Sam Bankman-Fried: The Boy King of a Bankrupt Empire

In February 2022, during Super Bowl LVI, Larry David sat in a television advert rejecting the wheel, the fork and the light bulb, then waved away crypto too. The joke was paid for by FTX, a crypto exchange run by a 29-year-old in cargo shorts named Sam Bankman-Fried. Six months later Fortune put him on its cover under the line "The Next Buffett?" Nine months later his company was bankrupt and about $8 billion of its customers' money was gone.

Bankman-Fried played the part of crypto's responsible adult better than anyone. Messy hair, a beanbag beside his desk, a vegan diet and a stated plan to give nearly all his money away. Congress invited him to testify. Politicians took his donations. At its peak in spring 2022 his fortune was about $26 billion, according to CNN. By the time FTX filed for bankruptcy on 11 November 2022 it was, by Bloomberg's calculation, close to zero.

He is now 34 and serving 25 years in a federal prison in California. Every court that has looked at his case has said the same thing: the image was cover for a fraud.

The making of a boy king

Bankman-Fried grew up on the Stanford University campus in California, the son of two Stanford law professors, Joseph Bankman and Barbara Fried. He studied physics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, graduating in 2014, and went to work as a trader at Jane Street, a Wall Street trading firm known for hiring maths prodigies.

At MIT he had been drawn to effective altruism, a philosophy that urges people to do the most good they can, measured as coldly as possible. One of its ideas, "earning to give", says a talented person may help the world most by making a fortune in finance and donating it. Bankman-Fried said that was exactly his plan.

In November 2017 he left Jane Street and co-founded Alameda Research, a crypto trading firm. Its first big money came from arbitrage, buying an asset where it is cheap and selling it where it is dear, the way a trader might buy a share in London and sell it in New York for a few pence more. In early 2018 bitcoin was trading at a higher price in Japan than in the US, and Alameda moved up to $25 million a day to capture the gap.

In 2019 he and Gary Wang, a former MIT room-mate, launched FTX. An exchange is the crypto version of an online stockbroker: customers deposit money, trade digital coins and trust the firm to keep their balances safe. FTX moved its staff from Hong Kong to the Bahamas in 2021 and by January 2022 investors valued it at $32 billion.

Buying a reputation

The money went outward fast. FTX paid a reported $135 million for the naming rights to the Miami Heat's arena. It signed Tom Brady and Gisele Bündchen. In December 2021 Bankman-Fried sat before the House Financial Services Committee and talked about sensible regulation.

He became one of the largest political donors in the United States. He gave $5.2 million to support Joe Biden's 2020 campaign, and in the 2022 midterm cycle around $39.8 million to Democratic causes, second only to George Soros, most of it through a super PAC called Protect Our Future. He also funded the FTX Future Fund, a charity arm whose team included the Oxford philosopher William MacAskill, which had committed about $160 million to good causes by September 2022.

To the outside world this was a billionaire buying good government and good works. To prosecutors it later looked like something else: much of the money had come out of customers' accounts.

The week it ended

On 2 November 2022 the crypto news site CoinDesk published a leaked balance sheet showing that much of Alameda's wealth was FTT, a token FTX had created itself. Think of a company propping up its accounts with vouchers it printed. On 6 November Changpeng Zhao, the chief executive of the rival exchange Binance, said Binance would sell its FTT holdings. Customers rushed to withdraw, the way depositors run on a bank.

On 7 November Bankman-Fried posted: "FTX is fine. Assets are fine." It was not and they were not. FTX had let Alameda dip into customer deposits through special exemptions in its own code, and the money had gone into trading, venture investments, Bahamas property and political donations. FTX could not pay. On 11 November it filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection and Bankman-Fried resigned.

Days later he gave a long interview by Twitter direct message to Kelsey Piper of Vox. Asked whether his ethical talk had mostly been a front, he did not deny it, and described ethics as a "dumb game we woke westerners play". He later said the messages were never meant to be public.

Trial, prison and a long appeal

Bahamian police arrested him on 12 December 2022, the day before he was due to testify to Congress. He was extradited to New York and released on a $250 million bond to live at his parents' home in California. In August 2023 Judge Lewis Kaplan revoked that bail after prosecutors said he had leaked the private writings of Caroline Ellison, his former girlfriend and Alameda's chief executive, to a reporter, an act the judge treated as witness tampering.

At trial in October 2023, Ellison, Wang and Nishad Singh, FTX's head of engineering, all pleaded guilty and testified against him. On 2 November 2023 a Manhattan jury convicted him on all seven counts of fraud and conspiracy after a few hours of deliberation. On 28 March 2024 Kaplan sentenced him to 25 years and ordered him to forfeit $11 billion, saying he had lied on the witness stand.

He has fought ever since. In March 2025 he gave an unauthorised prison interview to Tucker Carlson, was reportedly placed in solitary confinement, and was moved from Brooklyn to California. In February 2026 his mother filed a motion for a new trial on his behalf, without his lawyers. On 28 April 2026 Kaplan denied it, calling its claims "wildly conspiratorial and entirely contradicted by the record".

On 12 June 2026 a three-judge panel of the Second Circuit Court of Appeals upheld the conviction, the sentence and the forfeiture. Judge Barrington Parker wrote that the evidence was "robust" and that Bankman-Fried had been "using FTX as his own personal piggy bank". His argument that customers would have been repaid did not help him: taking money temporarily is still fraud.

On 10 September 2026 his lawyer Jeffrey Fisher asked the US Supreme Court to hear the case (docket 26-349), arguing that the jury was never allowed to hear that FTX had enough assets to repay everyone, and that the $11 billion forfeiture is an unconstitutionally excessive fine. The government's reply is due on 16 November 2026.

He is also asking for mercy. In June 2026 the Justice Department's pardon office listed an application from him for a "pardon after completion of sentence", which would clear his record after he serves his time rather than free him. President Donald Trump told The New York Times in January 2026 that he was not considering a pardon. The Bureau of Prisons expects to release him in 2044.