His parents are both Stanford law professors, but he disliked school

Bankman-Fried was born to Barbara Fried and Joseph Bankman, two professors from Stanford Law School in the US. His mother teaches law, economics, and philosophy, while his father teaches tax policy.

Despite growing up in a household run by educators, Bankman-Fried hated school. Yahoo! Finance reports that he once said: “I have a lot of pedagogical disagreements with how a school is run.”

At around seventh or eighth grade, he admitted to his mother that he found school so boring that he was “gonna die”, according to the same source. His parents then arranged for him to join maths camps for the summer, which honed his problem-solving and managerial skills.

He went to MIT and became president of Epsilon Theta

After high school, Bankman-Fried decided to get a degree in physics at MIT – a decision that Business Insider reports was decided by a flip of a coin, with Caltech as the other option.

There, he joined a group house called Epsilon Theta, where he would stay up all night playing games with friends. Adam Yedida, a member of Epsilon Theta, told Yahoo! Finance that the group was similar to “a fraternity, but replace all the alcohol with the nerdiest stuff you can imagine”.

Yedida claims that Bankman-Fried had a charismatic personality that eventually led him to become “commander” or president of the group.

He eventually discovered “effective altruism”, which changed the way he viewed the world

In his second year at university, Bankman-Fried discovered “effective altruism”, which is a philosophy that aims to build a better world by taking action based on research.

Of its many teachings, Bankman-Fried believes in “earning to give”, the goal of which is to earn as much money as possible so that one can give it away generously to selected causes.

It was this teaching that guided Bankman-Fried’s eventual path to wealth. When faced with the decision about whether to work for the Center of Effective Altruism or at the Wall Street firm Jane Street Capital, Bankman-Fried eventually chose the latter, believing that he would be able to do more good by donating part of his income from the high-paying job.

Staying true to his beliefs, he used his earnings to donate to animal welfare causes and other organizations he stands for, reports Yahoo! Finance.

He regrets not joining cryptocurrency earlier

In a call with Entrepreneur.com, Bankman-Fried admitted that his biggest mistake was not joining cryptocurrency earlier.

According to the interview, his friend Gary Wang developed a bitcoin arbitrage bot as early as 2013. Bankman-Fried thought that it was interesting, but did not work together with Wang until 2018, when they founded FTX together.

“Imagine what would happen if we chased that rabbit hole much earlier,” he said.

He plans to donate most his wealth

Despite now being one of the wealthiest people in the world, Bankman-Fried still lives by the teachings of effective altruism.