For a man on a moral crusade, Sam Bankman-Fried lived a life of surprising luxury. The $40m penthouse in the Bahamas, the supermodels and celebrities roped in to back his business ventures, and the fawning glossy magazine profiles would all be perfectly standard trappings for a Wall Street tycoon or hedge fund playboy. But they seem strangely reminiscent of the tired old capitalism Bankman-Fried got rich rejecting, not the one he was supposedly building in its place.
Once one of the world’s youngest billionaires, Bankman-Fried made his fortune in cryptocurrencies – forms of digital money originally invented to circumvent the supposedly corrupt financial elite and empower the little guy – and had grand plans for giving it all away to life-changing progressive causes. But instead of bringing the rotten old order crashing down, he was this week arrested on fraud charges (which he has denied) relating to the implosion of his currency exchange FTX in what bankruptcy lawyers describe as “one of the most abrupt and difficult collapses in the history of corporate America”.
