Sam Bankman-Fried – FTX
Silicon Valley thought he was the next Warren Buffett. Prosecutors didn't need an oracle to prove he wasn't.
Silicon Valley and Madison Avenue leaders propped up Sam Bankman-Fried as a wunderkind, but the FTX founder’s genius eventually manifested as an out-of-control crypo-klepto.
In March 2024, Bankman-Fried received a 25-year prison sentence and a court order to forfeit $11 billion following his conviction on seven counts of fraud, conspiracy and money laundering.
Investors who thought they were buying bitcoin through the FTX currency exchange were merely funding whatever Bankman-Fried decided to do with the money as he wantonly misappropriated it.
The fuzzy-headed fraudster illegally stuffed billions of dollars of FTX customer funds into his venture capital firm, Alameda Research, run by his girlfriend Caroline Ellison.
He took private jets to his lair in the Bahamas and put the FTX logo everywhere from a Miami basketball arena to a Formula 1 race car. He ran a memorable Super Bowl commercial staring comedian Larry David, courted many other celebrity endorsements, made huge donations to Democrats, and even bragged that he might one day buy Goldman Sachs.
Both his parents are Stanford law professors, he had access to millions of dollars worth of lawyers, and none could save him.
Bankman-Fried was briefly lauded as “the next Warren Buffett,” and he achieved a net worth of about $26 billion – at least on a computer screen. Now he’s in the pokey eating beans and rice.
Bankman-Fried apparently counted the truth as just another start-up expense to be culled.
“Lack of trust is an enormous transaction cost,” Bankman-Fried said in an August 2022 Forbes story before his life came crashing down. “I underestimated this when I first got into business.”