When an aide told me that “one of our drivers” would pick me up for my lunch with Sam Bankman-Fried, I imagined a hulking black SUV of the kind that shuttles high rollers to and from the casinos in Nassau, where the 30-year-old crypto billionaire lives. Instead, it’s a modest maroon Honda that pulls up outside my hotel.
The headlong drive along the island’s winding coast road takes us past the terracotta-roofed compound that houses Bankman-Fried’s crypto exchange, FTX, which processes billions in transactions every day, and the overgrown seafront plot where it plans to build a new 1,000-seat headquarters, having moved to the Bahamas from Hong Kong after China outlawed crypto trading last year.
