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.

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)}

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. While working at Jane Street, Bankman-Fried gave about half of his salary to charity, primarily to animal causes.⁵⁾ After serving briefly as director of development at the Centre for Effective Altruism, he founded Alameda Research in 2017 and FTX two years later.

In 2020, he donated $5.2 million to Future Forward USA (a super-PAC affiliated with Facebook co-founder Dustin Moskovitz) supporting Joe Biden, becoming one of the president's top donors.⁶⁾ More recently, he has contributed to organizations working in global poverty, climate change, AI safety, biosecurity and pandemic preparedness.⁷⁾ As of February 2022, Bankman-Fried has given away between $50 and 100 million,[13]

Bankman-Fried signed Bill Gates' “The Giving Pledge” in June 2022.⁸⁾