Who is Sam Bankman-Fried, founder of the now bankrupt FTX

This week, crypto wunderkind Sam Bankman-Fried, the CEO of the FTX exchange, saw what media called one of the biggest-ever destructions of wealth in history.

Sam Bankman-Fried, once praised for his rapid rise to the top, had his assets crash from $16 billion to zero within less than a week, Bloomberg reported. FTX has filed for bankruptcy.

The FTX crisis, centred on its lack of liquidity, resonated across the crypto world, with some experts saying its broader impact cannot be determined so early.

The crisis marks an astonishing reversal of fortune for Bankman-Fried, who has been called the next Warren Buffett.

Bankman-Fried, an alumnus of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, was a Wall Street broker before he moved to cryptocurrencies in 2017, news agency AFP reported.

That year, he founded the Alameda Research, that dealt in major cryptocurrencies as well as digital assets, a Reuters report said.

A year and a half later, Bankman-Fried and another MIT graduate, former Google engineer Gary Wang, started FTX.

In 2021, Bankman-Fried moved the company from its headquarters in Hong Kong to the Bahamas, a tax haven.

At its peak, Bankman-Fried's net worth was estimated to be over $26 billion, making him one of the wealthiest people in the arena of digital assets.

Bankman-Fried pledged to donate his wealth to causes like combating global warming and animal welfare.

He had told Bloomberg in an interview that will keep enough money to continue leading a comfortable life, which will be $100,000 a year, at least.

“You pretty quickly run out of really effective ways to make yourself happier by spending money,” Bankman-Fried said. “I don’t want a yacht.”

(With inputs from AFP and Reuters)