Sam Bankman-Fried

Bankman-Fried was born in 1992 on the campus of Stanford University, the son of Barbara Fried and Joseph Bankman, both law professors from Stanford Law School.[2] When he was about 14 years old, his mother noticed that he had spontaneously developed an interest in utilitarianism.[2] Later, he attended Canada/USA Mathcamp, a summer program for mathematically talented high school students.[2]

From 2010 to 2014, Bankman-Fried attended the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.[2] There, he lived in a coeducational group house called Epsilon Theta.[2] In 2012, he blogged about utilitarianism, baseball, and politics.[5][2] In 2014, he graduated with a degree in physics and a minor in mathematics.[2][7][8]

In the summer of 2013, Bankman-Fried began working at Jane Street Capital, a proprietary trading firm,[2] trading international ETFs.[9] Initially an intern, he returned there full-time after graduating.[2]

In September 2017, Bankman-Fried quit Jane Street and moved to Berkeley, where he worked briefly at the Centre for Effective Altruism as director of development from October to November 2017.[2][10] In November 2017, he founded Alameda Research, a quantitative trading firm.[2] (As of 2021, Bankman-Fried owns approximately 90% of Alameda Research.[2])

In January 2018, Bankman-Fried organized an arbitrage trade, moving up to $25M per day, to take advantage of the higher price of bitcoin in Japan compared to in America.[2][10] After attending a late 2018 cryptocurrency conference in Macau, and while also inspired by the concurrent fork of Bitcoin Cash, he moved to Hong Kong.[2][11] He founded FTX, a cryptocurrency derivatives exchange, in April 2019, and it then launched the following month.[2]

On December 8, 2021, Bankman-Fried, along with other industry executives, testified before the Committee on Financial Services in relation to regulating the cryptocurrency industry.[12][13]

Bankman-Fried is a supporter of effective altruism and pursues earning to give as an altruistic career.[14] He is a member of Giving What We Can and plans to donate the great majority of his wealth to effective charities over the course of his life.[4]

His company FTX has a policy of donating 1% of its revenue to charity.[14][15] He was one of the largest CEO donors to Joe Biden in the 2020 election cycle, personally donating $5.2 million, second to only Michael Bloomberg.[14][16]

In 2022 Bankman-Fried provided initial financial support for Protect Our Future PAC. Protect Our Future was launched as a Democratic political action committee with $10 million in initial funding aiming to support "lawmakers who play the long game on policymaking in areas like pandemic preparedness and planning", according to Politico.[17]

Bankman-Fried is a vegan.[18][19][8] He often sleeps on a bean bag chair in his office next to his computer.[20][19][11] He ensures that every room in his office has bean bag chairs to sleep on.[8] He shares an apartment with roommates.[8] He lives in the Bahamas. He almost never drinks or goes on vacation.[8]

Bankman-Fried describes himself morally as a "Benthamite" and "a total, act, hedonistic/one level (as opposed to high and low pleasure), classical (as opposed to negative) utilitarian".[19]

• Interview with Sam Bankman-Fried on Sam Harris' Making Sense podcast