A 29-year-old has bought a Super Bowl ad.
This simple fact puts into perspective the changes in business in the internet era.
Sam Bankman-Fried, the CEO of cryptocurrency firm FTX, is that 29-year-old. With a net worth of $16 billion, he is the second-richest 20-something in the world since Mark Zuckerberg.
And he still sometimes crashes on a bean bag with roommates.
The big trend in Super Bowl ads this year is the entry of crypto firms. FTX aside, Crypto.com, helmed by 42-year-old Kris Marszalek, also has a commercial to be beamed during the game, which will be held on February 13 in Los Angeles.
As usual, the ad spots for the contest, which decides the winner of the American National Football League, are expensive. Thirty seconds of air time cost $6.5 million. A gaudy annual collision of sport, money and celebrities, the Super Bowl is also known for its half-time show. This year’s performers include Dr Dre, Snoop Dogg and Mary J Blige.
Bankman-Fried fits the super-techie stereotype. Some of his sentences sound like questions. He has an overgrown curly mane and often does TV interviews wearing a tee.
He is vegan, calls himself an effective altruist, and his interests include utilitarianism and baseball.
The son of two Stanford law professors, Bankman-Fried was too bright for his own good as a child. If there is any lesson to be learnt from his story, it is the importance of recognising higher intelligence in children and engaging them proportionately.
According to Yahoo Finance, when Bankman-Fried was a child, his mother, Barbara, found him crying one day.
“Mom, I’m so bored I’m gonna die,” the boy said.
The parents arranged advanced math classes for their precocious son. In summer, it was off to the Canada/USA Mathcamp.
There, Bankman-Fried was introduced to puzzle hunts. These were variants of scavenger hunts, and where the logical riddles led to solving a larger meta-riddle.
Bankman-Fried returned to high school a changed boy. And he too organized a similar challenge in which teams from local schools could compete.
“I saw a different side of him than I had ever seen,” Barbara Fried told Yahoo Finance. He had “amazing managerial skills” and “could muster visible, exuberant, infectious enthusiasm for it.”
Nonetheless, high school remained an unexciting period for Bankman-Fried. “I was a little bit in waiting mode for the next chapter to begin,” he said. “High school and middle school are not the things that I am really made for.”
After somehow majoring in physics at MIT, he is now doing the big things he was made for. Super Bowl ad aside, his company has a tie-up with football superstar Tom Brady. Bankman-Fried was the second-biggest donor to Joe Biden’s presidential campaign. Crucially, he is not defensive about some of the scepticism towards the crypto business.
About Paul Krugman’s critique in The New York Times about cryptocurrency playing little role in “normal economic activity,” he said, “Krugman is right that, right now, most legit payments don't use crypto. But I think they could and, in many cases, it would be better if they did. There's a self-fulfilling prophecy about saying nothing legit uses crypto, and using that as a way to discourage legitimate services from using crypto. . . . The current financial infrastructure is just not built to be natively digital. But I do think there’s a ton of promise.”
Marszalek, the Hong Kong-based boss of Crypto.com, is a product of Poland’s Adam Mickiewicz University. Bright and ambitious, he was a fan of Michael Jordan, and he enjoyed buying and scaling companies.
“I’m a lifelong company builder, having spent almost 20 years in company building. Crypto.com is my fifth business; before that, I’ve twice grown companies from $0-$100 million in revenue,” he said in an interview on CryptoNewsz.com. “I enjoy building products to solve real problems—our team founded Crypto.com as we saw the huge potential it has in terms of giving everyday consumers more power over their money and data. We have a comprehensive suite of financial products to provide a viable alternative to traditional bank services. Our mission is to put cryptocurrency into every wallet.”
However, one project of Marzalek’s went bust and earned him some notoriety. Prior to Crypto.com, he was the CEO of a publicly traded discount website called Ensogo. It offered online deals comparable to Groupon. In June 2016, it suddenly shut down its business in Southeast Asia, causing severe financial losses to customers and partners.
However, by the time things worsened at Ensogo, Marzalek was ensconced at Crypto.com. In a statement to Daily Beast, Crypto.com said there was no wrongdoing on his part.
“In mid 2016, the (board) decided to shut down Ensogo against Kris’s wishes and advice. Kris did not hold a board seat and held a low single digit percentage stake in the business at the time,” the statement said. “He resigned in response to the proposed shutdown. The shutdown angered many customers and consumers—one of the reasons Kris was opposed to the decision. There was never a finding of wrongdoing under Kris’s leadership.”
FTX and Crypto.com are both betting big on sports, as the target audience is more or less the same – young, male, tech-savvy. In the near future, the Staples Center will be called the Crypto.com Arena after the company paid $700 million to get their name on the home of the LA Lakers.
FTX has purchased the naming rights for the Miami Heat arena, paying $135 million for the deal.
But for now it’s showtime and Super Bowl.
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