FTX CEO Sam Bankman-Fried lost his billionaire status overnight as his personal wealth plummeted nearly 94 percent to $991.5 million in a single day. It marks the biggest wealth collapse of a billionaire ever in a single day, according to Bloomberg.
The fall in Bankman-Fried’s fortune came after the 30-year-old announced that his crypto exchange FTX was being bought by rival Binance.
In a tweet Tuesday, Changpeng Zhao, head of Binance, the world's largest cryptocurrency platform, said that his company had signed a letter of intent to buy FTX because the smaller exchange was experiencing a “significant liquidity crunch.” Zhao also shared two lessons on investment shortly after announcing the deal.
According to Coindesk, Sam Bankman-Fried was worth an estimated $15.2 billion before news of the FTX acquisition broke. Nearly $14.6 billion was wiped out overnight from his wealth.
It was a stunning setback for the 30-year-old billionaire, known on social media as SBF, who was hailed by many for his meteoric rise. Fortune magazine went so far as to wonder in August if he was the new Warren Buffett.
Bankman-Fried had earlier spoken about giving his fortune away, and a news article on his remarks resurfaced online amid the FTX saga.
The son of Stanford Law School professors and a graduate of the elite Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), he worked as a broker on Wall Street before turning to cryptocurrencies in 2017.
A vegan who sleeps four hours a night, Sam Bankman-Fried had become a public face of crypto money. He had pledged to donate almost all of his fortune to his favored causes, like animal welfare and the fight against global warming.
(With inputs from AFP)
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