A year ago, Sam Bankman-Fried (often called “SBF”) was on top of the world. He had been on the covers of Forbes, which dubbed him “the richest twentysomething in the world”, and Fortune – the equivalent, for a business leader, of a rock star on Rolling Stone, or an athlete on Sports Illustrated.
He was featured in the prestigious “lunch with the FT” in the Financial Times. He was seen as the responsible face of cryptocurrency. There was even speculation he could become the first trillionaire.
But in late 2022, his FTX crypto trading operation – and the closely related Alameda Research, an investment fund he had founded before FTX – both collapsed.
