At age 29, Sam Bankman-Fried had an estimated fortune of $22.5 billion.
Only Mark Zuckerberg had risen higher this early, and thanks to a money machine called Facebook.
But at age 30, everything has changed.
With the bankruptcy of FTX, this Californian son of two Stanford University law professors is no longer even part of the billionaires' club.
His dizzying transition from the top to the bottom has much of the world on which he built his wealth, cryptocurrencies, where time, like money, runs at a different speed.
Faster, more volatile.
More, always more.
The profile of SBF, as it is known from the initials of its name, does not seem, however, that of a man blinded by the idea of accumulating dollars for his own interest.
He eschews the libertarian spirit of many bitcoin loyalists, who shy away from taxes — he advocated that the rich, including himself, should pay more.
He does not proclaim the omnipotence of cryptocurrencies with an almost religious fanaticism, as others do, but with pragmatism, to make them profitable.
And he is a supporter of so-called "effective altruism", a philosophy based on maximizing the good you can do to others with your money, to the point that he promised to donate most of his fortune in life.
"My goal is to have an impact," he said in an interview with
Forbes
magazine last year.
For a time, it seemed that such philanthropic work would be one that leaves its mark.
At his peak, his wealth stood at $26.5 billion.
The problem is that it was tied to his holding in FTX and the FTT token, both of which have collapsed in a liquidity crisis, amid massive withdrawal requests from customers panicking that they might lose everything.
Like its precipitous descent, SBF's path to the top didn't require too many stops either.
The young man founded the quantitative
trading
company Alameda Research in 2017, and began adding zeros to his account thanks to a seemingly simple discovery: “Bitcoin was $10,000 on an American
exchange
and $11,000 on a Japanese one, so if you take 10 million, you buy at 10,000 and sell at 11,000, you make a million.
We were able to do that every day of the week”, he explained in a video.
With this operation, he claims to have earned 20 million.
Two years later he created FTX in Hong Kong, an intermediary platform for those who wanted to buy and sell bitcoins and other cryptocurrencies that was among the largest in the world and was valued at 40,000 million.
In September 2021 he moved his headquarters to the Bahamas, where he lives in a penthouse with 10 friends, including some of those who run his business.
Although his standard of living is clearly above average, he shunned luxuries such as expensive watches or sports cars: he drove a Toyota Corolla valued at just over $20,000.
Graduated in Physics from the prestigious Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), vegan and committed against animal abuse and climate change, he grew up fascinated by the Harry Potter books, he was a fan of the San Francisco Giants baseball team and very fond of video games such as
Starcraft
or
League of Legends
.
His life was until recently an entertainment in which everything went well.
A close associate recounted to his astonishment that he discovered him hooked on that latest game while he was simultaneously intervening brilliantly on a Zoom video call at a meeting with Sequoia Capital investors.
Despite that distraction, he impressed them with the answers to their questions and managed to convince them to get out the checkbook, although in hindsight they would have preferred not to: On Thursday, Sequoia Capital announced that it was valuing its $210 million investment at $0. on the platform.
Although he is now just the bitter visible face of a corporate crisis that can bankrupt him and cause huge losses to his clients, SBF was once the second richest man in the
crypto
universe after the head of Binance, Changpeng Zhao.
And this summer he came to be considered by
Fortune
magazine as a new Warren Buffett.
The parallelism arose from the fact that if the veteran Berkshire Hathaway tycoon came to the rescue of Goldman Sachs by putting 5,000 million on the table in the Great Recession, SBF did the same with a handful of companies in trouble just a few months ago, during the so-called
crypto winter
that It's not over yet.
Others went even further back to draw resemblances, seeing in him a modern version of the legendary financier John Pierpont Morgan and his pivotal role in saving the system from collapse during the so-called financial panic of 1907, when Wall Street plunged into a crisis. flood of bankruptcies and other businesses.
Interestingly, the white knight who had pulled FTX resources to bail out troubled
crypto
firms like Voyager Digital or BlockFi found himself boxed on the weak side of the trading table.
Asking for help for FTX to survive, even through social networks, and openly acknowledging their responsibility.
"I screwed up," he said graphically in a series of messages where he explained what happened and apologized to customers who saw his savings get caught up.
"I'm really sorry".
But despite the public self-flagellation, the wave raised by the crisis continued to gain height until it drowned the company and probably left the hundreds of thousands of small investors who trusted its platform without part of their savings.
millionaire political donations
Just a few days ago, before the storm, Twitter messages gave off a very different scent.
SBF spoke of its donations to Republican and Democratic politicians ahead of the legislative elections held on Tuesday.
In total, he doled out $40 million among candidates he considered constructive, committed to preventing new pandemics, and favorable to promoting crypto-friendly regulations.
His political donations already made headlines in the presidential campaign that brought Joe Biden to the White House, whom he endorsed with more than five million dollars, the second highest amount, only behind Michael Bloomberg's 56 million.
His idea was to raise the stakes even more in 2024: in May he even flirted on a
podcast
with the idea of giving the record amount of up to 1,000 million dollars to the Democrat who would fight that election, especially if Donald Trump was facing him as the Republican candidate.
That will never happen anymore.
Abandoned by Binance, which threatened to buy FTX and after seeing the account books backed down, and investigated by the US regulator (the SEC) for possible irregular handling of its clients' funds ―which it would have used in risky operations not authorized―, the young man who one day dedicated 135 million to baptize with the name of his company the field of the Miami Heat of the NBA, and embodied the ideal of precocious talent applied to cryptocurrencies sees everything he had built collapse around.
He already joins a list in which he would never have wanted to appear, the one that mentions the Korean Do Kwon, founder of the failed Luna, and the protagonists of other similar fiascoes.
Much less flattering mirrors than those of Warren Buffett and JP Morgan.
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