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Sam Bankman-Fried
Sam Bankman-Fried, also known simply as SBF, is an American cryptocurrency trader.
He was a cofounder and CEO of the embattled cryptocurrency exchange FTX and the associated Alameda Research.
History
Early life
SBF was born March 6, 1992 in Stanford, California.1) As a high school student, Bankman-Fried attended Canada/USA Mathcamp, a summer program for mathematically talented youth. There he met his future business partners Sam Trabucco (co-CEO of Alameda) and Gary Wang (co-founder and CTO of FTX).2) 3)
Effective altruism
During his third year as a physics major at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Bankman-Fried was exposed to effective altruism at a talk by William MacAskill on the ethics of career choice.4)
Upon graduating from MIT, Bankman-Fried joined Jane Street Capital, a quantitative trading firm and liquidity provider, where he worked as a trader and designed the firm's automated off-exchange trading system. After serving briefly as director of development at the Centre for Effective Altruism, he founded Alameda Research in 2017 and FTX two years later.
Bankman-Fried signed Bill Gates' “The Giving Pledge” in June 2022.5)
1)
Sam Bankman-Fried. EA Forum. Retrieved November 24, 2022, from https://archive.ph/rOiPC
2)
McMahon, K., & Huang, V. G. (2021, December 28). Here are 10 of the most surprising little-known facts we learned about the 29-year-old crypto billionaire Sam Bankman-Fried after months speaking to his closest friends, family, and colleagues. Business Insider. http://archive.today/2021.12.29-014820/https://www.businessinsider.com/crypto-trading-billionaire-sam-bankman-fried-ftx-alameda-surprising-facts-2021-12
3)
Bankman-Fried, S. (2020, May 17). Raising the bar. FTX Research. https://web.archive.org/web/20221125085649/https://blog.ftx.com/blog/raising-the-bar/
4)
Gabriele, M. (2021, August 1). FTX Trilogy, Part 1: The Prince of Risk. The Generalist. https://archive.ph/wZmQ0
5)
November 12, 2022 | @HRenkel (Twitter)