Sam-Bankman Fried launched the cryptocurrency exchange FTX in 2019, and it went bankrupt in 2022. Born in 1992 in California, he grew up in an academic family, with both of his parents professors at Stanford Law School.
He earned a physics degree with a minor in mathematics from MIT in 2014. While in the program, he worked as an intern in 2013 for the trading firm Jane Street Capital in New York. It was there that he met Caroline Ellison, who later became his girlfriend. Ellison was also the CEO of Alameda Research, a quantitative cryptocurrency trading firm and SBF’s first company, founded in 2017. It was later discovered that he built FTX to support Alameda’s trading business.