After growing up amid upper-middle-class affluence in Silicon Valley as the children of two Stanford Law School professors, as a super-smart kid who got into MIT to study physics, Sam Bankman-Fried decided in those teen years that he wanted to save the world in the worst way.
Which is exactly what he did.
The young, and by all accounts idealistic, Bankman-Fried fatefully attended a college lecture where he learned about and came to embrace an idea called "effective altruism" — that rising geniuses like him won't improve humankind through mundane drudgery like organizing the peasants. No, they should use their brainpower and some math calculations to maximize the amount of money they earn in the free-for-all of modern capitalism, and then give their millions or maybe billions of dollars away to their favorite social causes.
