Mr. Bankman-Fried’s enterprise and political empire was all the time a household affair. The FTX founder was a prolific political donor, and he was a part of a community of contributors who gave cash to teams beneficial by Thoughts the Hole, folks accustomed to the group stated. He additionally helped bankroll a nonprofit group referred to as Guarding Towards Pandemics that was run by his 27-year-old brother, Gabe Bankman-Fried.
Mr. Bankman was deeply concerned in FTX. In its early days, he helped the corporate recruit its first legal professionals. Final yr, he joined FTX employees in conferences on Capitol Hill and suggested his son as Mr. Bankman-Fried ready to testify to the Home Monetary Companies Committee, an individual accustomed to the matter stated. FTX staff often consulted him on tax-related issues, the individual stated.
“From the beginning at any time when I used to be helpful, I’d help,” Mr. Bankman stated on an FTX podcast in August.
Mr. Bankman visited the FTX places of work within the Bahamas as typically as as soon as a month, an individual who noticed him there stated. Among the many much-younger employees, he cultivated an avuncular persona, regaling staff with tales from his son’s youth, the individual stated. He and Ms. Fried stayed in a $16.4 million home in Previous Fort Bay, a gated neighborhood in Nassau, the capital of the Bahamas; the couple’s names seem on actual property paperwork, in keeping with Reuters, although Mr. Bankman-Fried has stated the home was “supposed to be the corporate’s property.”
Ms. Heller, the couple’s spokeswoman, stated Mr. Bankman and Ms. Fried “by no means supposed to and by no means believed they’d any useful or financial possession in the home.”
As an worker, Mr. Bankman centered on FTX’s charitable operations. He put collectively the Miami occasion, deciding on the groups of highschool college students who competed for $1 million in FTX grants.
Mr. Bankman additionally leveraged household connections to develop FTX’s attain. His sister, Barbara Miller, works in Florida as a political marketing consultant and launched him to Newton Sanon, the chief government of OIC of South Florida, a nonprofit group that helps folks with work pressure improvement coaching to advertise financial mobility. (Ms. Miller didn’t reply to a request for remark.)