Bankman-Fried first came across Singer’s work when he was a teenager living in Berkeley, Calif. Bankman-Fried’s capitalist muse is the utilitarian philosopher Peter Singer, a professor at Princeton and an animal-rights advocate. The me-first ethics of the novelist Ayn Rand have been the inspiration of ruthless entrepreneurs from Uber’s Travis Kalanick to tech mogul Peter Thiel. ![]() “Ideally, I would want FTX to become the biggest source of financial transactions in the world.” “We’re sort of playing in the kiddie pool,” Bankman-Fried says. If he succeeds in taking over crypto, the mainstream finance industry is next. He wants to offer cryptocurrency futures, swaps, and options, which he sees as a potential $US25 billion-a-day market. Instead of shares of Microsoft, users are buying and selling bitcoin, Ether, Dogecoin, and hundreds of other weird cryptocurrencies.īankman-Fried has set his sights on the US market, which is dominated by Coinbase. 3 crypto exchange by volume yet handles $US15 billion of trading on a good day. He smiles as he shares a chart that shows FTX growing faster than his largest competitors, such as Binance. But it’s clear the main appeal for him is getting rich quick. He says FTX is running an honest market, checks customers’ backgrounds, buys carbon credits to offset its emissions, and is more efficient than the mainstream financial system. The crypto industry might seem like an odd choice for a do-gooder: It’s facilitated endless scams, turned ransomware into an industry, and sucks up tonnes of energy-as much as the country of Malaysia, by some estimates. Bankman-Fried figures as many as five of his co-workers are also billionaires. He drives a Toyota Corolla, and when he’s not at the office, he crashes at an apartment with 10 or so roommates, though it’s a penthouse at the island’s nicest resort. For now it’s headquartered in a one-story red-roofed building near the airport.īankman-Fried lives like a college student perpetually cramming for finals. FTX is planning to build a 1,000-employee campus overlooking the ocean. These days, Bankman-Fried lives in Nassau, the capital of the Bahamas. Yet he’s now part of the power structure that causes the problems he says he wants to fix. He’s a kind of crypto Robin Hood, beating the rich at their own game to win money for capitalism’s losers. Other than that, he still plans to give it all away-every dollar, or bitcoin, as the case may be. He’ll keep enough money to maintain a comfortable life: 1 per cent of his earnings or, at minimum, $US100,000 a year. A crypto Robin Hoodįor all his wealth, Bankman-Fried tells me his core philosophy remains the same. Now, Bankman-Fried is one of the richest people in the world, with a fortune of more than $US20 billion, according to the Bloomberg Billionaires Index, after venture capitalists recently invested in FTX and its US arm at a combined $US40 billion valuation. Then he spotted a seemingly too-good-to-be-true pricing anomaly in bitcoin and decided that, for him, the right path would be making tonnes of money to give away. The next day she told her 154 million followers on Instagram, in an unsolicited endorsement, “im quitting music and becoming an intern for ok”įive years ago, Bankman-Fried was working for a charitable organisation that promoted the then-fringe idea of “effective altruism”: using scientific reasoning to figure out how to do the most good for the most people. The singer Sia invited him to a dinner at a Beverly Hills mansion with Bezos and actor Leonardo DiCaprio, where Kate Hudson sang the national anthem and he chatted about crypto with pop star Katy Perry. ![]() There was lunch with basketball legend Shaquille O’Neal and a party DJ’d by the head of Goldman Sachs. The previous weekend, he watched the Super Bowl from box seats just in front of NBA star Steph Curry-an FTX endorser. The novelty of appearances like this has long since worn off for Bankman-Fried, who’s testified before Congress twice since December. Sam Bankman-Fried, a 30-year-old crypto billionaire who wants to give his fortune away. He’s speaking by Zoom from his office in the Bahamas. Sam Bankman-Fried, a 30-year-old cryptocurrency billionaire, is probably the first person to play a computer game while giving a talk.Īs the featured guest one morning in February, Bankman-Fried is reclining on a gaming chair in blue shorts and a grey T-shirt advertising his cryptocurrency exchange, FTX, his mop of curly hair flattened by his headphones. Central bankers’ comments at the 115-year-old organisation have moved markets. ![]() The Economic Club of New York has hosted kings, prime ministers, and presidents, as well as ’s Jeff Bezos and JPMorgan Chase’s Jamie Dimon.
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