway train has been indicted on murder and arson charges.
Sebastian Zapeta is accused of setting a sleeping woman on fire and then fanning the flames with a shirt, which caused her to be engulfed by the blaze.
He allegedly sat on a platform at Brooklyn’s Coney Island station, opposite the stopped train, and watched as she burned to death.
Authorities are still working to identify the victim.
Zapeta, 33, has been charged with one count of first degree murder, two counts of second degree murder and one count of arson in the first degree.
After a brief hearing in which the indictment was announced, Brooklyn District Attorney Eric Gonzalez said: “This was a malicious deed. A sleeping, vulnerable woman on our subway system.”
Mr Gonzalez said police and medical examiners are using fingerprints and advanced DNA techniques to identify the victim, while also retracing her steps before the murder.
“Our hearts go out not only to this victim, but we know that there’s a family,” he said. “Just because someone appears to have been living in the situation of homelessness does not mean that there’s not going to be family devastated by the tragic way she lost her life.”
Officers patrol the platform where the woman died. Pic: AP
Zapeta was initially charged with murder and arson in a criminal complaint earlier this week.
Such filings are often a first step in the criminal process because all felony cases in New York require a grand jury indictment to proceed to trial, unless a defendant waives that requirement.
Zapeta was not present at the hearing. The most serious charge he is facing carries a maximum sentence of life in prison without parole and the indictment will be unsealed on 7 January.
More US news:
Pizza delivery woman stabs pregnant customer
Judge warns Jay-Z’s lawyer over rape case
Zapeta is a Guatemalan who entered the US illegally having already been deported in 2018, officials say.
He was taken into custody last Sunday, after three children called 911 when they recognised him from an image shared by police.
During questioning, prosecutors say he claimed not to know what happened, and noted he consumes alcohol – but did identify himself in photos and videos showing the fire being lit.
A pizza delivery woman stabbed a pregnant customer over a $2 tip, authorities in the US say.
Brianna Alvelo, 22, is charged with attempted murder after allegedly stabbing the woman multiple times at a motel in Kissimmee, Florida.
The victim, her boyfriend and her five-year-old daughter were staying at the Riviera Motel to celebrate a birthday and ordered Marco’s pizza on Sunday, according to a court document reported by Sky News’ US sister outlet NBC News.
Alvelo delivered the pizza which cost around $33 (£26) and was asked to provide change for a $50 bill but did not have the change, the affidavit said.
The woman then searched for smaller bills and in the end gave Alvelo a $2 tip.
Brianna Alvelo Pic: Osceola County Jail
She told police that some time later she heard a loud knocking on the door. A man and a woman wearing masks and all black forced themselves into the room when she opened the door, she said.
The man brandished a silver revolver and demanded that the woman’s boyfriend go into the bathroom and the other person, believed to be Alvelo, pulled out a pocketknife, the document said.
As the woman turned to shield her child she felt a strike on her lower back, she said.
She then “threw her daughter onto the bed and attempted to pick up her phone”, the affidavit said, but Alvelo grabbed it and smashed it.
Alvelo then “began striking her multiple times with the knife”, according to the affidavit. The man who had the gun then yelled it was time to go, stopping the assault, it said.
Read more from Sky News:
Trump criticises Biden for death row decisions
Stranded astronauts send Christmas message
The woman received 14 stab wounds and discovered she was pregnant while being treated in hospital.
Alvelo is charged with attempted murder, home invasion with a firearm, kidnapping and aggravated assault, according to court records.
A man alleged to have accompanied Alvelo during the incident has not yet been identified.
-
Sports2 years ago‘Storybook stuff’: Inside the night Bryce Harper sent the Phillies to the World Series
-
Sports9 months agoStory injured on diving stop, exits Red Sox game
-
Sports1 year agoGame 1 of WS least-watched in recorded history
-
Sports2 years agoMLB Rank 2023: Ranking baseball’s top 100 players
-
Sports3 years ago
Team Europe easily wins 4th straight Laver Cup
-
Environment2 years agoJapan and South Korea have a lot at stake in a free and open South China Sea
-
Environment2 years agoGame-changing Lectric XPedition launched as affordable electric cargo bike
-
Business2 years agoBank of England’s extraordinary response to government policy is almost unthinkable | Ed Conway