Sam Bankman-Fried

Sam Bankman-Fried is the richest person in crypto, thanks to his FTX exchange and Alameda Research trading firm. The son of two Stanford law professors, he studied physics at MIT but was drawn to “effective altruism,” the utilitarian-inflected notion of doing the most good possible. So he took a job trading ETFs at a quant firm, donating a chunk of his salary to charity, then jumped into crypto trading in late 2017, when he spied a lucrative arbitrage opportunity. Bankman-Fried launched his own exchange, FTX, in 2019. Built “by traders, for traders,” it’s one of the leading exchanges for buying and selling crypto derivatives. FTX raised $900 million from the likes of Coinbase Ventures and SoftBank in July 2021 at an $18 billion valuation, helping make Bankman-Fried one of the richest people under 30 in history. Most of his wealth, which he says he will eventually donate to charity based on a philosophy called “earning to give,” is tied up in ownership of about half of FTX and a share of its FTT tokens.