Out of nowhere, 30-year-old Sam Bankman-Fried became a billionaire mover and shaker in the world of cryptocurrency. Careful to make friends of powerful Democrats and media columnists alike, he threw money around the halls of Congress — and everywhere else he went — while threatening to disrupt Chicago’s financial futures industry.
Known by his initials, “SBF” is a billionaire no more. The house of cards he built over the past several years came crashing down in a matter of days.
His FTX crypto exchange and the entangled Alameda Research hedge fund are now in bankruptcy, amid reports that customer funds are missing. As many as a million of SBF’s customers may have lost whatever they had in their trading accounts, which, unlike traditional bank and brokerage accounts, are not guaranteed by the federal government against a company’s failure.
